The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Biography 0198703015, 9780198703013
Biography is one of the most widespread literary genres worldwide. Biographies and autobiographies of actors, politician
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Table of contents :
Cover
The Oxford Handbook of ANCIENT BIOGRAPHY
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Contents
Prefae
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
List of Contributors
Part I: Introduction
Chapter 1: Writing (About) Ancient Lives: Scholarship, Definitions, and Concepts
Modern Criticism
defining Biography
'Origins'
Rationale Behind the Book
Acknowledgements
Chapter 2: What are BIOI/VITAE? Generic Self-Consciousness in Ancient Biography
What is the Ancient Understanding of Genre
Genre Hierarchy and Relationships
Genre Overlap and Differentiation: Biography and History
Ancient Biographers on the Biography Tradition
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 3: Individual and Collected lives in Antiquity
Herodotus' 'Lives' of Croesus and Cyrus
Cornelius Nepos' On Foreign Generals
Plutarch's Parallel Lives
Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 4: Popular Biography
The Texts and Their Characteristics
Early Traditions about the Seven Sages
The Life of Aesop
Secundus, the Alexander Roance, and the Homeric Lives
Further Reading
Chapter 5: Jewish Biography
Some Biographical Elements in the Septuagint
Jason of Cyrene and the Second Boo of Maccabees
Philo's Biographical Works
THe Autobiography of Kind Herod
THe Vita of Josephus
Conclusion
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Chapter 6: Christian Biography
Orthodox Narrative and the Gospels
Apocrypha
Saints' Lives
Biography and the Organization of Knowledge
Conclusion
Further Reading
Part II: Reading Biographies
Chapter 7: Fifth-Century Preliminaries
Stesimbrotus of Thasos
Ion of Chios
Proto-biography and Historiography
Eastern Preliminaries?
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 8: Isocrates' Evagoras: The Educational Ends of the 'First' Biography in Classical Greece
The Rhetorical Tradition of Praise
The Poetic Tradition of Praise
Biography and the Rhetoric of Praise
Biography and Education
Conclusion
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Chapter 9: Xenophon of Athens
The Question of Genre: The Case for Inclusivity
The Importance of Socrates
(Auto)Biography and the Anabasis
Birth-to-Death Life-Writing: More Genre-Bending
Many Socrateses or One?
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 10: Ex Uno Fonte Multi Rivuli? Unity and Multiplicity in Hellenistic Biography
Unity and Multipplicity in Hellenistic Biography
'Periegetic Biography': Neanthes of Cyzicus vs. Antigonus of Carystus
'Epicurean' Biography
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 11: Nepos' Life Atticus, icolaus' Life of Caesar, and the Genre of Political lBiography in the age of Augustus
Reading Atticus and Caesar as Specimens of a Shared Genre
Caesar: Biography vs. History
Conclusion
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Chapter 12: Biography and Praise in Trajanic Rome: Tacitus' Agricola and Pliny's Panegyricus
The Agricola in the Biographical Tradition: Encomium and Synchrisis
Dangerous Lives?
Writing Down Trajan: Biographical Aspects in the Panegyricus
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 13: Plutarch's Parallel Lives
Parallelism and Comparison
Death Scenes
Source Material, Composition, and Narrative Technique
Moralism, Characterization, and Readership
Conclusion
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Chapter 14: Plutarch: Lives of the Caesars (Galba, Otho) and Lives of Aratus and Artaxerxes
The Riddle of the Artaxerxes: Composition, Subject, and Style
The Life of Aratus: Composition, Subject, and Style
Lives of the Caesars (Galba, Otho): Composition, Subject, and Style
Further Reading
Chapter 15: Types of Life-Writing in Suetoninus' Lives of the Caesars and Illustrious men
Categories vs. Chronology: Suetonius' Literray Technique and the Biographical Tradition
Caesars, Poets, Grammarians: Life-Writing and Lifestyle in Second-Century Rome
Evolutionary Models and their Limitations: The Lives as Part of Suetonius' Oeuvre
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 16: The Alexander Romance
A Composite and Multifaceted Work
Characterizing Strategies
THe Story of an Outstanding Hero
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 17: Lucian: Satirical and Idealizing Lives (Peregrinus, Alexander, Demonax)
On the Death of Peregrinus
Alexander or the False Prophet
The Life of Demonax
The Lost Sostratus
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 18: The Biographer as Literary Artist: Form and Content in Philostratus' Apollonius
Narratorial Self-Presentation
THe Master's Teachings
TheNarrative Setting: Greek Antiquarianism
Eastern Exoticism
Roman History and Politics
Conclusion
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Chapter 19: Diogenes Laertius and Philosophical LIves
A Genealogy of Philosophy
Lives of Philosophers
Two Lives: Aristotle and Parmenides
The Life of Philosophy
Afterlives and Audience
Further Reading
Chapter 20: A Bishop's Biography: Eusebius of Caesarea and the Life of Constantine
The History of the Life
Bishops in the History
The Emperor as Bishop
Emperors as Bishops (and Bishops as Bishops)
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 21: Augustine's Confessions as autobiography
About Me
The Story of Us
I'm Still Here
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 22: Solitude and Biography in Jerome's Life of Hilarion
Solitude in Graeco-Roman Biography
Solitude in Early Christian Biography
Jerome's Biographical Writing
The Preface
EarlyLife
Flight
Landscape
Conclusion
Further Reading
Part III: Tracing Biographees
Chapter 23: Lives of Homer
The Making of Homer Before the Lives
The Lives of Homer
Homer's Name
Homer's Place of Birth
Parents and Genealogies
Date
Portraits
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 24: Ancient Biographies of Statesmen
Defining Ancient Biographies of Statesmen
The Development of Political Biography
The Aim of Political Biography Inculcating Morals
Encomium and Political Biography
Serialization and Exemplariness
Political Biography as a Separate Genre?
The Inclusion of Personal Details
Political Biography and Fiction
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 25: Sophists
Why Write Biographies of Imperial Sophists?
Intellectual Historiography and Self-Definition
Sophists at Work
Sophists and Power
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 26: Philosophers and Their Neoplatonic Lives: Problems and Paradigms
Lives of Pythagoras: Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras and Iamblichus' On the Pythagorean Life
Porphyry's Life of Plotinus
Marinus' Proclus, or On Happiness
Serial Biographies: Eunapius' Lives of Philosophers and Sophists and Damascius' Philosophical History/Life of Isidore
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 27: Holy Men: Lives of Miracle Workers, Apostles, and Saints
Terminology of the Holy Man
The Subjects of Hagiographical Discourse
The Apostles
Lives, Biography, and Hagiography
Formal Characteristics
Stylization
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 28: Martyrs and Life-Writing in Late Antiquity
Martyr Accounts and Scholarship
LIves
Love
Conclusion
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Chapter 29: Monastic Lives
The Life of Antony
The Lives of Pachomius
Theodoret on the Monks of Syria
The Dialogues of Gregory the Great
Conclusion
Further Reading
Part IV: Cultures
Chapter 30: Syriac Biography
Hagiography
Biographies of Non-Religious Heroes
Fictional Autobiographies
Biblical Figures
Lives of the Church Fathers
Local Heroes
Competitive Biographies
Ascetic and Monastic Lives
Biographies of Women
Collective Biographies and History
Reading Biographies
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 31: Coptic LIfe Stories
Monastic Life Stories
Biographies of Bishops
Martyrs and Their Stories
'The Biographic': Fragments of Life-Writing
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 32: Armenian Biography in Late Antiquity
Introduction
Heroic Oral Tales of Prowess and Gallantry
The Transition to Literate Biographical Forms: Koriwn's Life of Maštoc'
The Composite Biographical Treatment of St Gregory the Illuminator
Lazar "'arpec'i's History and its Three Biographical Sketches
Biographical Treatment of St Hrip'sime in a Festal Hymn
Traditions of Oral Myth Historicized
The Martyrology of Hamazasp and Sahak Acruni under the 'Abbasids
Autobiography
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 33: Arabic Biography
Genealogy
Prophetic Biography: Sira
Islamic Tradition: Biography Related to Hadith and Biographies of Transmitters
Biographical Dictionaries
Biographical Dictionaries of Professionals
Biographical Dictionaries of Local Orientation
Later Developments: Variegated Biographical Dictionaries
Individual Biography
Christian and Islamic Hagiography
Conclusion
Further Reading
Part V: Media
Chapter 34: Biographical Monuments: DIsplaying Selves and Lives in Ancient Egypts
Definition
Scholarly Approaches
Implications of Context, from Body to Landscape
Aspects of Content: Ideals and Subjectivities
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 35: Engraved Lives: Biographical Material in Epigraphic Sources
Greece
Rome
Concluson
Further Reading
Chapter 36: Depicted Lives: The Role of the Visual Arts in Sophistic Self-Representation
Sophists and the Importance of Appearance
Civic Euergetism and the Creation of a Lasting Public Image
Looking Like a Pepaideumenos: Looking as an Act of Self-Representation
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chaper 37: Triumphant Lives: Portraits, Statues, and Triumphal Arches in Imperial Rome
Documenting Roman Lives: The Rise of Realistic Portraiture
Portrait Statures: Types and Tropes
Public Portraits and Women's Biographies
Visual Biographies and Triumphal Arches
Emended and Expurgated Lives
Conclusion
Further Reading
Part VI: Reception
Chapter 38: Byzantine Biography
Introduction
Ancient Biography in Byzantium
Hagiography: Bioi, Encomia, and Hypomnemata
Hagiography Through the Centuries
Non-Hagiographical Encomia
The Biographic in Fiction
Biographical Arrangement in Historiography
Autobiography
Short Biographies, Biographical Sketches, and Collective Biographies
Conclusion
Further Readng
Chapter 39: Roman Biography in the Medieval West: Did Classical Texts Facilitate Complex Literary Portraits in the Middle Ages?
Portraits by Suetonius and Sallust in the Middle Ages
Were Ambiguous Portraits Facilitated by Ancient Models?
The Widening Horizon of Writing in the Eleventh Century
Sallust, Latin, and the Empire
Did Classical Inspired Latin Contribute to a Distinctive Conceptualization of Man?
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 40: Ancient Biography and the Italian Renaissance: Old Models and New Developments
Collective Biographies of Historical Figures
COllective Biographies of Literary FIgures
Individual and Comparative Biographies
Literary Biography in Dialogues Form
Collective Biography and Portraiture
Conclusion
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Chapter 41: Ancient Biography in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Lives and History
Biography from History to Fiction
Ancient Lives in Literary and Moral Writings
THe Romantic Turn
Conclusion
Further Reading
Chapter 42: After-Lives: Biographical Receptions of Greek Roman Poets in the Twentieth Century
The Death (and Return) of the Author
Intertextuality of Metabiography
Psychoanalysis and the Biographical Subject
Conclusion
Further Reading
References
Index Locorum
General Index
Citation preview
ANCIENT BIOGRAPHY
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................
ANCIENT BIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................................................
Edited by KOEN DE TEMMERMAN
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, , United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in Impression: All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press Madison Avenue, New York, NY , United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: ISBN Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
A ..............................................................................................
D its long gestation period, the volume has benefitted greatly from the help and support of a number of people. It is my delightful duty, first and foremost, to thank wholeheartedly all contributors for their hard work and the pleasant collaboration. My warmest thanks also go to Hilary O’Shea, the commissioning editor at OUP who invited me to put together this volume, to Charlotte Loveridge, who took over its supervision in the process, and to Alexander Johnson, Jenny King, and Georgina Leighton for their kind and most professional guidance along the way. The initial proposal for this book has been improved considerably thanks to the suggestions and comments of the referees at OUP. My thoughts on ancient life-writing have further been enriched by stimulating discussions with Kristoffel Demoen, Stephen Harrison, Irene de Jong, Wolfgang de Melo, Chris Pelling, Danny Praet, and Tim Whitmarsh. For editorial assistance, I thank Pauline De Groote, Lotte Van Olmen, and Robbe Van de Velde. Special thanks go to Evelien Bracke, who joined the project during its final stage and has provided indispensable and characteristically efficient practical and editorial support; and to Susan Dunsmore for copy-editing. Finally, a warm note of gratitude and love goes to my parents, Ignace and Linda, to Lieselot, and to Jacob and Isaac. To them the story of my own life owes its vividness and delight. This project has received funding from the European Research Council under both the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/–; Starting Grant Agreement n° ) and the European Union’s Horizon research and innovation programme (Consolidator Grant Agreement n° ).
C .............................................
Preface List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations List of Contributors
xi xiii xv xxi
PART I I NTRODUCTION . Writing (about) Ancient Lives: Scholarship, Definitions, and Concepts
K D T
. What Are Bioi/Vitae? Generic Self-Consciousness in Ancient Biography
S A. A
. Individual and Collected Lives in Antiquity
J B
. Popular Biography
I M. K
. Jewish Biography
J G
. Christian Biography
S F J
P A R T I I R E A D I N G BI O G R A P H I E S . Fifth-Century Preliminaries
C P
. Isocrates’ Evagoras: The Educational Ends of the ‘First’ Biography in Classical Greece
T P
. Xenophon of Athens N H
viii
. Ex uno fonte multi rivuli? Unity and Multiplicity in Hellenistic Biography
T D
. Nepos’ Life of Atticus, Nicolaus’ Life of Caesar, and the Genre of Political Biography in the Age of Augustus
R S
. Biography and Praise in Trajanic Rome: Tacitus’ Agricola and Pliny’s Panegyricus
C W
. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives
A G M A. L
. Plutarch: Lives of the Caesars (Galba, Otho) and Lives of Aratus and Artaxerxes
L V S
. Types of Life-Writing in Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars and Illustrious Men
D P
. The Alexander Romance
C J
. Lucian: Satirical and Idealizing Lives (Peregrinus, Alexander, Demonax)
G A
. The Biographer as Literary Artist: Form and Content in Philostratus’ Apollonius
A M. K
. Diogenes Laertius and Philosophical Lives
S W
. A Bishop’s Biography: Eusebius of Caesarea and the Life of Constantine
J C-W
. Augustine’s Confessions as Autobiography
M S W
. Solitude and Biography in Jerome’s Life of Hilarion J Kö
ix
PART III TRACING BIOGRAPHEES . Lives of Homer
S Sï
. Ancient Biographies of Statesmen
J K
. Sophists
K E
. Philosophers and their Neoplatonic Lives: Problems and Paradigms
G M
. Holy Men: Lives of Miracle Workers, Apostles, and Saints
D P
. Martyrs and Life-Writing in Late Antiquity
K D T D P
. Monastic Lives
M E
PART IV CULTURES . Syriac Biography
M D´
. Coptic Life Stories
A P
. Armenian Biography in Late Antiquity
S. P C
. Arabic Biography
F D-A
P A R T V M ED I A . Biographical Monuments: Displaying Selves and Lives in Ancient Egypt E F
x
. Engraved Lives: Biographical Material in Epigraphic Sources
C S F R. F
. Depicted Lives: The Role of the Visual Arts in Sophistic Self-Representation
Z N
. Triumphant Lives: Portraits, Statues, and Triumphal Arches in Imperial Rome
E R. V
PART VI RECEPTION . Byzantine Biography
M H
. Roman Biography in the Medieval West: Did Classical Texts Facilitate Complex Literary Portraits in the Middle Ages?
L B M
. Ancient Biography and the Italian Renaissance: Old Models and New Developments
T H
. Ancient Biography in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
E Z
. After-Lives: Biographical Receptions of Greek and Roman Poets in the Twentieth Century
N G
References Index Locorum General Index
P ......................................
I academic education, biography courses are quite frequent these days. Ancient biography has become the object of research and teaching not only in many Classics departments, but also in literary studies, philosophy, and history departments—and in high school curricula in some countries. Given its function as a broad introduction and a reference tool, on the one hand, and its ambition to move beyond the state-of-the-art on the other, this Handbook will, I hope, be of interest to a variety of readers. First, to newcomers in the field such as undergraduate students, who can use individual chapters for orientation, for inspiration for productive insights and/or as introductory aids to their own research. Second, to more advanced, graduate students, academic specialists, scholars, and researchers working on ancient literature in general and ancient biography in particular. I hope that academic faculty will find the volume helpful for their teaching too. And, third, to a broad range of students and scholars who work in related disciplines and/or study other periods or literatures and all have reason to hark back to ancient biographical narrative: scholars in religious studies, reception studies, medieval, Renaissance and post-Renaissance lifewriting, etc. In view of such a broad audience, contributors have been encouraged to write in a way that is accessible to non-experts. Chapters provide English translations of ancient (and modern) terminology and citations. In addition, all individual chapters are concluded by a section containing suggestions for further reading. For reasons of internal consistency across the book, Greek names of places, persons and literary works have been Latinized as much as possible (e.g. Halicarnassus, Thucydides, Cyropaedia) but English spelling is used where common (e.g. Corinth, Homer, Odyssey). If there is no Latinized equivalent commonly used in English, Greek transcriptions are used (e.g. Sokratikoi logoi, Ion’s Epidēmiai). While mostly using Greek transcriptions of Greek nouns and adjectives (e.g. epitaphios logos, mēnologion), I have opted for Latin transcriptions when arguably more common in English scholarship (e.g. martyrium and syncrisis rather than martyrion and synkrisis). If these terms have their own entries in the Oxford English Dictionary (nd edn. ), they have in most cases not been italicized (e.g. encomium, ecphrasis). For Latin names too, English spelling is used where common (e.g. Julius rather than Iulius). In order to distinguish the two current meanings of the word ‘life’ (both ‘the period from birth to death’ and ‘biography’), we capitalize it (‘Life’, plural ‘Lives’) when it is a synonym of ‘biography’ or ‘description of one’s life’. We similarly disambiguate ‘martyrdom’ (the event or concept) and ‘Martyrdom’ (the account), whereas ‘passio/passion’ and ‘acta/acts’ take the lowercase form because they typically refer only to accounts and not concepts. References to titles of specific works (or parts thereof) are not only capitalized but also
xii
italicized (e.g. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Acts of Thomas). For reasons of economy, we often use shorthand titles (e.g. Suetonius’ Caesars for the Lives of the Caesars). Finally, historical eras are capitalized (e.g. Late Antiquity); their adjectives are not (e.g. late antique), except if it is helpful for disambiguation—e.g. Imperial authors (as opposed to, for example, imperial administration), Republican Rome, and Classical Greece.
L I ......................................................................................................
Figures . The biographical inscription of Ahmose in his tomb at Elkab
. Limestone biographical statue of Nespaqashuty (height: cm) from the temple of Amun at Karnak
. Bust, possibly of Polemo. Athens National Museum
. Bust of Herodes Atticus. Athens National Museum
. Statue of one of the Vedii Antonini, Izmir Archaeological Museum
. Statue of Dometeinos, Aphrodisias Museum
. Reconstruction of the Nymphaeum at Olympia
. Republican male, Rome, Musei Vaticani, Galleria Chiaramonti
. Hadrian, from Ceprano, Rome, Museo Capitolino, Salone
. Faustina Maior, Rome, Museo Capitolino, Vestibolo
Tables . Topical outline of the Life of Aristotle
. Chronology of Dynastic Egypt
. Known copies of Catilina and Jugurtha between the ninth and the twelfth centuries
L A .........................................................................................................
Ancient texts and authors are cited for the most part using the conventions of the Greek– English Lexicon edited by Liddell, Scott, Jones, and McKenzie (LSJ, for Greek; it also explains abbreviations of (some) epigraphical publications) and A Latin Dictionary edited by Lewis and Short (for Latin). Books of the Bible (Old Testament, New Testament, and apocrypha) are abbreviated according to the Society of Biblical Literature Handbook of Style (nd edition, Atlanta, ). In the bibliography, abbreviations of periodicals used are those of L’Année Philologique. In addition, this book uses the following abbreviations: Adv. Col.
Plutarch, Adversus Colotem
AE
L’Année épigraphique
AMS
P. Bedjan (ed.), Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum. vols. (Paris/ Leipzig, –)
ANRW
H. Temporini and W. Haase (eds.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt. Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung. Part I (vols. –) and Part II (vols. –.) (Berlin, –)
Antid.
Isocrates, Antidosis
Ant. Rom.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Antiquitates Romanae
AP
Anthologia Palatina
Aud.
Plutarch, De recta ratione audiendi
BHG
F. Halkin (ed.), Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca. Subsidia Hagiographica (rd ed., Brussels, [])
BHL
Socii Bollandiani (eds.), Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina Antiquae et Mediae Aetatis (Brussels, –, –)
BHO
P. Peeters (ed.), Bibliotheca Hagiographica Orientalis. Subsidia Hagiographica (Brussels, )
Bibl.
Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica
BNJ
I. Worthington (ed.), Brill’s New Jacoby (url: https:// referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/brill-s-new-jacoby)
BNP
Brill’s New Pauly. Antiquity volumes edited by Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider; English edition by Christine F. Salazar. Classical Tradition volumes edited by Manfred Landfester; English edition by Francis G. Gentry
xvi
c.
circa
CANT
M. Geerard (ed.), Clavis Apocryphorum Novi Testamenti. Corpus Christianorum (Turnhout, )
Chil.
Tzetzes, Chiliades
CM
Eusebius of Caesarea, Contra Marcellum
cod.
codex
Col.
column
comm.
commentary
Conf.
Aurelius Augustinus, Confessiones
Contest
Anonymous, Contest of Homer and Hesiod (or Certamen)
Conv.
Plutarch, Convivium Septem Sapientium
CPG
Clavis Patrum Graecorum. Corpus Christianorum. vols. (Turnhout, –)
CVA
Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum (London, –)
d.
died (followed by date of death)
Dial.
Gregory the Great, Dialogi
DK
H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vols. –, th edition (Zurich, )
DMP[RP]
Eusebius of Caesarea, De Martyribus Palaestinae (recensio prolixior)
DPhA
R. Goulet (ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, vols. (), (), (), supplément (), (), a–b (), (), () (Paris)
edn.
edition
Ep.
Epistulae
Evag.
Isocrates, Evagoras
f.
folio
F
fragment
FGrHist
F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, I–III (Berlin, –; Leiden, –)
FGrHistCont IV A
Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker Continued. Part IV: Biography and Antiquarian Literature. IV A: Biography. Section editors G. Schepens (until ), S. Schorn, vols. published and forthcoming (Leiden). Online at https:// referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/fragmenteder-griechischen-historiker-iv
FGrHistCont IV B
Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker Continued. Part IV: Biography and Antiquarian Literature. IV B: History of Literature, Music, Art and Culture (and Related Genres). Section editors L. Bossina, S. Schorn, vols. (Leiden). Online at https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/fragmente-dergriechischen-historiker-iv
Fig.
Figure
fl.
floruit
gr.
graecus
Greg. Naz.
Gregory of Nazianzus
Hadr.
SHA, Vita Hadriani
HE
Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia Ecclesiastica
Heraclid. Lemb. Pol.
Heraclides Lembus, Politeiai
xvii
Hier.
Eusebius of Caesarea, Contra Hieroclem
Hist.
Historiae
Hist. Mon.
Historia Monachorum in Aegypto
Hist. Rom.
Velleius Paterculus, Historia Romana
HL
Palladius, Historia Lausiaca
Hom.
Pseudo-Plutarch, On the Life and Poetry of Homer ( treatises)
HR
Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Historia Religiosa
I.Ancyra
S. Mitchell and D. French, The Greek and Latin Inscriptions of Ankara (Ancyra). Vol. : From Augustus to the End of the Third Century AD (Munich, )
I.Erythrai Klazomenai
H. Engelmann and R. Merkelbach, Die Inschriften von Erythrai und Klazomenai, III (IGSK –; Bonn, –)
IG
Inscriptiones Graecae. vols. (Berlin, –)
IGLS
Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie (Paris, –)
ILLRP
A. Degrassi (ed.), Inscriptiones Latinae Liberae Rei Publicae, vols. nd edn. (Florence, –)
ILS
H. Dessau (ed.), Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae, vols. (Berlin, –)
Inc.
Athanasius, De incarnatione verbi Dei
Inschriften von Ephesos
AA.VV., Die Inschriften von Ephesos. parts, vols. (Bonn, –)
InscrIt
Inscriptiones Italiae (–)
intro.
introduction
IOSPE
V.V. Latyshev, Inscriptiones antiquae Orae Septentrionalis Ponti Euxini graecae et latinae (Saint-Petersburg, –). Third online edition (IOSPE³) at https://iospe.kcl.ac.uk
Iov.
Jerome, Contra Iovinianum
I.Priene
F. Hiller von Gaertringen, Inschriften von Priene (Berlin, )
I.Priene B-M
W. Blümel and R. Merkelbach{, Die Inschriften von Priene I-II (IGSK ; Bonn, )
I.Sestos
J. Krauss, Die Inschriften von Sestos und der thrakischen Chersones (IGSK ; Bonn, )
xviii
KD
Key Doctrines, translation for Kuriai Doxai (called Sententiae by LSJ, which invites confusion with a distinct collection of ‘Vatican Sentences’)
LDAB
Leuven Database of Ancient Books (https://www.trismegistos. org), with as introductory publication: M. Depauw and T. Gheldof, ‘Trismegistos: an interdisciplinary platform for ancient world texts and related information’, in Ł. Bolikowski, V. Casarosa, P. Goodale, N. Houssos, P. Manghi, and J. Schirrwagen (eds.), Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries TPDL Selected Workshops. Cham, , –
Leg.
Philo, Legatio ad Gaium
Louvre MA
Musée du Louvre, Antiquités grecques et romaines (followed by catalogue number)
Mos.
Philo, Moses
MP³
P. Mertens and R.A. Pack³: Catalogue of Greek and Latin Literary Papyri (http://cipl.philo.ulg.ac.be/Cedopal/MP/ dbsearch en.aspx)
Nic.
Isocrates, Nicocles
OCD
S. Hornblower, A. Spawforth, and E. Eidinow (eds.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary, fourth edition (Oxford, )
Opif.
Philo, De opificio mundi
Or.
Oratio(nes)
orat.
Tatian, Oratio ad Graecos
p.
page
PBerol.
Papyrus Berolinensis
PH
Damascius, Philosophical History (Life of Isidore)
PG
J.P. Migne (ed.), Patrologiae cursus completus. Series graeca (Paris, –)
PHaun.
Papyrus Hauniensis
PHerc.
Papyrus Herculanensis
P.KRU
W.E. Crum, Koptische Rechtsurkunden des achten Jahrhunderts aus Djême (Theben) (Leipzig, )
PL
J.P. Migne (ed.), Patrologiae cursus completus. Series latina (Paris, –)
PLond.
Papyrus Londinensis
pl(s).
plate(s)
PMG
Page, D. (ed.), Poetae Melici Graecae (Oxford, )
PO
P. Luisier (ed.), Patrologia Orientalis (Turnhout, –)
Poss.
Possidius
xix
POxy.
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri
Prae. ger. reip.
Plutarch, Praecepta gerendae rei publicae
Praef.
Praefatio (preface)
Prol.
Prologue
Prol. in Aristid.
Sopater, Prolegomena in Aristidem
Ps.-
Pseudo-
Quaest. Rom.
Plutarch, Quaestiones Romanae
r.
reigned (followed by dates of reign)
RE
G. Wissowa, W. Kroll, K. Witte, K. Mittelhaus, and K. Ziegler (eds.), Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Neue Bearbeitung (Stuttgart, –)
repr.
reprinted
rev.
revised
RG
Caesar Octavianus Augustus, Res Gestae Divi Augusti
RSV
Revised Standard Version (Bible)
SA
F. Wehrli, Die Schule des Aristoteles (Basel/Stuttgart, –)
schol.
scholium
SEG
A. Chaniotis, T. Corsten, N. Papazarkadas, E. Stavrianopoulou, and R.A. Tybout (eds.), Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (Leiden, –)
SH
H. Lloyd-Jones and P. Parsons (eds.), Supplementum Hellenisticum (Berlin, )
SHA
Historia Augusta (so-called)
SSR
G. Giannantoni, Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae (Naples, )
Subl.
Pseudo-Longinus, Περὶ ὕψους (de Sublimitate)
T
Testimonium
trans.
translation/translator
v
verso
V. Ant.
Athanasius, Vita Antonii
V. Aug.
Possidius, Vita Augustini
VC
Eusebius of Caesarea, Vita Constantini
Vell.
Velleius Paterculus
VH
Jerome, Vita Hilarionis
Vir. ill.
Jerome, De viris illustribus
Vit. Rom.
Anonymous, Vita (Homeri) Romana
xx
Vit. Scor.
Anonymous, Vita (Homeri) Scorialensis ( and )
VM
Jerome, Vita Malchi
VP
Jerome, Vita Pauli
VPS
Eunapius, Vitae Philosophorum et Sophistarum
VS
Philostratus, Vitae Sophistarum
L C ......................................................................................................
Sean A. Adams is Senior Lecturer in New Testament and Ancient Culture at the University of Glasgow, UK. His publications include The Genre of Acts and Collected Biography (Cambridge), Baruch and the Epistle of Jeremiah: A Commentary Based on the Texts of Codex Vaticanus (Leiden), and Composite Citations in Antiquity (London, co-edited with Seth Ehorn). Sean specializes in Hellenistic Judaism and has just published a book on Greek Genres and Jewish Authors: Negotiating Literary Culture in the Greco-Roman Era (Waco), which is funded by the British Academy. Graham Anderson is Professor Emeritus of Classics in the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. He has written a study of the biographies of Philostratus, and a number of studies on Lucian and the Second Sophistic. Jeffrey Beneker is Professor of Classics and former Chair of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, USA. In addition to his book, The Passionate Statesman: Eros and Politics in Plutarch’s Lives (Oxford, ), he has published numerous articles on Plutarch and ancient biography. He is co-author of The Progymnasmata of Nikephoros Basilakes: Byzantine Rhetorical Exercises from the Twelfth Century (Harvard, ). James Corke-Webster is Senior Lecturer in Roman History at King’s College, London, UK. He has published a number of articles on early Christian historiography, martyr literature, and novelistic texts, is the author of Eusebius and Empire: Constructing Church and Rome in the Ecclesiastical History (Cambridge, )—awarded the Conington Prize of the Oxford Faculty of Classics (joint), and the Best First Book Prize of the North American Patristics Society—and the joint editor of The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sanctity (Brill, ). S. Peter Cowe holds the Narekatsi Chair of Armenian Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California at Los Angeles, USA. He also is the Director of the Center for World Languages at that university. Muriel Debié is Professor of Religion at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, France. Koen De Temmerman is Professor of Classics at Ghent University, Belgium. He is the author of Crafting Characters: Heroes and Heroines in the Ancient Greek Novel (Oxford, ) and the co-editor of Writing Biography in Greece and Rome: Narrative
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Technique and Fictionalization (Cambridge, , with Kristoffel Demoen) and Characterization in Ancient Greek Literature (Leiden, , with Evert van Emde Boas). He was the Laureate of the Prize for Humanities of the Belgian Royal Academy () and is the recipient of two European Research Council grants (, ). Tiziano Dorandi is affiliated with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, France. Faustina Doufikar-Aerts is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Free University (VU) of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Mark Edwards is Professor of Early Christian Studies in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford, UK. He is the author of Neoplatonic Saints: The Lives of Plotinus and Porphyry by their Students (Liverpool, ) and John through the Centuries (Oxford, ), and co-editor of Portraits: Biographical Representation in the Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire (Oxford, , with Simon Swain). Kendra Eshleman is Associate Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at Boston College, USA. Florian R. Forster is affiliated with the Abteilung für Alte Geschichte des Historischen Seminars at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Elizabeth Frood is Associate Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, UK. She is the author of Biographical Texts from Ramessid Egypt (Atlanta, ), as well as numerous articles on different strategies of Egyptian self-presentation, including biography. Joseph Geiger is Shalom Horowitz Professor of Classics Emeritus at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and is the author of over one hundred learned articles, ranging from historiography and biography to intellectual history, with forays into Talmudic studies and classical topics in art and literature. His books include Cornelius Nepos and Ancient Political Biography, Masada II: The Latin and Greek Documents (with H.M. Cotton), The First Hall of Fame: A Study of the Statues of the Forum Augustum, and Hellenism in the East: Studies on Greek Intellectuals in Palestine. He has been, i.a., a Visiting Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor at Heidelberg and Yale. Aristoula Georgiadou is Associate Professor of Ancient Greek Literature at the University of Patras, Greece. She is the author of Plutarch’s Pelopidas: A Historical and Philological Commentary () and co-author of Plutarco: Pelopida e Marcello () and Lucian’s Science Fiction Novel True Histories: Interpretation and Commentary (). She has published several articles on Plutarch and Lucian. Nora Goldschmidt is Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University, UK. She is the author of Shaggy Crowns: Ennius’ Annales and Virgil’s
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Aeneid (Oxford, ) and Afterlives of the Roman Poets: Biofiction and the Reception of Latin Poetry (Cambridge, ), and editor (with Barbara Graziosi) of Tombs of the Ancient Poets: Between Literary Reception and Material Culture (Oxford, ). Thomas Hendrickson teaches Latin and English at Stanford Online High School. After receiving his PhD in Classics from UC Berkeley, he spent two years in Italy at the American Academy in Rome and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Hendrickson has taught at Dartmouth College, Furman University, and San Quentin State Prison. His Ancient Libraries and Renaissance Humanism (Leiden, ) is an edition of the first modern history of libraries, the De Bibliothecis of Justus Lipsius. He is also a co-author of Bartolomeo Platina, Lives of the Popes, Paul II: An Intermediate Reader of Renaissance Latin (Oxford, OH, ). Martin Hinterberger is Professor for Byzantine Literature in the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies of the University of Cyprus. His major research interests are emotions in Byzantine literature and society (Phthonos. Mißgunst, Neid und Eifersucht in der byzantinischen Literatur, Wiesbaden, ), Byzantine hagiographical literature (especially Metaphraseis and the issue of genre), biography and autobiography (Autobiographische Traditionen in Byzanz, Vienna, ), and literature in the vernacular as well as the history of medieval Greek, especially as a literary language (ed., The Language of Byzantine Learned Literature, Turnhout, ). Noreen Humble is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and Religion at the University of Calgary, Canada. Her research focuses primarily on Xenophon and Plutarch, both in their contemporary setting and in the early modern period. She is the editor of Plutarch’s Lives: Parallelism and Purpose (Swansea, ) and co-editor of Mediterranean Travels: Writing Self and Other from the Ancient World to Contemporary Society (Oxford, , with Pat Crowley and Silvia Ross). Scott Fitzgerald Johnson is Associate Professor of Classics and Letters and the Joseph F. Paxton Presidential Professor at the University of Oklahoma, USA. He has published widely on late antique literature and culture, including The Life and Miracles of Thekla: A Literary Study (Harvard, ) and Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity (Oxford, ). He is the editor of Greek Literature in Late Antiquity: Dynamism, Didacticism, Classicism (Ashgate, ), The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity (), and Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity: Greek (Ashgate, ). He is the translator of Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Sinful Woman (Gorgias, ) and the co-translator of Miracle Tales from Byzantium (Harvard, ). Corinne Jouanno is Professor of Ancient Greek Language and Literature at the University of Caen, France. Her main field of investigation is Byzantine fiction (novels, epic and fictional biographies). She is especially interested in the reception of Antiquity in medieval Greece and the modern world. She is the author of Ulysse, odyssée d’un personnage, d’Homère à Joyce (Paris, ) and Naissance et métamorphoses du
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Roman d’Alexandre. Domaine grec (Paris, ). She has translated both the Life of Aesop and the Alexander Romance into French. Adam M. Kemezis is Associate Professor in the Department of History, Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. He is the author of Greek Narratives of the Roman Empire: Cassius Dio, Philostratus and Herodian (Cambridge, ) and articles on the literature and history of the Severan period, as well as on Imperial Greek literature and the relationship of literature to Roman political culture. Jacqueline Klooster is Lecturer at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, the Netherlands. She has published on Hellenistic poetry (Poetry as Window and Mirror: Positioning the Poet in Hellenistic Poetry, Leiden, ) and ancient biography. Jason König is Professor of Greek at the University of St Andrews, UK. He works broadly on the literature and culture of the Roman Empire. His books include Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire (Cambridge, ) and Saints and Symposiasts: The Literature of Food and the Symposium in Greco-Roman and Early Christian Culture (Cambridge, ). Ioannis M. Konstantakos is Professor of Ancient Greek Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. His scholarly interests include Greek and Roman comedy, ancient fiction, folktales and popular lore, Near Eastern literatures and their influence on Greek culture, and the reception of classical texts in East and West. He has published numerous books and articles on these topics and has given lectures at several European universities and learned societies. He has gained scholarships from the Greek State Scholarships Foundation and from the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation. He received the prestigious prize of the Academy of Athens for the best classical monograph in and was a finalist for the Greek state prize for literary essay in . Michele A. Lucchesi is Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek in the Theology Faculty of Turin, Italy. After completing his doctorate in classical languages and literature at Oxford, he has begun a second doctorate in patristic studies at the Pontifical Institute Augustinianum in Rome. His main research interests include Plutarch, the reception of Sparta in the early and late Imperial time, and the idea of history in Late Antiquity (especially in the ecclesiastical historians). He has published several articles and chapters in collected volumes about Plutarch and Sparta. Graeme Miles lectures in Classics at the University of Tasmania, Australia. His research is primarily concerned with Greek literature and philosophy of the Roman era. Lars Boje Mortensen is Professor of Ancient and Medieval Cultural History in the Department of History at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, and head of the Centre for Medieval Literature, Odense and York; co-editor of the Open Access Journal Interfaces—A Journal of Medieval European Literatures (–). Other recent
xxv
publications include Medieval Narratives between History and Fiction: From the Centre to the Periphery of Europe, c. – (Copenhagen, , with P.A. Agapitos) and The Performance of Christian and Pagan Storyworlds: Non-canonical Chapters of the History of Nordic Medieval Literature (Turnhout, , co-edited with T.M.S. Lehtonen). Zahra Newby is Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research focuses on the experience of Greek culture in the Roman Empire, and the expression of this in the visual arts. She has published a number of articles and is co-editor of Art and Inscriptions in the Ancient World (Cambridge, ). Her books include Greek Athletics in the Roman Word: Victory and Virtue (Oxford, ) and Greek Myths in Roman Art and Culture: Imagery, Values and Identity in Italy, – (Cambridge, ). Arietta Papaconstantinou is a historian of the late antique and early medieval Mediterranean. She received her PhD from the Université de Strasbourg and is currently Associate Professor of Ancient History at the University of Reading, UK. She is the author of Le culte des saints en Égypte des Byzantins aux Abbassides () and has published widely on the religious, linguistic, social, and economic aspects of the transition from Rome to the Caliphate in the eastern Mediterranean, focusing more specifically on the history of late antique and early medieval Egypt. Dennis Pausch taught Classics at Gießen University from to . During this time and during his stay in Edinburgh as Humboldt Fellow, he wrote his first book (Biographie und Bildungskultur: Personendarstellungen bei Plinius dem Jüngeren, Gellius und Sueton, Berlin, ) and his second book (Livius und der Leser: Narrative Strukturen in Ab urbe condita, Munich, ), the latter of which was awarded the Bruno Snell Prize of the Mommsengesellschaft in . After three years at the University of Regensburg, he now holds the Chair of Latin at the Technische Universität Dresden, Germany. Christopher Pelling is Emeritus Regius Professor of Greek at Christ Church, Oxford, UK. Takis Poulakos is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Iowa, USA. Danny Praet is Professor of Ancient Religion and Philosophy at Ghent University, Belgium. Suzanne Saïd is Emerita Professor at Columbia University, USA, after teaching at Paris IV, Grenoble, and Strasbourg. She has published extensively on Homer (Homer and the Odyssey, Oxford, , and ‘Homer’ in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, fourth edition, Oxford, ), Greek tragedy, comedy, historiography, the novel, Plutarch, and the reception of Antiquity. Christof Schuler is the first Director of the Kommission für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Munich, Germany. He
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is also affiliated with the Abteilung für Alte Geschichte des Historischen Seminars of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Rex Stem is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of California, Davis, USA. His first book is The Political Biographies of Cornelius Nepos (Ann Arbor, ). He is interested in Roman political thought, especially as conveyed through biography and historiography, and is currently pursuing projects involving Caesar’s Gallic War and Livy’s first decade. Luc Van der Stockt is Emeritus Professor of Greek Literature at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. Eric R. Varner is Associate Professor in the Art History Department of Emory University, Atlanta, USA. Stephen White is Professor of Classics and Philosophy in the University of Texas at Austin, USA. His publications include a study of Aristotle’s Ethics, Sovereign Virtue (Stanford, ), co-edited volumes on Hellenistic Aristotelians, and articles on diverse topics in Greek philosophy, science, and literature from Thales and Theophrastus to Hellenistic poetry and Stoicism. He has a new translation of Diogenes Laertius forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Christopher Whitton is Reader in Latin Literature at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow and Director of Music of Emmanuel College. His publications include a ‘green and yellow’ commentary on Pliny Epistles (Cambridge, ), and The Arts of Imitation in Latin Prose: Pliny’s Epistles/Quintilian in Brief (Cambridge, ). Michael Stuart Williams is Lecturer in Ancient Classics at Maynooth University, Ireland. He is the author of Authorised Lives in Early Christian Biography: Between Eusebius and Augustine (Cambridge, ), along with a number of articles on the intellectual history of Late Antiquity. His most recent publications are Peace and Reconciliation in the Classical World (edited with E.P. Moloney, Routledge, ), and The Politics of Heresy in Ambrose of Milan (Cambridge, ). Enrica Zanin is Senior Lecturer (maître de conférences) of Comparative Literature at the University of Strasbourg, France. She studied at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), was a Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation, and is currently a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Her research deals with early modern European drama, more specifically tragedy (Fins tragiques, Droz, ) and the poetics of early modern drama (Le Théâtre au miroir des langues, Droz, ). She is currently working on early modern novellas and preparing a book about their ethical issues from Boccaccio to Cervantes.
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INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................
......................................................................................................................
() Scholarship, Definitions, and Concepts ......................................................................................................................
I has become a topos in scholarship on biography to note that it is one of the most widespread literary genres worldwide. Biographies and autobiographies of actors, sportsmen, politicians, singers, Nobel Prize-winners, and other famous people have never been more prominent in book shops and publishers’ catalogues (Dorey : xi; Shelston : –; Backscheider : xiii; France and St Clair : ). Another indication of the interest triggered by the term as well as the concept of biography is the fact that in modern-day publishing (and marketing), the term often features in book titles not only in reference to persons but also as a metaphor for a startlingly diverse range of other subject matters (see McGing and Mossman b: ix, xviii–xx). A variant of this trope goes back all the way to the third century , when Dicaearchus of Messina, a student of Aristotle, according to the Suda (Verhasselt : T), entitled his (now fragmentarily preserved) history of Greece as a Bios Hellados (Life of Greece). The work discusses the cultural evolution of the Greek people from earliest times and its title arguably adapts what must then have been a recognizable label for the description of individual lives from childhood onwards (Görgemanns ).1 In the first century , the same trope inspired Jason of Nysa (Bios Hellados) and Varro (De vita populi romani, On the Life of the Roman People). At the same time, it is another topos in scholarship to point out that scholarly attention has been slow to follow the genre’s increasing popularity.2 This observation has also been made for ancient biography in particular. In his monograph on this ancient genre, for example, the late Tomas Hägg (a: x) notes that it is one of the more neglected fields in classical studies. There is, of course, much work on individual biographies (e.g. Demoen
In fact, Dicaearchus himself is said (by D.L. .) to have used the same label also for the title of his collection of Lives of philosophers (Peri biōn, On Lives; Fortenbaugh and Schütrumpf : ). Averintsev (: ) discusses the meanings of the Greek word bios (as opposed to zōē). 2 On this discrepancy, see Nadel (: ), Madelénat (: ), Kendall (: ), and Backscheider (: xiv), of which the last also gives further references. 1
and Praet on Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius), single authors (e.g. Pelling a on Plutarch; Guijarro on Diogenes Laertius; and Bowie and Elsner on Philostratus), more or less rigidly defined sets of subgenres (e.g. P. Cox on spiritual biography in Late Antiquity; Kivilo on poets’ Lives; and Fletcher and Hanink on Lives of artists in general) and specific historical periods (e.g. Erler and Schorn on Hellenistic and Edwards and Swain on Roman Imperial biography). But most studies that aim to offer some comprehensiveness in their treatments of ancient biography more generally predate all this scholarship by several decades (e.g. Leo ; Stuart ; and, on autobiography, Misch ). The same can be said of studies that cover substantial parts of the genre (e.g. Hadas and Smith on spiritual biographies; Dorey on Latin and Dihle and Momigliano on Greek biography). Whereas recent years have witnessed the publication of broad, collective surveys on other ancient narrative prose genres such as historiography (Marincola ) and the novel (Whitmarsh ; Cueva and Byrne ), the present Handbook is the first such work on ancient biography.3
M C
.................................................................................................................................. As an explanation for the lack of holistic focus in scholarship, some scholars have pointed to the fact that ancient biography as a whole is rather badly documented. Gallo (: ; : ), for example, complains that we have almost no remaining biographies predating Plutarch.4 This is arguably an exaggeration, as this volume will go on to show, although much depends on how we define that term (a thorny question to which I return below). Another explanation focuses not so much on the quantity of what remains as on its perceived quality. As Sonnabend (: –) explains, the genre has received a particularly bad press. First, ancient biography clearly cannot be adequately described using the traditional, formal genre categories.5 Like most other prose genres, it famously differs from the major genres in verse, such as epic, lyric, and tragedy, in that we do not have ancient generic theory on it or any other trace that would suggest that it ever had its own consolidated set of guidelines, prescriptions, or ‘poetics’ in Antiquity. This observation has even led scholars to think of it as a ‘minor’ or ‘marginal’ genre (Kleinliteratur), as opposed to more elevated and refined literature (belles lettres or Hochliteratur).6
3 For medieval biography in the Latin West, on the contrary, there is Berschin’s monumental study in five volumes ( ). 4 Similarly, but more specifically on Hellenistic biography, see Bonazzi and Schorn (: ). 5 See, among others, Steidle (: , ), Wehrli (: ), Sonnabend (: ), and Pausch (: ), who also provides further references. 6 For example, Gallo (: ) on ancient biography never having been a ‘genere alto’ (Plutarch being the sole exception), Gallo (: ) on this genre as ‘letteratura di consumo’, Efthymiadis (c: ) on pre Christian biography as marginal, Momigliano (: ) on pre Constantinian biography as relatively unimportant, Thorsen and Harrison (b: ) on biography often being perceived as one of the ‘lowest’ genres and Frickenschmidt (: ) on the contrast between ancient biography and so called Hochliteratur.
( )
Ancient biographies share this fate with another prose genre that does not seem to have come with its own theoretical conceptualizations in Antiquity and was equally often neglected or treated dismissively in twentieth-century scholarship: the ancient novel. This genre too has been critically rehabilitated only relatively recently,7 but in the case of ancient biography, the rehabilitation has been more uneven, as some biographers have tended to miss out on the general reappraisal more than others. Another similarity is that scholarship on ancient biography too tends to recognize modern counterparts as the norm, while characterizing ancient (and medieval) texts as ‘forerunners’ rather than full-blown representatives of an ancient genre in their own right (see also Hägg a: – on this trend). The language of origin, evolution, and progression underlying such genealogies, as if there is a clear line running from exemplary or idealizing ancient Lives to realistic ones of the eighteenth century, has been rightly criticized (e.g. by H. Lee : xiv). Nevertheless, in many histories of the genre, typically a few ancient biographers (usually including Plutarch and Suetonius) are singled out, whereas most forms of ancient biographical narrative are not dealt with at all (e.g. Madelénat ; Parke ; Hamilton ; Gillies ; Klein ). It is not just that biographies have long been characterized by modern scholars as marginal, relatively unimportant, or less developed than their modern counterparts. It is also that they have been criticized for their perceived lack of historical precision. One of the most famous examples of this attitude is Theodor Mommsen (: ), who criticizes the lack of historical reliability in the Historia Augusta and labels this text ‘one of the most wretched mess-ups’ (‘eine der elendsten Sudeleien’) that have come down to us from Antiquity. His characterization is emblematic of a broader concern with biography’s position ‘between historical writing and belles lettres’ (Kendall : ) as it has traditionally been perceived: scholars long required biography to be a truthful representation of historical reality. This requirement typically activated a set of expectations, such as that of completeness, citation of sources, first-hand knowledge of the biographer, and objectivity.8 Ancient biography too has been read as a form of history9—with notable consequences. As Hägg (: –) explains, scholars have long kept ancient biographies ‘proper’ separated from ‘other’ narratives because of their belief that historical accuracy and factual truth are essential in the former and, therefore, should act as genre-distinctive criteria. At the same time, others have rightly suggested that we cannot simply retroject such modern requirements onto the ancient material and that the relationship between biography and history is more complex. In fact, ancient biography often shows an awareness of its own generic position in relation to history—a topic explored by S. Adams in Chapter in this volume, and further picked up by R. Stem in Chapter .10 Rather than simply being a
See De Temmerman (: ) on this change in critical attitude from, roughly speaking, the s onwards. 8 Romein (: ), Shelston (: ), Edel (: ), Hähner (: ), and Hamilton (: ) are examples. See H. Lee (: ) for sensible criticism of each of these expectations. 9 Güthenke () is insightful on how nineteenth and early twentieth century scholars of ancient biography (e.g. Bruns ; Leo ; Misch ) project modern concerns (i.e. about fictionality and historiography) onto their research object. 10 F. Doufikar Aerts, for her part, draws attention to a quite different approach to distinguishing history from biography in the Arabic tradition of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages (Chapter in this volume). 7
subgenre of history, it has been pointed out, biography operates under generic parameters of its own and is generally not concerned with sustained historical veracity (e.g. P. Cox : on spiritual biography). On the contrary, modes of emplotment and conventional structures of fiction are operative in it and make it a creative and meaningful literary form rather than, simply, a recorder of historical fact (e.g. Nadel : and, for ancient biography specifically, De Temmerman ). In fact, the common motif in biographies and encomia to compare a literary work to a painting and sculpture may invite us to reflect on aspects of biography such as flattery, idealization, flatness, inaccuracy, and distortion, all of which may very well have been intrinsic to the ancient concept, even if they have not always been recognized as such by modern scholars.11 As a result, more open views have recently been applied to the concept of biography (McGing and Mossman ; H. Lee ; Hägg a; De Temmerman and Demoen ; Fletcher and Hanink ; Cairns and Luke a), allowing, for example, the inclusion of Lives of saints,12 legendary heroes (such as Aesop), and fictionalized, historical figures (such as Ps.-Callisthenes’ Alexander). This volume also includes such Lives (e.g. Chapters , , , ) and, in addition, addresses various other kinds of overlap between ancient biography and fiction (e.g. Chapter on Xenophon, Chapter on political biography, Chapter on fictional autobiography in Syriac, Chapter on fictionalizing dynamics in ancient Egyptian biographical monuments, and Chapter on the biographic in Byzantine fiction). In this book, in other words, we depart from what has long been an essential assumption underlying quite a few modern definitions of the genre of biography, i.e. that it tells the life story of a historical individual (rather than a fictional one; Madelénat : ; Hägg a: ix). This assumption is in need of revision, as it is arguably a remnant of our modern characterization of biography as a provider of historical truth. Indeed, modern readers have an acute awareness that the content of, say, Joann F. Price’s Barack Obama: A Biography () is ontologically very different from that of books that have formally similar titles but are, in fact, either acknowledged fictions cast in the form of biographies (e.g. Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyitch or Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which are built around invented characters)13 or biographical novels (e.g. Allan Massie’s Tiberius, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, or, to take an ancient example, Ps.-Callisthenes’ Alexander Romance, which are concerned with historical characters but invent plotlines around them and/or do not necessarily relate to existing traditions). But for some ancient Lives included in this Handbook, it is not even clear to us whether their subjects ever were historical persons—and it may not have been any clearer to an ancient audience. The fabulist Aesop and the philosopher Demonax (whose Lives were labelled as Bioi in Antiquity and are dealt with in Chapters and respectively in this volume), for example, cannot be said with any certainty to have existed (though they probably did, as
11 H. Lee (: ). T.E. Duff (: n. ) gives references to the ancient texts. See also P. Cox (: xi xvi) on biographers as painters not of landscape but of character the ‘inscape’ and on the exaggeration, typification, stylization, and idealization that come with it. Licona (: ) com pares writing biography to editing photographs (e.g. adding haze) to make the same point: that the ancient genre did not have the same preoccupation with precision as we have today. 12 See, among others, Heffernan () on Latin and English medieval hagiography as ‘sacred biography’. 13 See Cohn (: ) on this distinction.
( )
G. Anderson assumes for Demonax in this volume) and we can only speculate about how ancient readers would have approached their Lives. It is equally unclear to what extent Jerome (or his readers) was (were) convinced that his Lives of Paul the First Hermit and Malchus dealt with historical figures.14 And what to think of the Byzantine Life (and Martyrdom) of Galaction and Episteme (BHG –)? Its male protagonist is presented as the son of Clitophon and Leucippe, the hero and heroine of Achilles Tatius’ novel from the middle of the first century (Robiano ). He is therefore paraded as being the product—quite literally—of a piece of fiction. In short, positing the historicity of biographees as a criterion for defining biography is not justified by the extant ancient material.
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.................................................................................................................................. Another explanation for the dearth of holistic focus in scholarship on ancient biography points to the difficulty of defining the notoriously diverse genre (Cairns and Luke b: vii). Indeed, it is difficult to study something in its totality if we do not know (or widely disagree about) what exactly that totality is. Our modern English term, to begin with, does not help much, as it is far from unambiguous. It goes back to the Greek ‘βιογραϕία’ (biographia), which postdates by centuries most of the material with which this Handbook is concerned. It first appears in fragments of Damascius’ Life of Isidore of Alexandria (end of the fifth or first half of the sixth century ) preserved in Photius’ Bibliotheca (cod. , ; ninth century), where it refers to the written production (graphein) of a story of one’s life (bios).15 In English, it is picked up in John Dryden’s introduction to his translation of Plutarch’s Lives (), where it has the same literary connotation, which is subsequently consolidated throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century and beyond—a written record of one’s life (rather than, say, a more general depiction of human life and experience across different media; Hamilton : –). The same connotation remains dominant in modern-day usage of the word as attested in dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary () or the New Oxford Dictionary of English ().16 At the same time, the English term has been polysemic since its coinage: an umbrella term that can denote widely different types of life-writing; not only Lives in both prose and verse, but also encyclopaedia entries, epitaphs, libri de viris illustribus, letters, and laudationes.17 It comes as no surprise, then, that opinions vary on how precisely to define biography as a part of ancient textual production. It never was a rigidly defined genre, and much ink has
Weingarten (: ) suggests that Jerome did indeed think of Paul as a historical figure. On the ‘invention’ of this character, on the other hand, see Rebenich (). On this Life as a ‘complete fiction’, see Barnes (: , ). 15 See, among others, Desclos (: ), Pausch (: ), Gallo (: ), and Schnicke (: ). 16 OED: ‘() The history of the lives of individual men, as a branch of literature; () A written record of the life of an individual’; NODE: ‘An account of someone’s life written by someone else.’ 17 On the semantics of the term, see Madelénat (: ) and Scheuer (: , ). On the use of French and German equivalents from the seventeenth century onwards, see Romein (: ) and Schnicke (). 14
flowed over the question of what it was (and what it was not).18 It is a recurrent pattern that modern definitions tend to impose boundaries which do not seem to be justified by the ancient material, which is too sprawling and diverse to be captured under one single definition unless a very general one.19 Momigliano’s influential definition as ‘an account of the life of a man from birth to death’ (: ) illustrates this very well. It is, first, too broad to be workable, as it includes, strictly speaking, any given epitaph that states that a person has lived a certain amount of time—something few readers would call a biography (Ehlers ). In an attempt to be more precise, Dihle (: –) adds specific criteria, such as a view of one’s life in its totality and a moral purpose. This concept of a ‘core genre’20 is designed to identify texts that best meet specific criteria and distinguish them from other texts (such as, in Dihle’s own view, Xenophon’s Agesilaus and Isocrates’ Evagoras, which he labels as encomia rather than biographies). But it is methodologically unhelpful: it is conducive to identifying some of the extant material as ‘real’ biographies while branding the rest as less central (or less successful). Moreover, since such identifications are always (and inevitably) based on a pre-selected sample of texts, they are particularly prone to circular reasoning. Burridge (: –), for example, identifies five texts as biographies (Isocrates’ Evagoras, Xenophon’s Agesilaus, Satyrus’ Euripides, Nepos’ Atticus, and Philo’s Moses) and excludes Xenophon’s Memorabilia because it is too long, has philosophical dialogue, and lacks chronology (ibid.: ). But, as Edwards (b: ) astutely points out, this line of thought imposes the expectation on the genre while claiming that the genre has defined the expectations: had Memorabilia been included in the sample at the outset, Burridge’s inference could not follow.21 Yet, for all its breadth, Momigliano’s definition is at the same time too specific to fit much of the extant material: it is challenged by all Lives of women (explicitly addressed in Chapters and in this volume); by all Lives that give no information about the birth or death of their subjects or, indeed, creatively reshuffle these topics, such as Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus (Chapter ), which starts not with the birth but with the death of its protagonist (, Edwards b); and by all Lives that are either ordered by principles other than (mere) chronology (e.g. Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars, Chapter ) or do not always encompass the full chronological range that Momigliano implies (e.g. Nepos’ On Foreign Generals, Chapter ). Hägg (a: ix) sensibly allows for more flexibility by defining biography as a story of one’s life ‘from cradle to grave (or a substantial part of it)’ but H. Lee (: ) rightly points to the fundamental problem: this requirement has been so often broken in 18 For discussions of specific ancient works as biographies, see, among others, Marincola (: ) on Tacitus’ Agricola and Pelling (a: ) on Plutarch’s Lives. For theoretical notions, see Hanuschek (: ). 19 See Zymner (: ) for a number of definitions. Similarly, modern taxonomies that establish different subtypes of biography (historical, literary, fictional, etc.), such as that of Parke (: ), do not fit the ancient material either. 20 The term was coined by Pausch (: : ‘Kerngattung’). 21 Other examples of such restrictive and methodologically unsound views of what a ‘real’ ancient biography is (not) or ought (not) to be, are Momigliano (: ), whose definition (cited above) excludes Plato’s Apology and Xenophon’s Apology and Memorabilia from being ‘full biographies’; and Arrighetti (: ), who labels as ‘real’ biographies only those which have ‘their only reason for being’ (‘la loro unica ragione d’essere’) in biographical research and exposition (‘nella ricerca e nell’esposizione biografica’), and on this (unverifiable) ground disqualifies Satyrus’ Life of Euripides.
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the history of life-writing as not to count at all. Although many ancient biographies surely capitalize on birth and death episodes as significant ingredients,22 others are often selective in which episodes they emphasize (and which they treat briefly or ignore altogether). And, of course, attitudes towards coverage are themselves subject to change over time: whereas Antiquity arguably saw attention to public achievement as a major ingredient of lifewriting, modern biographers may cater more to readers’ taste for psychological dissection of one’s inner life.23 Titles of works as they have come down to us through the editorial tradition are not of much help either. Some works featuring the word bios in their titles, such as Lucian’s Life of Demonax (Chapter in this volume) or the anonymous Life of Secundus the Philosopher (Chapter ), are not biographies in any strict sense of the word but resonate widely with other genres, such as encomium, recollections, and collections of sayings. And though all ancient and late antique works entitled as bioi do share not only their title but also a number of characteristics,24 Edwards (b: ) rightly points out that, if one were to take these characteristics as criteria for a definition of biography, numerous other important representatives of commemorative ancient life-writing would be excluded altogether (e.g. Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars, the gospels, Eusebius’ Life of Constantine, Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life and Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus). Given the fuzziness surrounding both the term and the concept of biography in Antiquity, scholars have been creative in finding metaphors to conceptualize its slipperiness. Hägg (a: xi), for example, warns, no doubt rightly, that it may be pointless to draw ‘borders where the authors themselves so obviously moved over mapless terrain’. D. Praet (Chapter in this volume) suggests, therefore, replacing the spatial metaphor by one of music, ‘where certain themes are repeated but with new material and variations on old themes, played with different instruments, sampled and remastered, and so on’. And Burridge (: ) draws on Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblances to allow similar flexibility: in his view, gospels would have been recognized by ancient readers as (belonging to the family of) bioi because they have a number of characteristics in common with other works labelled as bioi.25 Other scholars have gone further and suggested that the common notion of ‘genre’ is less than adequate to capture the subtleties and complexities of ancient biographical narrative. C. Pelling, for example, is explicit that ‘one should not think of a single “biographical genre” with acknowledged conventions, but rather of a complicated picture of overlapping 22 On (life and) death in biographical traditions of Archaic philosophers, for example, see Chitwood (). 23 See, for example, Backscheider (: xvi) on the modern biographer ‘getting to the person beneath, the core of the human being’ and France and St Clair (: ) on one’s ‘inner truth’ becoming important in biographical writing from Rousseau’s Les Confessions onwards. 24 These are, according to Edwards (b: ): all events pertain to the life of a single character; the narrative follows a chronological order from birth or infancy to death; and the primary intention of the work is to judge rather than to inform. Examples are Nepos’ Lives of Illustrious Men, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists, Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Damascius’ Life of Isidore, Lucian’s Life of Demonax, and the Life of Aesop. 25 M.S. Williams (: ) similarly sees Christian and non Christian biography as ‘siblings’, and Bowersock (: ) uses the same metaphor to distinguish Christian biography from acts of the Christian martyrs.
traditions, embracing works of varying form, style, length, and truthfulness’.26 Similarly, Edwards and Swain () introduce the concept of ‘the biographic’: not so much a strictly delineated genre as a broader category, a trait, or set of traits present not just in biographies but also in a variety of other texts (Swain : ). In other words, ‘[j]ust as the tragic, ever since Aristotle, has been recognized as an element in literature that is not simply identical with the content of a tragedy, so we would contend that the biographic is’ (Edwards b: ).27 This allows the net to be cast much more widely and invites the inclusion as representatives of ‘the biographic’ of texts that have traditionally been labelled as generically hybrid (e.g. Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius) and other works that are neither histories nor biographies in any strict sense (e.g. Aristides’ Sacred Orations, Arrian’s Anabasis, certain speeches of Dio and Lucian, and the correspondence of Cyprian, Julian, Basil, Augustine, and Jerome). Swain and Edwards’ concept is helpful in analysing how biographical tendencies ‘invade’ (Edwards b: ) other forms of writing. Indeed, the (open) approach taken in this Handbook owes much to it. Xenophon of Athens’ Cyropaedia (fourth century ), for example, is routinely cited as (one of) the first representative(s) of ancient biography, but a number of more or less contemporary, encomiastic, and other writings, such as his Memorabilia and Agesilaus, Isocrates’ Evagoras, and Plato’s Apology and Phaedo, are also informed to varying degrees by modes of writing that had an important role to play in later biographical discourse (Hägg a: –)—even though few would simply label them ‘biographies’. Conversely, the modern label of ‘fictional biographies’ (Karla b) is routinely used to denote a range of the most disparate (pagan and early Christian) narratives from the first few centuries of the Common Era that consciously seem to draw upon a number of protocols from biography but at the same time are much more diffuse forms of story-telling than biographies strictly defined (Life of Aesop, Alexander Romance, apocryphal acts of the apostles, etc.).28 Yet, I am not quite ready to give up on ‘genre’ as a critical concept altogether. One of the problems with the notion of ‘the biographic’ is that it seems difficult to see ‘where to stop’: in fact, if one were to make a Handbook of ‘the biographic’ in Antiquity, it would have to cover even broader sweeps of ancient literature than we have already done here. (On its current scope, see the section ‘Rationale Behind the Book’.) Biographical vignettes or more or less elaborate and/or evaluative sketches of characters abound in many ancient literary genres—from philosophical treatises and oratory over historiography and letter-writing to novels29—and although Swain (: ) is surely right that both biography and the OCD, s.v. ‘biography, Greek’, . See already Gallo (: ) in passing on this distinction. The main characteristics of ‘the biographic’, as identified by Edwards, are that the authors are almost always partisan, the tone of the writings is often panegyrical, polemical, or apologetical, many are written by an intimate, or at least a contemporary, of the subject, many are argumentative and use strategies to enhance their veracity, and accounts of the subject’s birth and infancy will often be miraculous. 28 Morales () points to the inadequacy of current generic categories to capture these texts. 29 To name only a few examples: on biographical sketches in Plutarch’s On the Malice of Herodotus, see Marincola (); in Marcus Aurelius and Fronto, Thorsen (); in Pindar, Uhlig (); in Velleius Paterculus’ Historia romana, Sonnabend (: ); in Sallust, Sonnabend (: ); in Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, Pitcher (); in Pseudo Hippocratic letters, Knöbl (); in Chion of Heraclea’s letters, Christy (). 26 27
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biographic are much more frequent in the literature of the Roman Empire and Late Antiquity than in previous eras, there remains much earlier material that would also merit being included.30 Our book, on the other hand, as a rule, covers texts that are recognizable in themselves as pieces of (either individual or collective) life-writing.31 I have not, that is, attempted to include every biographical sketch or every instance of biographical modes of discourse in historiography, epic, epistolography, and other genres (which would be possible only in a multi-volume series), although such biographical material does feature in some individual chapters (and even has a prominent role to play in Part V). In addition, even if we accept the concept of the biographic as a real and important one (as I do), this still leaves intact the notion that genre has or can have a role to play in how readers respond to Lives (a view also held by S. Adams in Chapter in this volume). As McGing and Mossman (b: x) rightly note, ‘some Lives inevitably activate some generically-inspired expectations which are more precise than Edwards’ concept allows’.32 And, in fact, some ancient authors reflect on how they inscribe themselves in the distinctive practice of writing bioi (Papaconstantinou ). Similarly, Swain (: –) recognizes the category of genre to some extent when he defines biographies as ‘texts which furnish detailed accounts of individuals’ lives’ and which may be ‘complete, from birth to death, or sectional and partial’. Urbano (: –) extends this definition to Late Antiquity to include not only bioi but also philosophical history, early forms of hagiography, and funeral orations, thus testifying to the sprawling nature of life-writing in that period. It will be clear by now that in this Handbook I do not conceive of ancient biography in terms of a checklist of essential, generic features. Since biography in its broadest sense is really just an extended, written account of the life (or parts thereof) of a given (real or fictional) individual (or group of individuals), it does not have specific formal characteristics that allow us to build a solid set of criteria. I have therefore chosen a workable middle ground between inappropriately rigid, generic essentialism and indefinite openness. In practice, this means that, starting from the observation that from the earliest representatives onwards, Lives, to varying degrees, share features with other (contemporary, earlier or later) genres, such as history, encomia or novels, the book includes quite a few texts that have traditionally not been included in the biographical canon: gospels (Chapter ), for instance, following Burridge (), Frickenschmidt (), Keener and Wright () and Licona (: –); Tacitus’ Agricola (Chapter ), though that text can just as well be read (and has been) as an encomium, funerary oratory, ethnography, and history (Whitmarsh ); the Life of Secundus, the Tale of Ahiqar (both in Chapter ) and the Alexander 30 Frickenschmidt (: ) discusses pockets of biographical narrative (‘einen repräsentativen kurzen Lebensquerschnitt’) from the Old Testament onwards and identifies biographical data collections that he sees as fundamental to more extended biographies (of which he identifies no fewer than ; ibid.: ). On biographical interests in the Old Testament, see also Baltzer (: ). 31 I have not included histories of peoples, such as Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks (which Kendall : includes in his discussion of ‘biography’ in Antiquity and the Middle Ages). 32 See also P. Cox (: xiii, ) on the continuity of generic features in ancient biography from the fifth century onwards and on the concept of genre as important for associating several literary works while allowing for individual variations, and as ‘a cluster of defining traits that both shapes and distinguishes one group of literary works from another’. Comparably, Adams’ () underlying premise is that determining the genre of a work is fundamental to its interpretation.
Romance (Chapter ), which all have (rightly) been included also in a recent Encyclopedia of the Novel (Selden ). With others, in short, I conceptualize biography in this Handbook as a flexible, open, and fluid genre, which allows, accommodates, and even stimulates experiments with its own characteristics, story-patterns, and borders.33 Of course, authors of individual chapters will come back to more specific questions of definition and genre with a view to the texts that they discuss.
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.................................................................................................................................. Just as scholars do not agree about what ancient biography is, they also do not agree, unsurprisingly, about how, when, and where it originated—and I return below to my own scepticism about the possibility of answering this question at all. Diachronic surveys of the genre sometimes look to the ancient Near East for so-called ‘predecessors’ or ‘precursors’— although C. Pelling (Chapter in this volume) is surely right to note the fundamental, methodological problems intrinsic to such teleological language. In any case, it remains valid to note that commemorative inscriptions in the Babylonian and Assyrian kingdoms (third millennium to the sixth century ) provide early textual expressions of a biographical interest (Maul ; Parke : xxi–xxviii; Madelénat : –), and E. Frood (Chapter in this volume) and C. Schuler and F.R. Forster (Chapter ) explore similar instances of such an interest in ancient Egypt and Rome and Greece respectively. In addition, scholars have also noted (or, given the absence of much early evidence, hypothesized) a strong biographical flavour in oriental tales going back all the way to the Gilgamesh epos, and they have examined (or speculated about) whether and how such tales (e.g. the story of Ahiqar or oriental versions of the Seven Wise Men) may have impacted Greek story-telling in Asia Minor from a relatively early stage onwards.34 But it is in the Hellenistic era that for a long time scholars located the earliest ‘proper’ Greek biographies—which is a bit of a paradox, to be sure, since not a single complete biography has survived from that era (see Chapter in this volume for details). At that time, so the traditional argument goes, the increased significance of individuals in largescale political structures (Einzelpersönlichkeiten, as opposed to the small-scale, collectiveness of the polis in the Classical period) was conducive to an interest in biographical writing, first about politicians but soon also about poets, scholars, and philosophers.35 Leo (), for example, has famously claimed that biography originates as a product of Peripatetic schools. His argument builds on the demonstrable interest of Aristotelians both in anecdotes illustrating virtues and vices and in the description and evaluation of individual writers and philosophical schools. He distinguishes two branches of biographical development (Leo : –, –, –, –): one branch invented by an early Peripatetic, possibly Aristoxenus, to tell the lives of statesmen (and generals) in straightforward, 33
For example, Hägg (a) and McGing and Mossman (), the latter of whom explore some of the borderlands of this ‘messy’ genre. See also Pausch (: ) on biography as an ‘open’ genre. 34 See Momigliano (: ) and Gallo (: ) on these stories; and Chapter in this volume for further discussion. 35 Sonnabend (: ). See Vössing (: ) and Dihle (: ) for similar arguments.
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chronological accounts, as exemplified by Plutarch in the later tradition; and another branch combining chronological accounts with systematic, thematic arrangements in order to highlight the character and achievements of individuals. The latter type, exemplified by Suetonius in the later tradition, was initially established, Leo submits, by Alexandrian grammarians under the influence of Peripatetic teaching in order to write the Lives of writers and artists. As is well known, Leo’s thesis has met with substantial criticism.36 Crucially, not much of his argument is supported by textual evidence. Leo rather retrojects characteristics of later texts (notably Plutarchan and Suetonian) into a Hellenistic past. It is not just that connections are sometimes tenuous at best;37 it is also that such retrojections are methodologically problematic in principle. In fact, Leo’s genealogy of a bifurcated tradition is complicated by some of the little Hellenistic material that we do have, such as the papyrus of Satyrus’ Life of Euripides (POxy. ; Arrighetti ). It is a biography in the form of a dialogue (which does not fit Leo’s ‘Suetonian’ model) that may well have been an early model for such biography in Late Antiquity. Similarly, other papyrus fragments too offer glimpses of what was probably a typologically more varied tradition than Leo’s theory of a Peripatetic origin can account for (e.g. PHaun. and POxy. , which suggest the existence of rather short biographies; Momigliano : –). Finally, scholars have also drawn attention to the possibility that biographical traditions may be older than the early Peripatos and specifically point to the fifth century 38—the topic of Chapter in this volume. One early name associated with writing biography (from the sixth century) is Theagenes of Rhegium39 (on whom see Chapter in this volume). Two others are Scylax of Caryanda (said by the Suda to have written a Life of Heraclides of Mylasa; FGrHist T) and Xanthus of Lydia (whose account of Empedocles is mentioned by Diogenes Laertius .). We know next to nothing about these authors or the contents of their works—not even enough to be confident, in fact, that Scylax’ account of Heraclides was ‘some sort of biographical work’, as Momigliano (: ) puts it.40 But the fact that all three authors have traditionally been located at the margins of Greek culture (one in the West and two in the East) feeds into the idea of biography being a culturally hybrid form of writing. For all the criticism that Leo’s thesis has encountered, his basic idea that biography originated in the context of philosophical schools has been shared by others. Dihle (: –), for example, places the rise of the genre in the Academy, where, he argues, the (memory of the) charismatic personality of Socrates provided the impetus for biographical writing. Following others,41 Dihle (ibid.: –) identifies as an important factor in this 36 See Momigliano (: ), Frickenschmidt (: ), and Gallo (: ) for overviews of such criticism. In addition, less substantial nuances to Leo’s thesis are offered by Stuart (), suggesting not one founder but a group of Peripatetics, Steidle (), pointing not to Suetonius but to Nicolaus of Damascus as the first who took the so called ‘Suetonian’ model into the political realm, and Krischer (), seeing Peripatetic biography not as a genre, among others. 37 Momigliano (: ) is surely right that it is difficult to see what was specifically Aristotelian in the Suetonian type. 38 Stuart (: ), Dihle (: ), Homeyer (), Gentili and Cerri (: ), and, most extensively, Momigliano (). 39 Gallo (: ). 40 See Gallo (: ) and Gera (: ) for details. 41 Such as Bruns (: ), who claims that biography originates as a result of the appearance of strong individuals/personalities in specific historical periods.
development a wider cultural interest in individuality as it is attested by, among other things, an anecdotic interest in famous people (popular books and legends about Homer and Hesiod, Aesop, Archilochus, Sappho, etc.), comprehensive assessments of prominent people in historical works, encomia, and Socratic literature.42 In Dihle’s view, Plato’s Apology is the earliest model of Greek biography (ibid.: ), whereas Aristotle’s Ethics influenced later Lives and the Peripatos formalized the tradition (ibid.: –). Whereas it is true that Plato’s Apology, like Xenophon’s Socratic writings, contains elements that became standard features of later biographies (as P. Cox : points out), Dihle’s basic assumption that biography needs an exceptional, authoritative figure to flourish has (rightly) been doubted.43 A number of other genres and writing practices have also been suggested to have played a role in the early development of biography. The Odyssey, for example, must have had an influence on early biographers, such as Stesimbrotus and Ion (Dormeyer ); Hellenistic philological commentaries and surveys have been said to evince biographical interests (Momigliano : –); Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon’s historiographical writings clearly accommodate biographical material (see Chapter in this volume on the first two, and Chapter on the last); funeral orations have been supposed to play a role too, both in fifth-century Greece (Momigliano : ) and in Republican Rome (Stuart : –; Brugnoli : –; Sonnabend : –); and, of course, the rhetorical tradition of the prose encomium (of which Isocrates formalizes the first model in his depiction of the ideal monarch in Evagoras; Chapter in this volume) shares important features with later key-texts of the ancient biographical tradition (P. Cox : ; Sonnabend : –). Finally, scholars have also attempted to reconstruct from supposed later examples (e.g. Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius) a (biographical) genre called ‘aretalogy’, which allegedly documented miracles and extraordinary achievements of deities and semidivine characters (Hadas and Smith )—more recently, others have adduced sensible criticism as to whether we really have to hypothesize the existence of such a genre in the first place (P. Cox : –; Haase ).
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.................................................................................................................................. The question of ‘origins’ is not one that this Handbook sets out to answer. Indeed, it is so much bound up with that of definition that we may very well be sceptical about the possibility of answering it at all. As we have seen, the only productive definition of ancient biography is a very loose and general one. And, of course, the more open and inclusive we allow it to be, the less possible it becomes to formulate a sensible answer to the question of origins and development—and, indeed, the less meaningful such an answer could possibly be.44 The volume’s cross-cultural and cross-linguistic inclusiveness drives this 42
See also Görgemanns (). As Krischer (: ) and Gentili and Cerri (: ) point out, it can just as well take its inspiration from the exemplary realization of general virtues and vices. 44 Whitmarsh (: xii) develops this argument for the ancient novel, which, like biography, can, in his view, be defined only very loosely (‘an extended fictional story in prose’). 43
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point home. Part IV includes chapters on late antique forms of life-writing in important traditions other than Latin and Greek: Syriac (the third largest surviving literature of Late Antiquity), Coptic, Armenian, and Arabic. Of course, cross-cultural exchange in all these fields has been widely documented,45 but the mere fact that all these traditions articulate life-writing along very similar, formal lines does not mean, of course, that they must be related to each other in terms of (direct or indirect) contact. In his history of the novel, Moretti (: vol. : section ) speaks of ‘polygenesis’, which means that across different cultures similar or identical practices (can) arise independently from each other.46 Surely, telling and writing stories about the lives of important or inspiring (groups of) individuals are more likely to be sensibly conceptualized along these lines than in terms of developmental history.47 There is much truth in Bowie and Harrison’s (: ) statement that the question of the ‘origins’ of the ancient novel, once thought to be the only one worth pursuing, is ‘an insoluble and vain enquiry’, and it is difficult to see why this would be any different for ancient biography, which is a kind of narrative just as sprawling and difficult to define. Moreover, the long-standing scholarly focus on the question of ‘origins’ (together with that on historicity and authenticity) has long kept scholars away from the approach adopted in this Handbook: to read ancient biographies as narrative and textual constructs in their own right. Good examples of this—fairly recent—trend are B. Graziosi’s () book on the Lives of Homer, and Fletcher and Hanink’s () volume on Lives of poets and artists: they draw attention to the relevance of biographical traditions as creative reworkings of earlier traditions—an outlook that surely can be extrapolated to biographies other than those examined by these authors. This is not to say, of course, that all contributors in this Handbook will address this one question; rather, like these authors, they pay attention, first and foremost, to issues of textuality and narrativity underlying the texts. In this sense, this Handbook does not want to replace the standard works of Leo, Dihle, or Momigliano, but rather aims to add perspectives and, in some cases, raise questions that have received less attention so far. This volume also takes a rather open approach in another area: that of chronology. Most current studies on the genre do not venture beyond the first couple of centuries of the Common Era (which constitute the genre’s best-documented period). This Handbook modestly broadens the temporal span and includes late antique forms of biographical narrative, albeit not exhaustively, of course: it covers, in Parts II and III, much of the field up to the fourth century (when Christian life-writing becomes too frequent and omnipresent to be sensibly contained and discussed within the limits of this one book) and occasionally discusses relevant material also from later in the early Byzantine period (and, more rarely, beyond), notably in Parts III and IV, with chapters on, for example, Christian martyrs (Chapter ), monks (Chapter ), and eastern traditions (Chapters –). The book thus builds on the insight that late antique biographies continue important aspects of the 45 Yolles and Weiss (), for example, on the biographical tradition of Muhammad as it evolves in the Latin, medieval West. See the relevant chapters for other bibliography. 46 The concept is inspirational for Whitmarsh () to discuss the genealogy of the Greek love novel. 47 Hägg () applies the concept of polygenesis to some texts that have their place in this Handbook (e.g. Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius, the apocryphal acts of the apostles, the Alexander Romance, and the Life of Aesop).
ancient biographical tradition (P. Cox ; Edwards and Swain ; Hägg and Rousseau ; Van Hoof ). The field most affected by this chronological scope is, of course, Christian life-writing.48 Lives of saints, just like the gospels (Burridge ; ), are separated from biography mainly by very slippery and vague conceptual boundaries (Van Uytfanghe ; Burrus ; Hägg ). This does not mean, of course, that I promote the view that narrative texts as diverse as philosophers’ Lives, political biographies, panegyrics, funeral orations, Christian martyr acts, and saints’ Lives should all be chalked down simply as ‘biographies’. Rather, all these types of narrative commemorate, document, or purport to document Lives, achievements, and/or deaths and build to some extent on biographical protocols, topoi, and narrative strategies; this Handbook aims to explore how exactly they adopt, adapt, rework, and recycle them. Another road to expand the study of ancient biography, both in chronological and cross-cultural terms, is taken in Part VI, which deals with the reception of ancient biography from the Middle Ages onwards. Although this topic has become increasingly popular in scholarship on specific authors over the last few years,49 general surveys of the ancient genre usually do not include it. The same is true also for the final area where I have tried to approach life-writing more openly than earlier overviews have done: that of media. Although the bulk of this volume deals with literature, Part V pays attention to representations of lives (or parts thereof) in other media. Epigraphical sources, for example, present important, topical aspects of the lives of historical persons that also receive attention in biographical narrative literature: birth, youth, death, etc. (Baslez ; Alföldy ; Errington ). In addition, inscriptions were used as a source of evidence not just of an individual’s actions but also of his/her moral qualities—another important resonance with biographical writing (e.g. Low on Classical and Hellenistic Greece, and C. Schuler and F.R. Forster in Chapter in this volume on both Greece and Rome). Similarly, different types of visual art, such as depictions of triumphs, feature important achievements, another well-known topos in biography. Therefore, attention will be paid to specific ways in which such biographical aspects are represented. For the conceptual openness and generic inclusiveness underlying this volume, there is one obvious price to pay: they make exhaustiveness impossible, even across a total of chapters. In order to at least ensure reasonable coverage of the extant material, I have distributed the lion’s share of the chapters over (the first) three parts. The introductory section (Part I) continues to deal with conceptual questions (Chapter ) and subsequently offers a bird’s-eye view of traditions of which specific texts are discussed in more detail in subsequent chapters—individual and collective life-writing, popular, Jewish and Christian biography (Chapters –). Part II, subsequently, offers readings of individual key texts. These are organized in a roughly chronological order and start from the fifth century up to the late fourth century . Part III, finally, steers away from questions about individual biographies to address broader issues: it accommodates chapters with a diachronic focus on specific types of biographees, such as statesmen, philosophers, and monks, 48
Even Hägg’s (a) admirably detailed, diachronic study covers the whole of early Christian biographical narrative in a single chapter (on the gospels) and an epilogue of ten pages. 49 See, for example, Hamilton (: ) on ‘the Renaissance of biography’ and Jacobs (: ) on the reception of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives in the western classical tradition.
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all of whom are discussed through different, selected texts from the biographical tradition. K. Eshleman (Chapter ), for example, explores, through two key texts, broader implications of life-writing of one type of biographee (reading, as she does, biographies of sophists as a cultural history of Hellenism). The combined arrangement of overview chapters in Part I and both synchronic and diachronic readings in Parts II and III respectively should allow the most important representatives of the large biographical subgenres, such as political biography, biography of intellectuals (philosophers and sophists), and hagiography, to be covered, even if not every individual biography is dealt with in a chapter of its own. The Historia Augusta, for example, which is the most extensive late Roman biographical work and the object of renewed scholarly interest (Rohrbacher ; ; Savino ), is covered through the combined attention it receives in two chapters ( and ) alongside other texts. Similarly, Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina is discussed as part of a broader chapter on Christian biography (Chapter ), Athanasius’ foundational Life of Antony as part of one on monks (Chapter ) and the De viris illustribus tradition surfaces in Chapters and (and some of its main representatives, such as Suetonius, Pliny, and Jerome do have chapters of their own). As for any Handbook, the index is therefore a crucial tool for readers interested in any given biography (or any topic, for that matter), as they are likely to find relevant information in different places.50 A final preliminary note is about the place of ancient autobiography in this book. Just as in the other areas of its conceptualization (and again following others, such as Momigliano , Sonnabend , and McGing and Mossman ), this Handbook does not posit any impermeable line between biography and autobiography. It rather builds on the similarities between the two kinds of writing more than on their differences (which are real enough, to be sure, and have been given more relative weight in other surveys, such as Marcus : – and Hägg a: ix). This means, in practice, that quite a few chapters discuss autobiographical alongside biographical narrative where appropriate for their individual purposes. (Again, the index allows for easy navigation.) Since, however, the huge majority of the book deals with biography (as we do not have that much ancient autobiographical material left in the first place), I have abstained from providing systematic, full coverage of autobiography as a separate topic or from thematizing it for its own sake (e.g. by including it in the book’s title or otherwise). Such a thematization would have taken the book in a different direction altogether, as it would have raised a whole range of specific, new questions about definition and narrative technique (e.g. on formal differences in narrating biographies and autobiographies) that really deserve to be covered in a book specifically on that topic.51
50 Inevitably, some texts have fallen out altogether, such as Julius Marathus’ biography of Augustus, of which no more than two fragments have come down to us. See Sonnabend (: ). 51 Misch () attempts at a general history of Greek and Roman autobiography. More recent treatments are of varying breadth: Reichel (a), C. Smith and Powell () and Marasco (b). On biography and autobiography in theoretical terms, see Holdenried (); on autobiography and fiction (in modern literature), Saunders ().
A The research leading to this chapter has received funding from the European Research Council under both the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/ ; Starting Grant Agreement n ) and the EU’s Horizon research and innovation programme (Consolidator Grant Agreement n ).
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W is genre? Or, more specifically for this chapter (and book): what is a biography? What might appear to be simple questions are inquiries that have engaged scholars and writers for millennia. In this chapter we will begin by discussing genre in general and biography in particular from an ancient perspective, attempting to develop an emic understanding of what distinguishes one genre from another. Having established that ancient authors recognized genre differences we will investigate how genre functions as a system, specifically focusing on genre hierarchies and relationships. Subsequently, we will turn our attention to biographies, how they related to the genre of history, and their presumed purpose and function. This chapter will conclude with a discussion of how biographers in Antiquity identified specific biographical conventions and identified themselves as members of this tradition.
W A U G?
.................................................................................................................................. In order to understand the genre of ancient biography, it is necessary to understand how the ancients viewed genres, since their perspectives of biography shaped the construction of this genre form.1 Although the lack of systematic study by the ancients prevents us from developing an exhaustive list of genre features, the components identified by these authors go a long way in the creation of our genre criteria. In our evaluation of authors we will see that they not only were aware of genres, but that they distinguished them by identifying Two points on the term ‘biography’ in this chapter need clarification. First, unless otherwise specified, the term biography refers to ancient biographies and not its modern counterpart. This holds for all other genre forms. Second, the sharing of a genre name across epochs (i.e., biography) does not necessitate or imply a sharing of genre features. These need to be decided according to era, geographic locale, and, sometimes, according to author. 1
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genre-specific formal features.2 One of the challenges in focusing on biography is that the majority of ancient discussions of genre discussed poetic works (e.g. epic, tragedy, comedy) as these were more valued in literary culture than prose works. As a result, though biography is our ultimate focus, we will sometimes need to discuss other literary forms as their discussions will assist in our understanding. First, genres are fundamentally split into two large divisions based on the use of metre: poetry and narrative. For, as Dionysius claims, ‘every utterance by which we express our thoughts is either in metre or not in metre’ (ἡ μὲν ἔμμετρος, ἡ δὲ ἄμετρος, Comp. ; cf. Philo, Opif. ). Prose language was further divided into styles, which were thought to correspond to the subject and genre of the work. For example, prose was traditionally divided into three styles: high, middle, and low (or grand, middle, and plain; D.H. Dem. –), though some ancients developed a four-part style division: grand, elegant, plain, and forceful (Phld. Rh. .; Ps.-Demetr. Eloc. –), while others had an even more complex system (cf. Hermog. Id.). For poetry, the ancients held that particular metres are lyrical representations of certain subjects and that it is a mistake not to pair a metre with its corresponding subject.3 For prose narratives, subject is not as explicitly tied to style, which can range within a genre form, though some pairings are more ‘proper’ than others (e.g. high style with history, D.H. Ant. Rom. ..). The length of the work (μῆκος) is also used to differentiate between genres, especially those that have other formal similarities (e.g. epic and tragedy, Arist. Po. b–). Although it is difficult to prescribe a necessary size for any specific genre, it is apparent upon evaluating the lengths of particular works that a general range can be established. For prose, two genres are typically large in size: history and certain philosophical treatises.4 Medium-range genres include some philosophical treatises, novels, encomia, and individual biographies. Collected biographies display a range of lengths, medium to large, and while they form a literary whole, each large collected biography could be subdivided into smaller components that make the larger whole. For example, Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers is comprised of ten books, each of which would be considered a medium-sized work on its own. Potentially more important than metre and length for determining genre participation are subject matter and the intention of the work. According to Aristotle, Homer and Empedocles differ, not because of their metre, which is the same, but because of their chosen subject matter and intentions (Po. b–). In the same vein, Aristotle also differentiates the historian from the poet, not merely by the use of prose or verse, but because the historian tells about what actually happened whereas the poet tells the sort of
For a more thorough discussion, see Adams (: ; : ). Cf. Wellek and Warren (: ), P. Cox (: , ), and Burridge (). 3 Arist. Po. b ; Rh. b ; D.H. Comp. ; Phld. Po. .. ; Prop. Elegy .. ; .. ; Ov. Fast. . . Horace sees a strong connection between the subject matter of the work and the appropriate metre to be used (cf. Sat. .. ). Metre and subject are closely linked and should not be experimented with. For example, ‘A theme for comedy refuses to be set forth in verses of tragedy’ (A.P. ). Likewise, Horace implores, ‘Let each style keep the singular place for which it is suited’ (A.P. ; Sat. .. ; cf. Ov. Am. .. ). 4 For definitions of size and more specific examples, see Adams (: ). Xenophon’s Cyro paedia is a notable warning to enforce rigid distinctions. 2
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thing that might happen (Po. a–b). Biography and history are also differentiated by topic (see below), although genres that focus on an individual (e.g. encomium) are more difficult to distinguish from individual biography as they both focus on the life of an individual. These related literary forms naturally overlap, resulting in an overlapping spectrum of genres rather than a series of discrete literary types. Regarding the variety of genre forms, Isocrates claims that there are as many branches of composition in prose as there are in poetry. Following this remark, Isocrates provides a brief typology of prose works, which include genealogies of demigods, studies of the poets, histories of war, and dialogue (Antid. –). A similar categorization is located in Panathenaicus – where Isocrates names different categories of prose writing evident in his lifetime (e.g. genealogy, poetic commentary, military history, sophistic argument, legal texts, mythology, speeches, etc.). This is not a strict or rigid schema of genre. Rather, we see that, like the types of poetry, the ‘forms of prose’ (ἰδέας τὰς τῶν λόγων) are virtually innumerable and Isocrates has no intention of providing a full listing of them. On the topic of genre development, Isocrates makes two comments that are important for this discussion. In Antidosis , he states that his speech is novel and unique in character, unlike any other. This novelty is based primarily on the selection of a subject which has not been attempted before (Antid. ). Not only does Isocrates claim to have selected a new subject for this genre, he also pleads for the reader’s patience for a work with a ‘mixed discourse’ (μικτοῦ τοῦ λόγου) and multiple purposes (ὑποθέσεις, Antid. ). The best-known passage of Isocrates for discussing genre development, however, is his claim in Evagoras : I am fully aware that what I propose to do is difficult to eulogize in prose (διὰ λόγων ἐγκωμιάζειν) the virtues of a man. The best proof is this: those who devote themselves to philosophy venture to speak on many subjects of every kind, but no one of them has ever attempted to compose a discourse on such a theme (περὶ δὲ τῶν τοιούτων οὐδεὶς πώποτ’ αὐτῶν συγγράϕειν ἐπεχείρησεν).
Not only does Isocrates show awareness of the prototypical features of encomium, he also displays a realization that he is intentionally breaking the traditional confines of that genre.5 This intentionality shows Isocrates’ ingenuity as an author and also provides an example of how genres develop. Further, that Isocrates felt free to expand existing generic boundaries indicates that biographical encomia allowed for generic adaptation and openness to non-prototypical features. Related to Isocrates’ actions and important for this discussion is Philodemus’ claim that genres exist not by nature, but by convention, νόμωι (Po. ..–). This reference to convention is essential as it indicates that at least one ancient explicitly understood genres as socially constructed entities. Though nature is necessary for the composition of poetry and other forms of literature, social convention provides the means by which genres are differentiated. Additionally, different cultures had different conventions, which result in the comparison of similar Greek and Latin genre forms by later authors.6
5 6
Cf. Hägg (a: ) and Sonnabend (: ). For example, Cic. Opt. Gen. ; Quint. Inst. .. .
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Overall, the ancients made specific reference to identifiable text components as earmarks for genres (metre, style, subject, length, structure, purpose, etc.). Not all genre features were equally weighted; certain elements were seen as more determinative of genre than others. Moreover, one feature was often insufficient to identify participation in a genre, as it could be used in more than one genre. Rather, multiple formal features were called upon to identify a work’s literary form.
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.................................................................................................................................. The relationship between genres, especially those that share a number of formal features, becomes increasingly important throughout the Hellenistic and Roman era. Genres did not exist in isolation from each other; rather, they existed within a system, with the importance of a particular genre directly related to its function and intentions.7 For Aristotle, this system needed to be strictly delineated and modelled on nature’s system of organization. Just as animal classifications were discrete, with each animal having its own category, so also each genre had its place and should not encroach upon the territory of other genres (Po. a–). The development of different genres gave rise to the notion of hierarchy, which became even more influential with the rise of literary canons. For example, Aristotle evaluated the three main genres (epic, tragedy, and comedy) and ranked them according to the criteria of length, metre, and dignity (Po. b).8 Prose works were not debated, ranked, or focused on as much as their poetic counterparts, nor were they listed in hierarchical order. Consequently, understanding prose-genre hierarchies depends on dissecting dispersed authorial comments. One of the most comprehensive examples is the well-known discussion in Institutio Oratoria ..–, in which Quintilian outlines representative authors for orators to read and ingest (cf. Inst. ..–).9 The first observation we can make from his discussion is the comparative importance of poetic metre over that of prose. In all of the genre hierarchies available to us, we see that poetic genres receive pride of place and the majority of the discussion.10 Prose literature, when it is even discussed, is secondary and not as fully developed in terms of the number of genres examined. Second, when prose genres are discussed, the genre of history is the form typically mentioned and, when compared with other prose genres, is usually presented first.11 This preference indicates that, within prose works, history was the most respected genre, with the works of
For further discussion, see Adams (: ). Ranking texts and authors was not uncommon in the Graeco Roman literary world. See Cancik (), Ford (: ), and Fowler (: ). 9 Quintilian opens with a discussion of different poetry forms: hexameter (i.e., epic, ) elegy ( ), iambic ( ), and lyric ( ). Following this, Quintilian examines old comedy ( ), tragedy ( ), new comedy ( ), history ( ), oratory ( ), and philosophy ( ). This is immediately followed by a list of Roman authors according to the same categories. 10 Cf. Vell. Hist. Rom. .. .. 11 Though see Cic. De Or. , who references poetry, philosophy, and oratory. 7 8
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Thucydides, Herodotus, Sallust, and Livy presented as the pinnacle for Greek and Latin prose writings, setting the standard for subsequent writers.12 One of the most striking features of the discussion of genre hierarchy and relationships is that mention of biography is practically non-existent. None of the major literary works that outline prose genres discuss the role of biography (e.g. Aristotle, Quintilian, Horace). Certain authors consider the role of encomium (e.g. Theon Prog. –), but they are clearly not equating it with biography, nor do they discuss encomium in hierarchical terms. This omission is very telling for the place of biography within the genre hierarchy. First, its lack of discussion indicates that it is not a particularly important literary genre (at least at the time at which these hierarchies were being discussed). Second, the consistent mention of history implies that it was the dominant prose genre and so would have been the ‘superior’ genre in its relationship with biography. This will be further discussed below. Although ancient literary culture as a whole shows certain trends in genre hierarchy, the formation of genre rankings was also personal, with each author having his or her own particular preferences. For instance, in Satire .. and Epistle ..–, Horace comments on his listeners’ low opinion of satire.13 Moreover, each individual’s hierarchy is temporally situated in the epoch in which he or she lived and wrote. As a result, one author’s perspective may not apply to literature in an earlier or later era. For example, though it is clear from all the authors studied above (c. – ) that for centuries history ranked highest amongst the prose genres, by the time of Philostratus in the third century , rhetoric had usurped the top position. One suspects that personal genre hierarchies of prominent individuals influenced the larger societal genre hierarchy. A society’s genre hierarchy may be shaped and even fabricated by dominant social and literary groups and individuals. Within the Roman Empire, no person had more power to influence than the Caesar, and the schools and writers he financially supported directly shaped literary culture. Consequently, it seems likely that a literary form that was advocated for and funded by the Caesar would become one of the dominant genre forms.14 Just as genre hierarchies differed among individuals, they also differed between cultures. It is especially apparent in statements by Latin authors that Greek and Latin cultures had different literary preferences, which were shaped by wider ethnic and cultural factors. These cultural preferences found their ideal expression in particular genres, which in turn came to be prized and incorporated into the national identity. Such cultural differences are witnessed in the comments of Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian above. In Opt. Gen. and , Cicero distinguishes between Latin and Greek genre examples. Moreover, Cicero recognizes Greek preference for iambic in Opt. Gen. , whereas Horace proudly claims that satire was untouched by the Greeks (Sat. ..–). Quintilian provides the greatest insight into this cultural differentiation with his comparison of Greek literature to its Latin counterpart (e.g. Inst. .., , ).
Quint. Inst. .., ; Ps. Longin. Subl. .. That representative authors of each genre were well known is seen in Plin. Ep. ... 13 Lucilius (F ) expresses the low opinion of satire during his time, although this changes slightly in Late Antiquity. 14 ‘The selective canons with most institutional force are formal curricula’: Fowler (: ). 12
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Regarding biography, it is clear that Greek writers were more drawn to philosophical individuals than were Latin authors.15 For example, throughout the Hellenistic period, there was a distinct emphasis by biographers on intellectual figures, as opposed to politicians and military leaders.16 This focus was broadened in the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods, but philosophers were regularly the focus of biographies.17 Conversely, Latin authors rarely recounted the lives of philosophers, preferring political and military leaders.18 Even Suetonius, who expanded his Illustrious Men to include poets, orators, and grammarians, did not mention philosophers (so far as we know). Although the full importance of genre hierarchy and ranking for biography will be revealed below, it is important at this stage to reinforce the view that the ancients knew and were engaged in developing genre hierarchies. Furthermore, the activity of ranking and comparing was not limited to the works produced by one’s own culture, but also engaged works of neighbouring cultures. This is especially apparent in Latin literary circles, which are constantly evaluating Latin literature in terms of its Greek equivalent.
G O D: B H
.................................................................................................................................. We can now turn our attention to the two most important prose genres for this volume: history and biography. As the number of genre features is limited, it is natural for there to be some genre overlap. By this, I mean the common use of one or more formal features in two or more genres. The closer the generic relationship, the greater the amount of overlap between the genres is expected. For example, both biography and history are written in prose, recount speeches, use sources, focus on important individuals, have comparable methods of characterization and setting, and are written for similar audiences.19 Due to the number of shared formal features, it is not surprising that a strong relationship existed between history and biography from biography’s inception throughout the Hellenistic and Roman eras.20 The large numbers of shared features—particularly in light of the practice of ranking genres—result in power relations in which one literary form will influence the use and formation of another. Influence is not evenly multidirectional, but functions in a top-down manner; dominant or prestige genres resist change and so do not typically adopt the features of ‘subordinant’ genres; whereas, so-called secondary genres adopt features of dominant genres. These genre adaptations are sometimes subconsciously enacted, but can also be a conscious effort by an author to elevate the status of a particular literary work. As a
On the ‘Romanness of Roman Biographies’, see Hägg (a: ). Geiger (: ). 17 For examples, see the works of Lucian, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Diogenes Laertius, Philostratus, Eunapius, and the anonymous work on Secundus, the Silent Philosopher. 18 For example, Cornelius Nepos and Tacitus. 19 For examples and further discussion, see Adams (: ; : ). 20 Cf. Momigliano (: ) and Sonnabend (: ). 15 16
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result, there is a blurring of genre distinctiveness as characteristic features of the dominant genre are recognized as components of genres. There are, however, some features that assist in differentiating these genres (sometimes referred to as ‘genre-specific’ or ‘genre-determinative’ features), though it is more often the case that it is the full constellation of formal features which suggests genre participation.21 Between history and biography these differentiating elements would include size, scope (a focus on more than an individual/a collection of individuals), structure, select literary topoi, and purpose. For example, ancient histories were structured topographically and chronologically (D.H. Th. ), whereas individual biographies were structured around the life (and death) of the subject (e.g. Eus. Hier. ), and collected biographies focused on succession or recounting the lives of illustrious individuals within a field. One way of immediately highlighting the differences in genre for the reader was the opening of the work, which includes both the opening sentence and the preface/prologue (Hor. A.P. –; Lucian Hist. Conscr. ). In the opening the reader is introduced to the subject, and through the overall structure, the subject is presented.22 For historical works, there appears to be a common refrain of speaking about a nation/ethnic group or a possible war that the author plans to memorialize for all time.23 Conversely, biographies regularly open with a reference to the individual or group of individuals that will be discussed.24 Differences in structure shape the reader’s appropriation of material and assist in defining the purpose of the writing. As we will see below, this differentiation was important for both biographers and historians. For Plutarch, the writing of his Parallel Lives was not a task divorced from history, but one in which history was embodied through the examination of selected lives (Aem. .–; on this passage, see also Chapter in this volume). In some of his prefaces, Plutarch speaks candidly about his work, discussing its purpose, function, and nature. Repeatedly he employs the terms ἱστορία and βίος as descriptors of his project. Both of these terms, however, have wider semantic ranges than specific genre labels.25 For example, ἱστορία does not necessarily signify the genre of history (though it could), but could also be used as a referent for the broader concept of inquiry or narrative, even distinguishing between prose and poetry.26 Accordingly, it is necessary to determine which aspect of the term ἱστορία is being invoked at any given instance. For example, in Timoleon .– Plutarch uses these terms in tandem to discuss his work, ‘I receive and welcome each subject of my ἱστορίας . . . Among which is the βίον of Timoleon the Corinthian and Aemilius Paulus, which we have undertaken to lay before you.’ In this case, it is unlikely that either term signifies to the reader a formal genre category (cf. Dem. .).
There is also the recognition that certain genres are not to have certain features, so called ‘anti features’, e.g. Arist. Po. a ; Philostr. VA ... 22 Arist. Po. b ; Hor. A.P. ; D.H. Ant. Rom. ..; Th. . 23 For example, Hdt. .; Th. .; Plb. .., ; D.S. .. ..; Hdn. .. ; Livy, Hist. Praef. . 24 For example, Matt ; Mark :; Plu. Alex. .; Porph. Plot. ; Iamb. VP ; Philostr. VS ; Eun. VPS ; Hier. Vir. ill. Praef. 25 T.E. Duff (: ). 26 For example, Porph. Plot. ; Theon Prog. ., ; ., , ; .; ., ; Eus. Hier. . Cf. Hägg (a: ). 21
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This ambiguity is not the case in his famous discussion at the opening of his parallel Lives of Alexander and Caesar where he claims that he is not writing history, but Lives (οὔτε γὰρ ἱστορίας γράϕομεν, ἀλλὰ βίους, Alex. ., on which, see also Chapter in this volume). In order to differentiate between the two, Plutarch speaks of his purpose: the revelation of character (virtue or vice) through the recounting of actions and sayings, both great and small. The recounting of deeds and speech was a standard way of portraying a person’s character in many genres, but was particularly strong in biographies.27 For Plutarch, the actions of his subjects display their virtues and vices in order to elicit positive change within the reader.28 Similar intentions are expressed by Eunapius, although his desire is to showcase the full achievement of the philosophical life for those who wish to follow after it (VPS ). Cornelius Nepos also felt compelled to explain his depiction of Pelopidas in his On Foreign Generals, outlining his dilemma of what to include in light of the genre requirements of history and biography: Pelopidas of Thebes is better known to those acquainted with history (historicis) than to the multitude. As to his merits, I am in doubt how I shall speak of them; for I fear that, if I begin to give a full account of his actions, I may seem, not to be relating his life, but to be writing a history (ne non vitam eius enarrare, sed historiam videar scribere), or that, if I touch only on his principal exploits, it may not clearly appear to those ignorant of Grecian literature how great a man he was (ne rudibus graecarum litterarum minus dilucide appareat, quantus fuerit ille vir). I will therefore, as far as I can, meet both difficulties and provide against the satiety as well as for the imperfect knowledge of my readers. (Pelop. .)
One of the primary concerns for Nepos is that he is consistent in his presentation of Pelopidas and does not change genre from biography to history.29 The main issue appears to be Nepos’ desire to outline Pelopidas’ virtue so thoroughly that he risked exceeding the accepted parameters of biography (cf. Nep. Vitae, Praef.).30 Once again we see a close relationship between biography and history, but a recognition by the author that there is a difference between the two. Although the extent of history’s influence on biography differed, depending on the time period and the geographic locale, the fact that certain famous people (e.g. generals, kings, politicians, philosophers, etc.) were regularly the focus of both genres dictated that writers of history and biography were necessarily aware of what was being written in the other genre (e.g. Plb. Hist. .., ..). It is worth emphasizing that, in light of this relationship, it is the writers of biography who felt most compelled to define their task in contrast to history and not vice versa (e.g. Nep. Pelop. ..; Plu. Alex. .–; Pomp. ). This suggests
X. Ages. .; Cyr. ..; Tac. Agr. .; Plu. Pomp. .; Cat. Mi. .; Philostr. VA ..; ..; Eun. VPS . 28 Cf. Per. .; Cat. Mi. .; Mor. B. T.E. Duff (: , ). 29 Cf. Plb. Hist. ., who critiques Theopompus for beginning with history and changing to biogra phy. After the fourth century , there was genre convergence as biography and history blended to form a new genre of ‘biographical historiography’. Swain (). 30 Cf. Stem (: ). 27
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that ancient biographers viewed history as the dominant or more established literary form and that they were attempting to describe their task in comparison with the other. The near absence of mention of biography among works of history is not surprising despite their close relationship. This is because history, as the dominant genre, does not need to differentiate itself from subordinant genres, nor would it be desirable for these authors to encourage such comparisons. However, Polybius, Hist. ..– provides an excellent example of the perceived differences between history and biography: It is strangely inconsistent in historians to record in elaborate detail the founding of cities, stating when and how and by whom they were established, and even the circumstances and difficulties which accompanied the transaction, and yet to pass over in complete silence the characteristics and aims of the men by whom the whole thing was done, though these in fact are the points of the greatest value. For as one feels more roused to emulation and imitation by men that have life, than by buildings that have none, it is natural that the history of the former should have a greater educational value. If I had not therefore already composed a separate account of him [Philopoemen], clearly setting forth who he was, his origin, and his policy as a young man, it would have been necessary to have given an account now of each of these particulars. But since I have done this in a work in three books, unconnected with my present history (τὸν ὑπὲρ αὐτοῦ πεποιήμεθα λόγον), detailing the circumstances of his childhood and his most famous achievements, it is clear that in my present narrative my proper course will be to remove anything like details from my account of his youthful characteristics and aims; while I am careful to add details to the story of the achievements of his manhood, which in that treatise were only stated summarily. I shall thus preserve the proper features of both works. The former being in the nature of a panegyric demanded an account of his actions, put briefly and in a style deliberately intended to enhance their merits; my present work, which is history (οὕτως ὁ τῆς ἱστορίας), and therefore absolutely uncom mitted to praise or blame, requires only a true statement, which puts the facts clearly, and traces the policy which dictated the several actions. (trans. Shuckburgh )
In this passage, Polybius succinctly outlines the nature of his dilemma, highlighting the different purposes and components of biography and history.31 According to Polybius, the genres of biography and history are related in that they both discuss similar people, but are differentiated by which details are included and the intended function of the genre. This is a unique insight into the way that a writer from the Hellenistic era distinguished these two related genres. These comments by ancient biographers and historians challenge the claim by Hägg (a: ), that ‘biography is more subject matter than form’, by asserting that a combination of the two are needed. From these discussions we see that there is significant overlap in content between biography and history with regard to the depiction of individuals. Content, in and of itself, is insufficient to distinguish these genres, though the selection of which life details are included may help in determining genre participation. Structure plays a substantial role in the creation of collected biographies, as the life of the individual is
31
For the debate surrounding Polybius’ Life of Philopoemen, see Walbank (: ).
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placed within a larger grouping. In such cases, subject matter is important, but it does not adequately assist in defining the genre. From the above examples we can see that care was taken by ancient writers to differentiate the related genres of history and biography. This is especially the case for writers of biography as their ‘subordinant’ genre was more vulnerable and needed to be defined in contrast to the dominant other. As part of these discussions we witness how the term βίος and ἱστορία are employed together towards a definition of βίος. A βίος is not a work of ἱστορία, but individuals who were regularly involved in major events memorialized in histories were also worthy of more specific and individualized focus. The difference between the two forms is that individual βίοι focused narrowly on the life and death of an individual, whereas ἱστορίαι place the individual’s life within a larger narrative, such as a war or the establishment of a nation. Collected biographies, which focus on multiple lives, also place the discussion of the individual within a larger framework. However, in this case, it is often on a specific topic or theme (e.g. philosophical school, illustrious lives, etc.) and not necessarily structured on military or political events.32 The primary example of the latter would be succession narratives, such as Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars, in which there is a strong overlap between the life of the Caesar and the development of the Roman Empire. This last example illustrates the close relationship that biographies and histories can have and that definitive categorizations and rigid differentiations between history and biography are not always tenable.
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.................................................................................................................................. Biographers did not always define their task in contrast to history; they also made reference to the genre tradition established by previous biographers. Such discussions are of great importance as they show the genre-consciousness of certain authors: how they viewed this literary tradition and placed themselves within it. Unfortunately, explicit discussions are rare. Nevertheless, what we do have provides solid evidence of the perceived shape and development of biography by ancient authors who offer us a retrospective on their field. The first example of this tradition comes from Tacitus (Agr. .), who briefly alludes to a tradition of recounting the deeds of famous men for posterity: ‘To hand down to posterity the deeds of famous men (Clarorum virorum facta) was a custom of the past: our age has not yet abandoned it even now . . . ’.33 Although Tacitus does not explicitly mention the genre of biography, this discussion within a work of biography (along with other examples of recounting the life of a person after death) suggests that Tacitus thought of himself as
32
For a longer discussion on collected biographies, particularly in light of their differences from individual biographies, see Adams (: ). 33 In contrast, Isocrates, Evag. highlights the lack of tradition with his claim that he is the first to eulogize in prose, though he does recognize that people have praised good people before (Evag. ; cf. X. Ages. .).
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continuing this tradition of post-mortem veneration in order to ensure that the name and deeds of famous (worthy) men would be preserved. Philostratus also mentions previous works in the opening of his Life of Apollonius ..–, in which he identifies other authors who have written on Apollonius before and so places himself within the literary tradition of recounting the life of a specific person. A useful ancient perspective on Philostratus’ work comes from Eusebius, who states: Philostratus, however, the Athenian, tells us that he collected all the accounts that he found in circulation, using both the book of Maximus and that of Damis himself and of other authors; so he compiled the most complete history (ἱστορίαν) of any of this person’s life (βίου), beginning with his birth and ending with his death. (Hier. , trans. F.C. Conybeare )
In this passage, Eusebius highlights the methodology adopted by Philostratus and his awareness of what was needed to successfully compose a biography. Moreover, Eusebius provides a definition of βίος that is strictly delineated by the birth and death of the individual. Eusebius’ use of the term ἱστορία in association with βίος further illuminates our discussion above of the relationship of the term βίος and ἱστορία. Here Eusebius frames the background inquiry/research of a biography to that of history (so too Plutarch), while maintaining that the final product is not ἱστορία but βίος. Philostratus associates his Lives of the Sophists to previous works when he refers in his preface () to Critias and his practice of not introducing a sophist by his father’s name. The lone exception to this was Homer, as Critias felt compelled to recall the tradition that the river Meles was Homer’s father. References to similar authors are found in Diogenes Laertius who, among many other citations, mentions Sotion in the opening paragraph of his work (.; cf. S.E. M. .). Although not as explicit as the other examples provided below, the mention of sources and of similar previous works indicates an awareness of the genre of biography, his task as an author, and his place within the wider tradition. One example of an author identifying his place within a tradition that has drawn significant attention is the preface to Jerome’s Illustrious Men, in which Jerome explains his work in light of a literary convention:34 ‘A similar work has been done by Hermippus the Peripatetic, Antigonus Carystius, the learned Satyrus, and most learned of all, Aristoxenus the Musician, among the Greeks, and among the Latins by Varro, Santra, Nepos, Hyginus, and by him through whose example you seek to stimulate us—Tranquillus’ (Vir. ill. Praef.). In this introduction, Jerome identifies nine literary predecessors who have produced similar works. Scholars interpret Jerome’s reference as indicating a literary tradition and the prestige that had been attached to these selected prototypical authors, and not as Jerome’s identifying the first representatives of the genre.35 Similar to other discussions of genre above, Jerome divides his examples into two categories according to language/culture—Greek and Latin—thus reinforcing the idea that, though both cultures had similar literary contributions, there was a distinction in the minds of the ancients between Greek and Latin genres and their prototypical representatives (see also Nep. Epam. .).
34 35
Hägg (a: ). Leo (: ), Momigliano (: ), and Geiger (: ).
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Arguably the most explicit and helpful description of the history of biography comes from the opening of Eunapius’ Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists. Immediately following his preface, Eunapius identifies writers who have previously endeavoured to compose a history of the Lives of philosophers. His discussion is worth consulting in full, but for space restrictions only the pertinent aspects have been quoted: Porphyry and Sotion compiled a history of philosophy and the Lives of philosophers . . . Philostratus of Lemnos in a superficial and agreeable style spat forth the Lives of the most distinguished sophists, but the lives of philosophers no one has recorded accurately . . . The inspired Plutarch records in statements scattered here and there in his books, both his own life and that of his teacher . . . but he does not entitle these records a Life (βίον), though he might well have done so, since his most successful work is that called Parallel Lives of men most celebrated for their deeds and achievements . . . Lucian of Samosata, who usually took serious pains to raise a laugh, wrote a Life of Demonax, a philosopher of his own time, and in that book and a very few others was wholly serious throughout. (VPS , trans. Wright )
In this section Eunapius delineates the scope of his project by comparing it to those who have gone before him. In his discussion Eunapius names five authors who have written biographical works on philosophers. The earliest of which is Sotion, who flourished in the second century , while the latest is Porphyry, who lived in the late third century . Within this substantial range Eunapius identifies other contributors, though his list is not exhaustive (omitting Philodemus, Diogenes Laertius, etc.). Eunapius also only mentions Greek authors, likely because Latin authors were less interested in philosophy. Not only does this discussion identify the tradition of philosophical biographies, but it signals to the reader how Eunapius wishes his readers to contextualize his work. In addition to identifying previous contributions, Eunapius also highlights areas in which no previous work has been written. For example, when talking about writing the Lives of specific philosophers (i.e., Musonius, Demetrius, Menippus) Eunapius laments, ‘Clear and accurate accounts of the lives of these men it was impossible to discover, since, so far as I know, no one has written them’ and ‘the lives of philosophers no one has recorded accurately’ (VPS ). Eunapius is clearly not claiming that there has been no book of Lives written on philosophers (as his lament is in the context of literary history), but rather he is challenging the accuracy of his predecessors. Although modern scholars might question the veracity of this statement, it is important to engage with Eunapius’ statement as valid from his perspective. What is clear is Eunapius’ desire to situate himself within the larger tradition of philosophical biographies and to indicate in what areas he is making a contribution. A few points are worth highlighting as we conclude this section. First, the statements by Tacitus, Philostratus, Jerome, Eunapius, and others provide clear evidence that biographers in Antiquity saw themselves as continuing a tradition of writing biographies. Second, most of the authors who discuss this tradition are from Late Antiquity. This is interesting, though not surprising as by the fourth century the genre of biography was widely recognized, more firmly established, and had greater recognition. This is (clearly) not to claim that biography as a genre did not exist in earlier epochs (cf. Tacitus), but that the majority of this retrospective discussion of tradition only occurs late in the Roman era. With this being said, the clear references to the genre of biography by authors above, especially in contradistinction to history, indicate that ancient writers (e.g. Polybius)
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recognized the genre of biography even if they did not explicitly mention literary forebears. Nevertheless, the referencing of biographical tradition by later authors and the lack of defining biography vis-à-vis history affirm the view that by the later Empire, biography was a more established genre form. As a result, it could be self-referencing and internally defined without explicitly distinguishing it from other prose genres. This is a marked change from earlier generations of biography writers (e.g. Plutarch) and highlights the development of this genre and the awareness of its users.
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.................................................................................................................................. This chapter highlights the ways the ancients approached and discussed genres with a focus on the role of biography within the larger genre system. The ancients not only had a robust concept of genre, but they distinguished each genre by the inclusion, exclusion, and arrangement of specific formal features. Although these features are typically used to distinguish one genre from another, certain genres (e.g. biography and history) have elements in common. This ‘genre overlap’ of formal features strengthens genre relationships and influences the development of genre hierarchies. In particular, we focused on the relationship between biography and history, arguing that history was portrayed by ancients as the dominant prose genre, not only because it was given pride of place in prose lists, but also because biographers, and not historians, felt the need to define their task in contrast to the other. The strong similarities between these two genres and their uneven power relationship resulted in a number of discussions by ancient biographers on the difference between biography and history, specifically focusing on the different purpose(s) for each genre. One of the main contributions of this chapter is that biography was a recognized genre form and that ancient biographers, particularly those in the later Empire, actively sought to situate themselves within this tradition. Originally, biography was defined by its authors in light of discussions of history; however, as time progressed, biographers showed a growing awareness and promotion of the ongoing tradition of this literary genre. This genre awareness allowed ancient biographers to define their task in light of representative authors who had preceded them and to cease defining themselves in contrast to another genre.
F R For a more thorough introduction to ancient genre theory with particular attention paid to biography, I would recommend Burridge () and Adams (). A number of scholars have looked at the development of biography and the role of specific authors in its formulation as a discrete genre form. Four good examples of this work are P. Cox (), Geiger (), Momigliano (), and Swain (). For recent overviews of biography in Antiquity that are very good, though not particularly systematic in how they connect biographers, see Sonnabend () and Hägg (a). The earlier work by Leo () is a classic, formative work and is worth investigating for serious study, although his perspectives have been challenged and are no longer widely held (see Chapter in this volume). For those looking to do work on a specific biographer, I would recommend T.E. Duff () as an exemplar of how to read and interpret ancient collected biographies by paying special attention to the macro structure of the work.
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A biography is, by definition, the written account of a person’s life, and therefore every biography is focused fundamentally on an individual. Nonetheless, the major biographers of Greece and Rome whose writings are extant—Cornelius Nepos, Plutarch, and Suetonius—all wrote Lives as parts of collections, and these collections influenced the form and function of their writings. All three authors, moreover, make use of the juxtapositions of Lives inherent in their collections to encourage comparative readings, and, in the case of Nepos and Plutarch, they expect readers to reflect on their own lives and societies as they read about statesmen, generals, and kings from the past. This chapter explores the implications of writing about individuals in the context of collections, taking up each of the authors mentioned above in a separate section and discussing other instances of individual and collected Lives. First, however, I examine early traces of the collection and comparison of Lives, taking Herodotus as my primary example to show that the ‘life-writing’ found in ancient political biography has been a part of the historiographical tradition from the beginning.
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.................................................................................................................................. The question of individual and collected Lives is, in fact, best considered as part of the development of ancient biography. Beginning in the middle of the Classical period, examples of biographical narrative appear in many types of Greek prose literature, well before biography proper emerges as an independent mode of writing (see Hägg a: –). This is especially true in historiography, where authors might focus narrowly on the character and careers of individuals to explain the course of larger political and military events, or to give their histories a moralizing dimension. In Greek historiography of the
fourth century , the moralizing and protreptic elements were pronounced, as we may observe by reading Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ assessment of the historian Theopompus. In the course of documenting Theopompus’ diligence and the variety of his subject matter, Dionysius says that he ‘revealed lives (βίους) of kings and the peculiarities of their ways (τρόπων ἰδιώματα)’, clearly finding an element of political biography in his history (Pomp. .).1 Even more revealing, however, is the oft-quoted passage where Dionysius praises Theopompus’ special insight. Not only could he notice and articulate the things that were obvious to most people, but he could also ‘examine the invisible causes for actions and the motivations and emotions of those who acted, which many people do not easily see’, and this ability in turn allowed him to ‘reveal all the secrets of apparent virtue and of unrecognised vice’ (.). The exercise of this sort of insight, which involves the exposition of character both to explain the course of historical events and to offer lessons to the reader, becomes fundamental to writers of political biography in later generations (see Gentili and Cerri : –). As the basis for the present discussion, I look to Herodotus, the first historian in the Greek tradition, and in particular to the first book of his Histories. There we find the socalled ‘Croesus logos’, which we may read essentially as a political biography of the Lydian king embedded within the larger narrative of Graeco-Persian relations. As later, formal biographers would regularly do, Herodotus crafts his ‘Life’ of Croesus to elucidate the character of the individual person, developing the portrait of a man blinded by power and wealth, and to demonstrate his accomplishments as king, using both the personal and the political to explain how the Ionian Greek cities came to be involved with non-Greek nations and how Lydian influence in Ionia gave way to Persian. And so this ‘Life’, interesting in its own right, ultimately lays the foundation for Herodotus’ narrative of the expansion of the Persian Empire into Asia Minor. This expansion, in turn, is similarly cast as the birth-to-death story of Cyrus the Great, intertwined in its inception with the story of Croesus but eventually emerging as the primary plotline in the second half of Book One. The notion that an individual’s character can shape history is fundamental to Herodotus’ use of biographical elements. Also present, however, are two important expectations: that readers will compare the lives of Croesus and Cyrus, and that they will consciously shape their own behaviour using another’s life as a model. We find both of these expectations embedded in the narrative of Histories . As Herodotus makes the transition from the Lydian to the Persian king, thereby bringing his Croesus logos to a close, he places the lessons of Croesus’ life in the foreground (.–), making them obvious to the reader and even to Cyrus himself, who benefits from the example of the Lydian king’s experiences and thus becomes the first and most important ‘reader’ of his life. The lesson is taught as follows. After hearing his prisoner Croesus exclaim Solon’s name as he is about to be burned alive, Cyrus sends his interpreters to ask whom he was calling (.). Croesus explains that Solon visited his palace in Sardis (as related in .–), and rather than be impressed by the king’s great wealth, treated it as though it were nothing. The wise Solon tried to show Croesus that his good fortune was transient, but Croesus could not understand the lesson until he had in fact lost all his possessions and was on the point even of losing his life. Solon, Croesus explains, was speaking not simply to him but to every human, 1
Translations are my own.
and ‘especially to those who consider themselves blessed’. Thus, Herodotus generalizes the lesson of Croesus’ life, and even goes on to demonstrate how it could be internalized: when Cyrus hears the story, he reflects that he is putting to death a fellow human who had quite recently been no less prosperous than himself. Fearing that he might face a similar reversal for his arrogance, he spares Croesus, speaks with him at length, and, amazed at the wisdom he gained through his downfall, makes him an advisor. Considered in the light of the later tradition, this passage is fundamentally biographical. The focus on character, the narration of personal successes and failures to demonstrate that individual actions have civic consequences, and the protreptic nudge to the reader all become staples for Plutarch, whose later Parallel Lives represent one strand of the fully formed biographical genre. In the introduction to his Aemilius Paullus, to take one example, Plutarch describes how he and his readers ought to interact with the Lives he recreates: I happened to undertake the writing of these Lives for the sake of others, but now I am continuing and enjoying them for my own sake. As if looking into a mirror (in some way or other), I try to use my investigation to give order to my life and to shape it according to the virtues of these men. For this experience is just like keeping a daily routine and living with them, whenever I welcome and receive each one of them in turn through my investigation, as if receiving a guest, and I observe ‘how great and of what character’ (Hom. Il. .) each man is, deriving from his deeds what is most important and finest to know. (. )
Plutarch is here speaking of Lives in the plural, imagining his series of parallel biographies as a collection that would allow his readers to explore various aspects of character because it offered a variety of good and bad examples to imitate or avoid. The biographical element in Herodotus offers something similar. Croesus did not understand that his good fortune could change, despite having been warned by Solon, and so was blind to the possibility of failure when Apollo revealed to him that if he crossed the River Halys to attack Cyrus, he would destroy a great empire (.). Croesus, without doubting that the great empire would be that of Cyrus, crossed the river, attacked the Persian army, and was defeated. A king attuned to the capriciousness of fortune would have considered that his own empire was liable to destruction before attempting to extend his power.2 This lesson, though easy to understand in light of Croesus’ downfall, is apparently hard to follow, a point that Herodotus makes as he continues his narrative and begins a second biography. Cyrus, despite knowing the outcome of Croesus’ arrogance, also overreaches and ultimately loses his life when he, too, crosses a river (the Araxes) in an attempt to extend his power too far. In commencing the final phase of Cyrus’ life, Herodotus describes his motivation for attacking the Massagetae, who inhabit the land across the Araxes, in terms that create a deliberate parallel with Croesus. Cyrus, he says, was eager to make war because he felt that his nature was something more than mortal and, more pointedly, because of the good fortune (εὐτυχία) that he had enjoyed against his enemies (.). Now
2 Pelling (b: ) shows that the usurpation of the Lydian throne by Croesus’ ancestor, Gyges, is the primary reason for Croesus’ downfall, as Apollo later explains (.). The lesson about the mutability of fortune is what applies to all humans.
Solon had earlier warned Croesus that each day brings something different and that the fortunate (εὐτυχής) man is liable to reversal (.). Croesus’ defeat then proved him right. Cyrus is even warned by a dream that he will meet his end fighting the Massagetae (.–), but, like Croesus, he does not understand the message. The reader, however, knows what lies ahead, and Cyrus’ defeat proves Solon’s wisdom a second time. In the aftermath of Cyrus’ downfall, there is no moment of clarity on a pyre or interview with a succeeding king that demonstrates the lessons of his life. There is in fact no need, since the lesson is already clear. And so rather than talk about lessons to be learned, Tomyris, the queen of the Massagetae, demonstrates the moral of the story bluntly and vividly: she soaks Cyrus’ head in a bag of blood. This, she declares to his corpse, is fitting revenge for his bloodthirsty behaviour, for Cyrus had captured her son by a trick and killed him, ignoring the queen’s demand that he return him and withdraw from her kingdom (.). Croesus had been lucky in his misfortune, for he lived on to become a trusted advisor to his conqueror following his defeat. The principal moral of Cyrus’ story, it seems, is that the consequences of misunderstanding the mutability of fortune can sometimes be much greater. The road from Herodotus to the later biographers is not direct, but we can observe a biographical trend foreshadowed in the ‘parallel Lives’ of Croesus and Cyrus. In Plutarch’s biographies we find a focus on ethics and personal behaviour, with Plutarch himself serving as an example of how to use biography for self-improvement. Plutarch’s ethical purpose, that is to say, is fundamental to his Lives, as he declares in the Aemilius. Similarly, he structures his Lives in pairs, often establishing important themes in the first Life and then elaborating them in the second (see Pelling b: ). This, too, is what Herodotus has done with the ‘Lives’ of the Lydian and Persian kings. In Herodotus, the ethical dimension is admittedly less prominent, though he makes use of comparative readings, as does Plutarch, and he foregrounds the intersection of personal behaviour and larger historical events. And both authors take up similar themes, as when Plutarch in the Lives of Alexander and Caesar explores the problem of leaders not recognizing the limits of their power (see Beneker : –), pointing to a lesson similar to the one we encounter in Herodotus. Plutarch’s Alexander even finds his limit at the River Ganges, which thus takes on a role equivalent to the one played by the Halys and Araxes in Herodotus. Before moving on to biography proper, it will be useful to survey the trends towards writing and collecting Lives that anticipate the fully formed extant tradition. One of the first examples of over biographical writing comes from the Socratics, who sought to record their teacher’s way of life and instruction. They ‘experimented in biography, and the experiments were directed towards capturing the potentialities rather than the realities of individual lives’ (Momigliano : ). These experiments took the form of apologetic speeches, philosophical dialogues, and a lengthy collection of philosophical conversations (Xenophon’s Memorabilia) that both defended Socrates from his critics and explored (and extended) his teachings. Xenophon pushed even further, writing such proto-biographical works as the Cyropaedia, the Anabasis, and his encomium of the Spartan king Agesilaus (see Chapter in this volume). Moving from the Classical into the Hellenistic period, we find evidence for ‘an unmistakeably biographical form’ of writing and collections of Lives, but this evidence is fragmentary and allows ‘the construction of several conflicting hypotheses regarding the form and purpose of the various Lives’ (Hägg a: –). We can
identify, however, a tendency towards collecting information, whether in the form of anecdotes, teachings of philosophers, or lives, as well as evidence for ‘monographical Lives’ (borrowing the phrase from ibid.: ). Into the latter category belongs, for example, the fragmentary Life of Euripides by Satyrus. Aristoxenus (a student of Aristotle) wrote individual Lives of philosophers (such as Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Archytas) and at least one poet (Telestes), but appears also to have assembled biographical information, if not full Lives, in collections with titles such as On Tragic Poets and On Flute Players (see ibid.: –). Others, such as Neanthes of Cyzicus and Hermippus of Smyrna, wrote Lives of famous men as collections, and there also appear during this period collections of Lives oriented around philosophers who founded ‘schools’ and their successors (see Adams : –, and Chapter in this volume).
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.................................................................................................................................. The first author of biography for whom a substantial corpus remains is Cornelius Nepos, who wrote in Latin during the first century but took as his subjects both Romans and non-Romans, especially Greeks. Although he did not write book-length biography, Nepos did create a collection of short Lives, Illustrious Men, in a series of books that were arranged by category. Only the book On Foreign Generals survives. It consists of a preface, the Lives of twenty-two military commanders, and another ‘Life’ that presents an overview of several kings. This book was originally paired with a parallel book on Roman generals. Also extant are two biographies, of Cato the Younger and Atticus, a friend of Nepos and Cicero’s famous correspondent. These Lives are said to belong to a book On Latin Historians (see Stem : –). Of these latter two works, the Cato is, according to a notice at the end of the Life, a condensed version of a separate, fuller biography. Because there is little trace of political biography before the first century, some scholars have argued that Nepos invented this type of Life (see Geiger and Tuplin ), though Stem (: –) has modified this thesis to argue that Nepos invented serial political biography. Regardless of Nepos’ role in the development of the genre, we may engage with his writings as the first collection of Lives that allows close reading. We are fortunate to have the full collection On Foreign Generals because Nepos has framed it with statements that give us insight into his purpose and methods. We find, as was the case with Herodotus and the other early Greek historiographers, that Nepos encourages readers to observe the character of the generals. Moreover, because the collections were originally organized around parallel books, Nepos also asks the reader to make a ‘global’ comparison between Romans and foreigners. In what follows, I begin with the preface and the transitional note that closes On Foreign Generals, to examine how Nepos conceived of his Lives as individual biographies but also as units of a larger work. The preface introduces several themes essential to the consideration of individual and collected Lives. The first few sentences, addressed to the subject of Nepos’ Atticus, are as follows:
I do not doubt, Atticus, that there are many who will judge this type of writing (hoc genus scripturae) as trivial and not sufficiently appropriate to the characters of the greatest men, when they read my account of who taught music to Epaminondas, or when I include among his virtues (virtutes) that he danced pleasantly and played the flute with skill. But these people will in general be those who, inexperienced in Greek literature, will think that nothing is correct that does not conform to their own customs. If these people will understand that the same things are not dignified and shameful for everyone, but that everything is judged according to the customs of one’s ancestors, then they will not be surprised that I have followed the customs of the Greeks as I set forth their virtues (virtutes). (Praef. )
Scholars on several occasions have taken up the question of Nepos’ audience and the relativism in cultural values raised at the very outset of his book (e.g. Horsfall ; Titchener ; Beneker ; Stem : –). Important to the present discussion, however, is the assumption that an exploration of a general’s virtues will include a discussion of his skills in activities that take place off the battlefield. Moreover, Nepos speaks of the Greeks collectively, envisioning an exploration of generalship, virtue, and vice that spans a series of Lives. Although each Life in the book is more or less self-contained, Nepos also views the series as a single entity, and promises a common approach to all the Lives. The interconnectedness of the series is reinforced in the note that closes the book. There Nepos writes, as he transitions to the parallel book of Roman generals, that ‘the time has come to make an end to this book and to set forth (explicare) the generals of the Romans, so that, with the deeds of both groups placed side by side, it will be easier to judge (iudicare) which men ought to be preferred’ (Hann. .). As in the preface, the individual nature of each Life is collapsed into a collective whole, with the deliberate intention that the reader will make a composite assessment of the foreign generals and compare them as a whole to their Roman counterparts. Turning to the individual biographies, we can see how they also reflect the duality of being the Life of an individual and belonging to a larger unit. Consider the introduction to the Eumenes: ‘If this man had been granted a fortune equal to his virtue (virtus), he would not in deed have been any greater—for we measure great men by their virtue, not their fortune—but he would have been much more famous and even more distinguished’ (.). Eumenes, Nepos goes on to explain, had the misfortune of living while the Macedonians were flourishing, and being an outsider kept him from attaining his potential, and from receiving the fame that would have been his due. Here we can glimpse Nepos’ criteria for including him in the collection: the strength of his moral character rather than the magnitude of his accomplishments or his stature in the histories of his times. We can observe the same sort of selection at work in the Thrasybulus, where Nepos claims that the Athenian general was unsurpassed in virtue (virtus), but was excelled by many in fame, and especially by the flamboyant Alcibiades (.–). Nepos, then, prefers character to reputation and popularity, and appears to have selected subjects whose careers demonstrated that they had lived their lives and performed their duties as generals virtuously. What were some of the virtues demonstrated by these foreign generals? In the case of Eumenes, we read of loyalty (he refuses to abandon his friend Perdiccas despite his cause being lost, ), honour (he gives his defeated enemy Craterus a ceremonial burial on account
of his dignity and their former friendship, ), and cunning (he outwits Antigonus and stops his army’s advance through a trick, ). In the Thrasybulus we encounter the general who opposed tyranny at Athens. Nepos calls his small group of followers the ‘source of salvation for the Athenians, the bulwark of liberty for a most glorious state’ (), and he records that when freedom was restored to the Athenians, Thrasybulus passed a law of amnesty that halted further civil war (). Despite Nepos’ warning in the preface, not all the virtues narrated in the Lives are culturally relative. They in fact demonstrated many wellrecognized qualities that were also important to the Romans (such as loyalty, bravery, patriotism, and amnesty), which could in turn become the basis for comparison between the generals. Nepos’ emphasis on virtue seems also to have influenced the selection of material within the individual Lives. In particular, he sought to avoid an excess of historical detail. At the opening of the Pelopidas, for example, Nepos claims to face a dilemma over how much historical information about the Theban general to include: he was not well known to Romans, but narrating too many of his accomplishments might transform his biography into a history and so obscure his virtues (.; see Chapter in this volume for the full passage). Like Eumenes and Thrasybulus, Pelopidas appears in Nepos’ collection not because of his fame but because of the virtue he displayed in the course of his career. Nepos will, by necessity, include some historical information, but promises only enough to support the contention that Pelopidas was an important figure. In the Miltiades we find the opposite problem: Nepos has arranged his material to keep proper history at bay in the Life of a truly famous man. The Miltiades consists of eight chapters, three of which are devoted to the Battle of Marathon, appropriately enough, since Miltiades’ victory there was his crowning achievement. But of those three chapters, the first two describe preparations for the battle, and the third is devoted to the honours granted to Miltiades afterwards. The battle itself is reduced to a single sentence that underscores the character of the army: ‘The Athenians had such a great advantage in virtue (virtus) that they routed an enemy force ten times larger than their own, and they struck so much terror into the Persians that they fled not to their camp but to their ships’ (.). Here Nepos emphasizes the collective virtue of the soldiers at the expense of details about the battle, and has even declined to say anything specific about Miltiades’ own actions. Thus the reader learns nothing of how the battle actually unfolded, only that virtue—here probably to be read as courage—won the day. At the conclusion of the book, as we have seen, Nepos asks his readers to compare the collection of foreign generals to his (now lost) book of Roman generals and to judge which group is superior. In writing On Foreign Generals, however, Nepos appears also to have envisioned a second comparandum for his reader, the Romans of his own day. Dionisotti (), Millar (), and Stem (: –) have argued that many of the moral lessons in the book are really a commentary on contemporary leadership and society in the late Republic. One example comes from the Agesilaus. The general is abroad and planning a campaign against Persia when a message arrives from Sparta recalling him to assist in a war at home. Agesilaus’ response, Nepos writes, proves his devotion to his country (pietas), for he gave up the campaign, which surely would have been successful, and returned home immediately. Then Nepos adds: ‘If only our generals had been willing to follow his example!’ (.). The use of ‘our’, Stem (: ) asserts, indicates that Nepos is referring to generals in his own time. Dionisotti takes this for granted and argues that Nepos is doing
more than using the past to teach a lesson: ‘Nepos, the critics say, is prone to moralising. But I would put it to you that passages like this are no mere moralising. They are comment on political behaviour, with a pretty sharp edge to recent events, implying also a specific view, as much political as moral, of what has gone wrong’ (Dionisotti : ). Such a reading adds another dimension to the comparative aspect of Nepos’ biographies, making them even more relevant to his contemporary audience.
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.................................................................................................................................. We turn from Nepos to Plutarch, whose Parallel Lives series also looks to historical figures as the subjects of political biography, while promoting an even broader ethical programme and teaching more general political principles. There are other important differences as well. Although the Parallel Lives series contains biographies of some of the same men as Nepos’ On Foreign Generals, each of Plutarch’s Lives is much larger in scope and arranged into one of twenty-three books. Each of these books, twenty-two of which are extant, consists of a pair of Lives, one of a Greek and the other of a Roman statesman, general, or king (see Chapter in this volume for details). As we saw above in the introduction to the Aemilius, Plutarch could imagine his biographical subjects as his guests as he wrote their subjects’ Lives. The Aemilius also suggests that the series grew gradually, and although the first pair of Lives, Epaminondas– Scipio, has been lost, it does not appear to have contained a statement that set out an overarching plan or programme for the whole collection. Most scholars believe that some groups of Lives were researched and published together (see T.E. Duff : , for a summary), but it seems clear from Plutarch’s own comments that the Parallel Lives texts were published as a series over time rather than all at once (see Jones ). From the readers’ perspective, however, the guests accumulated as the series grew, and since the corpus is established, regardless of the order of publication, we can explore themes that Plutarch developed within individual Lives, within books, and across the series. Plutarch indeed seems to have taken pains to build cohesiveness at various levels. As Pelling explains, each individual biography plays ‘a double role, perhaps even a treble role, of Life as complete in itself, Life as part of a pair, and Life as part of a series’. And for Plutarch, there was ‘an alertness to all those “wholes” as guiding the selection and emphasis of material’ (Pelling : ). Pelling himself explores the idea that the Parallel Lives series was intended to provide a global history of Greece and Rome. There is in fact broad historical coverage in the aggregate of the Lives, but Pelling ultimately rejects the idea of a complete history, finding too many gaps in the coverage and concluding that Plutarch was always willing to subordinate historical themes to his primary purpose, ‘the understanding and judging of the individual heroes’ (ibid.: ). Nonetheless, there are examples of books that complement each other in ways that appear intentional. Consider, for instance, the books that include Lives of Romans from the late Republic. In addition to a complex web of cross-references and strong evidence of joint composition (see Pelling ), there are themes and an overall account of events that are only fully fleshed out when the Lives are considered together. To take one example, the Lives of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus
function as a sort of triad in their depiction of the political interactions of the men who formed the first political triumvirate. In Plutarch’s conception, Caesar was the dominating contender, Pompey held the second position, and Crassus was subordinate to both of them. Even though he highlights the best qualities of the heroes in their individual biographies, Plutarch maintains their relative positions across all three Lives, pointedly describing the weaknesses that hindered Pompey and Crassus and the strengths that allowed Caesar to dominate both of his rivals. A complete understanding of each man’s political career and character requires a reading of all three Lives (see Beneker ; J.T. Chlup ). Even more important, however, is the cohesion of the pairs, or books, of parallel Lives. Here thematic development is strongest, and the demonstration of character through narrative, syncrisis, and authorial comment is more explicit. Plutarch probably did not attempt to make his biographies reflect on particular politicians or the emperors of his own day (see Pelling c). He was, however, interested in using historical figures as examples for the instruction of contemporary politicians, and this had a strong influence on the themes of his biography. We gain insight into how Plutarch thought the past could be instructive from his essay Political Precepts, where he addresses a young man who is in need of political instruction but lacks the time for a practical education. As Plutarch explains, this is just the situation where examples from the past can be useful: Since you do not have the time to observe the philosopher’s life openly in the midst of political affairs and public trials, nor to witness examples accomplished in deed rather than in word, you ask to receive some political instruction, and I believe that a refusal on my part would be entirely inappropriate . . . I have made use of a wide variety of examples, just as you have requested. (B C)
In the course of the essay Plutarch touches on various topics, such as the importance of character in being selected for office and the necessity of being able to speak persuasively in assembly. Such topics are important to the success of modern politicians, and all are illustrated (positively or negatively) by real politicians from the past. Plutarch follows the same tack in his Parallel Lives, with an even wider variety of examples, most of which illustrate ethical rather than political themes. He has, moreover, structured his books to encourage comparison, or syncrisis, at many levels as a means of highlighting his subjects’ careers and character. Syncrisis is the natural result of the pairing of Lives, and Plutarch takes advantage of the pairings through a technique of ‘pattern and variation: the first Life [in a pair] sets a pattern which is then exploited and varied in the second’ (T.E. Duff : ; see also Pelling b). Many of the books also conclude with a formal syncrisis, where Plutarch compares the heroes directly. This is a ‘harderedged, more critical analysis’ (T.E. Duff : ) than what is found in the narrative of the Lives, and Plutarch will often introduce new material or apply a different interpretation to material previously narrated. Finally, Plutarch also compares his subjects to their contemporaries or other historical figures. For instance, he compares Pompey to Alexander the Great, and finds him lacking (Pomp. , ), and he compares Pericles not only to other politicians but also to the Athenian people as a whole, and finds him superior (Per. –). This ‘internal’ syncrisis gives to the individual Lives an interpretive depth that allows them to stand alone as biographies, as they often do in modern collections,
despite the highly developed interconnectedness with other Lives in the same book and in the series.
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.................................................................................................................................. In addition to his Parallel Lives, Plutarch also wrote a series of Lives of the Roman emperors, the Lives of the Caesars, arranged in chronological order from Augustus to Vitellius. Only the Galba and Otho remain, so we know very little about the form of these biographies or why Plutarch chose to write them. Regardless, he appears to have been the first to write a Caesars (see Chapter in this volume). The most famous series of imperial Lives, however, belongs to Suetonius. His collection begins with Julius Caesar and ends with Domitian, thus covering a longer span of time than Plutarch’s collection and, significantly, now including Julius at the head of the dynasty. Apart from his choice of where to begin and, perhaps, where to end his series, the individual Lives included in Suetonius’ collection were determined by the historical circumstances of who ruled and when. Thus, we see a fundamental difference between the Caesars (of both Plutarch and Suetonius) and Nepos’ On Foreign Generals and Plutarch’s other series, the Parallel Lives. For the latter two, once the broad terms of the collection were set, the authors could select the subjects that best served as vehicles for their ethical and political programmes. Even so, the impetus to collect according to a category, in this case, the category of ‘Caesars’, links Suetonius’ series to other collections, such as Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers and Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists, and even to his own collection Illustrious Men, which contained the Lives of poets, orators, historians, philosophers, and grammarians and rhetoricians. We might further consider this sort of collection in the larger context of the miscellanies (collections of anecdotes, literary discussions of problems, and the like) that were popular during the Second Sophistic (see T. Morgan ). If we compare Suetonius’s Caesars to Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, we discover a radically different approach to biography. The differences are so great that they have been used as evidence to support theories about the development of different strands of the biographical genre. A detailed comparison is beyond the scope of this discussion, but we can note here that while Plutarch’s Parallel Lives contain birth-to-death narratives of important historical figures and take an overtly moralizing approach, Suetonius’ Caesars eschew chronological arrangement, and although they reveal much information about the character of the emperors, they do not attempt to shape the morals of the reader. Both authors, however, were using historical material and so faced the problem of distinguishing their biographies from history. We find this concern in Nepos as well: recall the dilemma he poses in the opening chapter of the Pelopidas about including too much or too little historical material. Plutarch observes essentially the same problem at Alexander , asking his readers not to quibble if he does not narrate the full histories of Alexander and Caesar. Suetonius was conscious of the problem, too, and his ‘reaction to the dilemma was vigorous’ (WallaceHadrill : –). This reaction is to be found in the very structure of his Caesars, which reflect a deliberate choice to avoid a form that looks like history. Suetonius himself explains his approach in the Augustus: ‘Having presented essentially a summary of his life, I will
now set forth the parts individually, not according to their chronology but by category, so that they may be explained and appreciated more clearly’ (.). Particular information provided in aggregate form in the Life of Julius includes, for example, the queens he had affairs with (), how little wine he drank (), and his skill as an orator (). We have observed in Nepos and Plutarch, and indeed as far back as Herodotus, that one of the advantages of collected Lives was the ability to compare the experiences and character of historical figures. Suetonius’ arrangement by category facilitates comparison as well. ‘No two of the Caesares are exactly the same, but a corresponding group of personal details is found in almost every one, composed of the same basic items (appearance, style of living, characteristics, intellectual pursuits) or a selection of them, in this order or in a variation of it’ (Wallace-Hadrill : ). This is a structure that overtly encourages comparison according to specific traits, much like Plutarch’s formal syncrises set out precisely the grounds on which two men are to be compared, and then provide fairly succinct and clear judgements. Suetonius’ biographies are certainly less complex from a literary perspective, but they do allow for the revelation and interpretation of character in the narrative sections as well as in the sections arranged by category. As an example, let us look to the death scenes of Julius Caesar and Nero. In narrating Caesar’s death (Caes. ), Suetonius establishes several characteristics of how a good (or, perhaps, a brave or dignified) emperor meets his end, and he uses this model to cast Nero as the opposite. In the first Life, Caesar attends a meeting of the senate despite warnings of the conspiracy against him, and when he realizes that he is under attack, resists only until he understands that he cannot prevail. Then he lets out a single groan and utters his famous line, in Greek, ‘you, too, my child,’ when Brutus approaches. With this statement he was probably not expressing surprise at Brutus’ involvement in the plot as is usually thought, but rather predicting revenge, since these words come from a line of Greek poetry (‘you too will one day taste of power’) that had become proverbial. Caesar’s abbreviated quotation promises that Brutus, though victorious in the present moment, will likewise suffer defeat (see Woodman : –). Finally, in the process of accepting over twenty wounds, he covers his head and groin area with his toga so that he may fall and lie dead with dignity. In comparison, Nero’s death (Nero –) depicts just the opposite sort of emperor. When Nero realizes that the army has abandoned him, he seeks a remote place to hide (Caesar met publicly with the senate despite warnings of conspiracy), placing a faded cloak (not the more formal toga) over his head to obscure his identity (not to maintain his dignity). After travelling on foot through the woods, he enters an isolated villa through a narrow trench, crawling on all fours (not standing to meet his attackers). As he cowers in fear and learns that he is to be punished by beating, he decides to attempt suicide (again refusing to meet his attackers), but upon testing the blades of his knives, refuses to go through with it (Caesar accepted twenty-three stab wounds). Finally, when it becomes clear that his capture is imminent, he almost musters enough courage for suicide. Like Caesar, he quotes a line of Greek poetry, from the Iliad: ‘The thunder of swift-footed horses besets my ears’ (.), but unlike Caesar, who promised posthumous revenge, Nero emphasizes his utter loss of power. Then, he stabs a dagger into his throat, but not without the help of his private secretary (Caesar faced death alone). Finally, not quite dead, he speaks to a centurion who feigns assistance, saying, ‘too late’ and ‘this is fidelity’ (in addition to quoting
a line of poetry, Caesar groaned just once, after the first strike, and understood perfectly well what Brutus was doing). As this reading shows, Caesar’s death both serves as a conclusion to Caesar’s own life and provides an example against which to judge Nero’s demise. Thus, Suetonius, despite taking on a radically different organizational structure, nonetheless follows the pattern of Nepos and Plutarch, offering individual Lives that can stand on their own while at the same time enriching the character portraits he draws by providing comparative readings across his series.
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.................................................................................................................................. The assembling of individual Lives into collections is one of the fundamental characteristics of biographical writing, and as far back as Herodotus, collections of Lives have encouraged comparative readings. In On Foreign Generals, Nepos expects his readers to notice the virtues of individuals, while at the same time comparing them to each other and to the virtues of Roman generals, both past and present. Plutarch goes a step further, deliberately pairing Greek and Roman Lives, which effectively makes syncrisis fundamental to the reading process, and even providing a formal exercise in syncrisis at the end of many of his books. And Suetonius, by arranging the information in his Lives according to category and revisiting common themes across his Caesars, similarly asks his reader to be thinking comparatively even as they focus on an individual Life. Antiquarian interests or the need to preserve a teacher’s wisdom may have been the inspiration for collections of Lives, but the three major biographers from Antiquity exploited the idea of collections to create coherent series, within which the themes and lessons of the individual Lives are enriched when they are considered as parts of a much larger whole.
F R In addition to the works cited above, the following studies are useful in considering individual and collected Lives. Horsfall () modifies his earlier negative assessment of Nepos as a scholar, but is still critical of the historical and literary value of his works. Manuwald () gives an intertextual reading of Nepos’ Epaminondas and Pelopidas, demonstrating, as does Stem (: ), the thematic unity of On Foreign Generals. The volume edited by Nikolaidis () considers thematic connections between Plutarch’s Lives and his Moralia, setting the individual Lives into a context even larger than the series of Parallel Lives itself. Many of the essays by Stadter (a) explore the implications of collecting and juxtaposing Lives; see especially Chapters (‘Paradoxical Paradigms’) and (‘Parallels in Three Dimensions’). Power and Gibson () have published a collection of essays that provide the first new assessment of Suetonius in English since Wallace Hadrill ().
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T T T C
.................................................................................................................................. T term ‘popular literature’, first used by literary historians in the mid-nineteenth century, is applied to a range of modern writings produced to entertain a mass audience, usually in the context of an organized commercial industry. In practice, the concept of popular literature is hard to define, given that it is not restricted to any particular genre. The most successful scholarly approaches avoid general definitions and focus rather on the inherent features of form, content, and manner of reception that are shared by the various individual specimens of popular writing.1 This kind of descriptive approach, though not suitable for theoretical abstractions, is at least of practical use when defining the set of traits that serve as the common denominator of popular literary products. The hallmark of the popular aesthetic, as many theorists have noted, is the primacy of content over form. This may be manifested through a number of interconnected features, such as a straightforward narrative, plain language, simple characterization, and a loose overall structure. One may doubt whether the category of popular literature is applicable to the ancient world, which had nothing comparable to the cheap book production, widespread literacy, and mass reading public of modern societies. Nonetheless, ancient literary output does include works that offer extensive analogies with the types of writing recognized as popular in our contemporary world. Such similarities provide the best justification for acknowledging the existence of some form of popular literature in Antiquity. From this point of view, modern mass-market literature can be regarded as the development of pre-existing kinds of written production, traceable in every literate culture of the past. The Graeco-Roman texts usually categorized by modern Classical scholars as ‘popular’ comprise a variety of genres, such as collections of fables, jokes, and marvels, handbooks of fortune-telling, and anonymous folk poetry.2 One particular group among them, consisting 1
Good discussions of modern popular literature are offered by Neuburg (), Petronio and Schulz Buschhaus (), Couégnas (), and Migozzi (). 2 For a collection of ancient popular works, see Hansen (); for further discussion, see Fusillo (), Pecere and Stramaglia (), and G. Anderson (). On the popular biographies in particular, see Gallo () and Hägg (a: ).
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of extensive narrative compositions (novels), draws heavily on biographical patterns. Popular novels, whether romantic, such as Xenophon’s Ephesiaca, or adventurous, such as The History of Apollonius King of Tyre, or comic, such as Lucius or the Ass, tend to offer a linear narration of the life story of one or two central characters. However, such works differ from conventional biographies in two respects. First, rather than covering the entire lifespan of their protagonists, they focus on a particular important period of it that is full of adventures and vicissitudes. And, second, their heroes are invented characters, not historical figures. Nevertheless, a few of the ancient popular narrative works can properly be termed biographies, in that they recount in full the lives of renowned historical persons or of figures generally regarded as historical by the ancients. These are the Lives of Aesop, Homer, the philosopher Secundus, and the so-called Alexander Romance. All these texts have many features in common that reveal strong affinities between them and justify their inclusion in the same category. Whether we should label this category of writings ‘popular biography’ or not is of secondary importance. The main issue is to recognize the close kinship of all its specimens, which collectively represent a particular way of narrating a person’s life. The aim of the following survey of the basic traits shared by these works is not to establish absolute criteria that show whether any one composition is ‘popular’ or not. Rather it is to trace in an empirical manner the peculiar physiognomy of this type of ancient biographical writing. The popular biographies in question employ a straightforward style of storytelling, generally devoid of complex techniques and innovative formal effects. They are fond of the repetition of stereotypes and familiar patterns. Their language is mostly plain, without sustained use of elaborate style. Occasionally, the writer may indulge in rhetorically elevated passages (e.g. the bucolic ecphrasis in the Life of Aesop , which imitates the mannerisms of the Second Sophistic) or insert quotations from poetry (e.g. the epic verses in the Lives of Homer). In such cases, the result is often clumsy, perhaps because the author is unfamiliar with this mode of expression. In terms of content, the texts appeal to the basic urges of the human psyche. The adventures of the biographee abound in sensational incidents and tales of wonder or horror. Comic episodes often include coarse sexual or scatological humour. A naivety of outlook and morality prevails, emphasizing simple emotions. The biographees themselves, along with the other characters involved in their life stories, are not depicted as complex multifaceted personalities. They mostly represent one-dimensional types, distinguished by a single prominent trait, such as cunning, conceit, or treachery, which unifies their various appearances. This does not mean that they cannot be impressive and memorable, just as heroes of modern popular fiction can be (e.g. Passepartout or Arsène Lupin). The structure of the biographical narrative is usually conglomerate and non-organic. A string of loosely connected episodes, giving the impression of independent tales haphazardly assembled together, follows the protagonist’s career from birth (or youth) to death and sets out in linear fashion his various exploits or mishaps. The arrangement of the episodes may follow an underlying and carefully constructed plan, as is the case with the Life of Aesop (see Holzberg ). This plan, however, is based on strategies typical of folk tradition, such as pattern repetition, symmetrical contrast, and organization of material in triads. It differs from the well-crafted artistic plot in which events consequentially evolve out of each other ‘according to plausibility or necessity’ in the Aristotelian sense (Arist. Po. a). Temporality is often vague. Imprecise statements (‘some days later’, ‘on another
occasion’) link one incident to the next, as happens in folktales. The conception of space may also be underdeveloped. The locations of the biographee’s adventures, even when they are given historical names, rarely display any local colour. The events might equally well occur in another place without substantial alteration. As regards textual tradition, ancient popular biographies are mostly anonymous and characterized by a fluidity of transmission. They do not consist of a fixed text, faithfully reproduced in all extant sources. Copyists treated them with freedom, altering the style, expanding or abridging the plot, and adding or eliminating episodes as they saw fit. As a result, popular biographies are preserved in a number of variant redactions, which share the same rudimentary storyline, but vary considerably in terms of diction and the particulars of the action. Individual recensions may have been composed over successive ages, but in some cases there is evidence for the contemporaneous parallel circulation of different versions. Experts sometimes use the terms ‘open text’ or ‘open tradition’ for such cases of polymorphic transmission (Konstan ). Most of these ancient works enjoyed an extensive appeal over large areas and periods of time. They were translated into many languages and widely diffused in both East and West. The Life of Aesop was rendered into Turkish, Slavic languages, Latin, and many European vernacular tongues. The Alexander Romance (on which see Chapter in this volume) and the Life of Secundus underwent similar adventures. Many of these versions were in continuous circulation during the Middle Ages, up to the dawn of the modern era. Such writings represent the closest thing to an ‘international bestseller’ that the ancient world produced. Their best analogues are found in certain narrative compositions of the ancient Orient, which have enjoyed an equally large multilingual success over time. Significantly, some of these Near Eastern texts, such as the Tale of Ahiqar and the Book of Sindbad, employ a biographical framework. Finally, popular biographies draw heavily on the materials of folk storytelling. They revolve around protagonists who, apart from their actual or presumed historical existence, had also become legendary personages, in that a number of folk legends concerning their exploits had grown up around them. A popular biography constructs its storyline largely on such legends. It also incorporates other tales current in the folk tradition. The biographee thus appears in many traditional roles of the oral storytelling repertoire: the cunning trickster outwitting his adversaries, the picaresque or travelogue hero who roams the world and experiences extraordinary adventures, the wise apophthegmatic advisor, or the central character of a ‘hero myth’ working his way from illegitimate birth or an irregular childhood to glory. Thus, the account of the biographee’s life becomes a kind of framework that attracts all manner of folk material, from folktales and fables to proverbs and riddles. Because of this tendency, the ancient popular biographies appear to be composite, heterogeneous works, pieced together from earlier autonomous traditions. In some cases, they even incorporate large portions from other independently circulating books. A summary of the Near Eastern Tale of Ahiqar has been inserted into the Life of Aesop; the Alexander Romance has absorbed various novelistic or pseudo-historical writings about the Macedonian conqueror. The ‘patchwork-like’ composition of the narrative may have encouraged later copyists to take considerable liberties with these works and to remove individual episodes or interpolate new materials borrowed from diverse textual or oral sources.
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.................................................................................................................................. As is the case with the entire Graeco-Roman genre of biography, popular biography has its roots in the late Archaic and the Classical age (sixth to fourth century ). During this period, the Greeks developed legends about famous men, in particular, great cultural figures, such as the poets Homer and Hesiod, the fabulist Aesop, and the so-called Seven Sages—the last of whom offer an instructive case of a primordial biographical tradition in the making. The Seven were a loosely composed group of men renowned for their intelligence, all of them conventionally placed in the same period, the early sixth century . They embodied a type of practical wisdom, expressed through gnomic sagacity and possessing a prominent public dimension. Most of them were active in political life as statesmen or counsellors of rulers. The identity of the members of the group varies according to the sources. There never was a definitive catalogue prohibiting further alterations. This absence clearly illustrates the open tradition of competing versions which characterizes the collective legendarium of the Seven Sages. Nevertheless, five names recur in most inventories, thereby forming a standard core: Thales of Miletus, Bias of Priene, Solon of Athens, Pittacus of Mytilene, and Chilon of Sparta. The life stories of the sages presumably started as separate local traditions. Each region exalted its native cultural hero, narrating his particular feats of wit. Eventually, a circle of seven was compiled, possibly under the influence of the Delphic sanctuary, which brought together the independent local traditions and merged them into a pan-Hellenic ‘collegium’ of wisdom (Busine ). The impact of oriental lore may also have been important. Mesopotamian myth knew of seven sages (apkallū) who lived before the Deluge and taught all knowledge to mankind. The Vedas and subsequent Sanskrit literature refer to an analogous company of seven wise seers (r: s: is), who were both religious ascetics and rulers or advisors of kings (Reiner ; R.P. Martin ). Archaic Ionia and the eastern Aegean islands were ideally positioned to receive such influences, as they maintained contact with the kingdoms of the Asiatic hinterland, as far as Babylon itself. It is no coincidence that several of the standard members of the Seven (Thales, Bias, and Pittacus) originated from these areas. After the formation of the group, narratives regarding their common activities also developed. The sages were shown displaying their wisdom at a communal banquet. They assembled at Delphi, in order to dedicate their precepts to Apollo, or at Croesus’ court, where they conversed with the Lydian despot. Herodotus, although he never directly refers to a circle of Seven Sages, nevertheless associates most of its individual members with Croesus. Bias, Pittacus, Solon, and Thales offer the Lydian king prudent advice or ingenious solutions to problems (., –, ). The most celebrated tale revolves around a valuable tripod or cup prescribed as a prize for the wisest man. This was first offered to Thales, but he forwarded it to another member of the company, whom he deemed worthier of the honour. The second candidate sent the item to a third one, and so on, until the prize made the round of all seven savants, who finally dedicated it to Apollo, the wisest of the gods. During the Classical period, all these traditions must have circulated predominantly by
word of mouth.3 The occasional references by historians and prose writers (such as Herodotus, Plato, and Ephorus) offer glimpses of this wide repertoire of legends, which altogether form an oral popular biography of the Seven Sages. The tale of the prize for wisdom, with its multiple variants, offers a good example of an open folk tradition.4 In some versions of the story, the precious item is a tripod hauled up by fishermen. The Delphic oracle then commands that it be awarded to the wisest of men. Elsewhere the object is a golden bowl, bequeathed by the wealthy Bathycles or dispatched to Greece by Croesus. Some of the variable details may go back to competing regional versions. Usually the item is dedicated to Apollo at Delphi, but alternative accounts mention the Apollo of Didyma or Thebes instead. One narrative presents the people of Argos, who erect the tripod as an award for wisdom. According to another variant, the object is fished up off Attica and the Athenian assembly decide its destiny. Often Thales is the first to receive the prize, though some versions privilege Bias, Pittacus, or the Spartans Aristodemus and Chilon instead. Such diversity of alternative, parallel forms corresponds, at the level of oral dissemination, to the fluid textual transmission of multiple recensions, which characterizes later written popular biographies, such as the Life of Aesop and the Alexander Romance. In their life stories, the sages are cast in various standard roles of the folktale repertoire. On many occasions they are shown propounding or solving riddles (Konstantakos ), especially the so-called ‘riddles of the superlative’, which ask what thing or person possesses a certain quality to the utmost degree. Solon, in his famous confrontation with Croesus (Hdt. .–, on which see Chapter in this volume), expounds exactly this type of question (‘Who is happiest?’). The legend of the tripod or cup reflects the same kind of conundrum but reverses the usual pattern. The superlative question (‘Who is wisest?’), instead of being put to the sages themselves, is asked about them. The famous riddle-solvers now themselves become the object of a riddle, and their agōn is an inverted contest in wisdom, in which everyone strives to avoid first place. Such preoccupation with riddles, already familiar from the Near Eastern Ahiqar, is still evident in later specimens of popular biography, such as the Lives of Aesop and Homer. Often the sages deceive their opponents through the clever manipulation of language or through cunning stratagems. Solon and Chilon tell lies to achieve political or personal aims; Pittacus and Bias trick the enemies of their cities during wartime.5 In most cases, these wiles are used for the good of the community and this prevents the hero from appearing as an amoral picaresque figure. The influence of the tricksters of folktales is nonetheless perceptible. Bias is also distinguished as speaker in court and as an arbitrator. He cleverly settles a long-standing dispute between the states of Priene and Samos concerning contested territory (D.L. .; Arist. F ; V. Rose : –). He thus recalls another favourite figure of popular novellas, the perspicacious judge, as we also find him in, for example, the 3
The indications for the existence of a written composition (e.g. a Symposium of the sages) already in the fifth century are slight and equivocal; see Snell (: ) and R.P. Martin (: ). Later, the stories were collected in biographical writings by Hermippus (FGrHist F ), Diogenes Laertius (Lives of Eminent Philosophers), and Plutarch (Life of Solon, Banquet of the Seven Sages). 4 See the accounts of Diogenes Laertius (. ) and Plutarch (Sol. ), who compile information from many earlier sources. 5 See Plu. Sol. , , .; D.L. . , , , .
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legend of Solomon and its folk retellings. Thales is cast in the comic type of the absentminded intellectual (Pl. Tht. a). Some narratives reflect well-known folk story-patterns. Bias assists the Egyptian Pharaoh Amasis in a riddle-contest against the ruler of Ethiopia (Plu. Conv. a–e). Such intellectual competitions between kings formed a common tale-type in western Asia and Egypt during the second and first millennia . The royal hero in such stories is usually helped by a counsellor, who solves the opponent’s riddles or invents problems of his own. Amasis’ adventure was apparently based on an Egyptian legend, onto which Greek tradition grafted the figure of Bias in the role of the counsellor (Konstantakos ). The story of the cup, which brings together a fellowship of heroes around a sacred vessel, has been compared to the myth of the Grail (Yoshida ; R.P. Martin ). Another seminal element in these legends is the fusion of the biographical framework with extensive pieces of wisdom literature. The Seven Sages were famous for their precepts, of which various collections were compiled in Antiquity. These maxims, reflecting an age-old folk wisdom, also became the object of an open tradition with many different recensions, transmitted in medieval manuscripts or on ancient inscriptions. The collected sayings were inserted at an appropriate point in the life story of the sages; the wise men gather at Delphi and jointly consecrate the maxims at the temple of Apollo. The conjunction of the biographical narrative with a collection of adages is a hallmark of Near Eastern wisdom compositions, such as Ahiqar and the demotic Egyptian Instruction of ‘Onchsheshonqy. The same mixture recurs later in the Lives of Aesop and of Secundus. In all of these texts, the series of maxims is said to have been uttered or written down by the central figure at some point in his life. The traditions of the Seven Sages exercised notable influence on subsequent biographical writings (Wehrli ). Their chreia-like anecdotes, which show the protagonist pronouncing a pithy apophthegm within a particular narrative frame, provided a model for the structure of Socratic and later philosophical Lives, from Xenophon’s Memorabilia to Diogenes Laertius (on which see Chapters and respectively). Their banquet may have inspired the sympotic scenery of several biographical anecdotes in the Epidēmiai by Ion of Chios (Chapter in this volume) and the literary symposia of Socratic authors. Finally, some of their stories were assimilated into the Life of Aesop.
T L A
.................................................................................................................................. This biographical novel about the famous fabulist was composed in the first or second century and written in simple but lively language, an unruly form of the colloquial Greek Koinē. This is clearly reflected in the oldest and most genuine of the extant redactions, G, which survives in a single manuscript. Here the work bears the title Book of the philosopher Xanthus and his slave Aesop, concerning Aesop’s mode of life, which recalls the long-winded titles of later popular romances.6 Another version, W, compiled in early Byzantine times, rewrites the text in a more erudite style and has removed certain 6 Cf. e.g. the Spanish picaresque novel The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities (); or Rabelais’ The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds and Feats of the Very Renowned Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes, Son of the Great Giant Gargantua ().
irreverent elements of the narrative. Nonetheless, this later version occasionally preserves ancient details, which presumably derive from the prototypical work, but were omitted from G. Many of its codices offer the conventional title Life (βίος) of Aesop the philosopher. A number of papyrus fragments have also been discovered that date from the second/third to the seventh century . Their texts are not identical verbatim either with the G or with the W. It seems that shortly after its initial composition the transmission of the Life became fluid and complex, with several variant forms in parallel circulation. At the beginning of the narrative, Aesop is introduced as a mute and extremely ugly Phrygian slave, working in the fields in an unspecified place. His fellow-slaves take advantage of his dumbness to frame him for their own misdemeanours; but Aesop manages to avoid misfortune thanks to his innate cleverness. His fate changes when he helps a wandering priestess of Isis to find her way. In return for his piousness, Isis and the Muses grant him the power of speech and the talent of storytelling. The estate manager can no longer stand the now caustic Aesop, who is consequently sold to a slave-trader. Thus begin the hero’s journeys, interspersed with many humorous episodes, in which he displays his practical wisdom. He is eventually sold to Xanthus, a professor of philosophy on Samos, who represents the type of the conceited pedant. The large central part of the Life narrates Aesop’s adventures in this man’s service. The cunning slave plays many jokes on his master, thereby mocking Xanthus’ inanity, although he cannot always escape corporal punishment. Nonetheless, Aesop also saves Xanthus from embarrassing situations, providing answers for hard problems which the philosopher cannot solve himself. In the end, Aesop resourcefully wins his freedom in a public assembly of the Samians by interpreting an enigmatic portent, which predicts an attack to be launched by the powerful King Croesus. At this critical juncture, Aesop offers valuable counsel to the Samian people; he also travels to Croesus’ court, impresses the hostile monarch with his eloquence, and reconciles him with Samos. Afterwards, Aesop becomes an itinerant sophist, eventually reaching Babylon. There he becomes the confidant of King Lycorus, whom he helps to win wisdom contests against other monarchs. This portion of the work is adapted from the Tale of Ahiqar, an Aramaic composition of the late seventh or early sixth century concerning the adventures of a wise Assyrian vizier. The author of the Life must have read Ahiqar either in a Greek translation or in some Near Eastern version (in Aramaic or Demotic Egyptian). Like Ahiqar, Aesop is unjustly accused by his adoptive son before the king and condemned to death, but saved and hidden by the friendly executioner. Finally, he is brought back and reinstated in order to solve the difficult riddles with which Nectanebo, the Egyptian Pharaoh, has challenged Lycorus. Aesop triumphs in this intellectual competition, gaining tribute and gifts from Egypt. Finally, the hero continues his wanderings, leaving Babylon and visiting Delphi. The stingy locals offer him no remuneration for his lectures and so Aesop mocks them. As a result, the angry Delphians frame him, hiding a sacred temple bowl in his luggage, and sentence him to death for sacrilege. Aesop’s clever fables cannot help him now; he is led to the precipice for execution and jumps to his death, cursing his persecutors. Afterwards, the Delphians are punished with a plague and obliged to expiate Aesop’s murder. Most of the ingredients of this narrative are drawn from earlier tradition, largely from orally transmitted folk materials. Biographical legends about Aesop, already current in the
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Classical period, form the skeleton of the plot. Aristotle names Xanthus as one of Aesop’s owners; he also describes how Aesop addressed the Samian assembly and acquired fame through his wise fables and advice (Rh. b–a; F ; V. Rose : ). The writings of the Samian historian Euagon (fifth century ) may have contained much material concerning Aesop’s adventures in Samos (FGrHist F ). Herodotus, who also spent time on the same island, reports on Aesop’s servitude there (.). It thus seems that the rudiments of Aesop’s biography rest on early Samian legends. The hero’s death at Delphi was also part of the tradition. The Delphians’ false charges of sacrilege and their judicial murder of Aesop are mentioned in several Classical sources.7 Another early feature, which is amusingly exploited in the Life, was Aesop’s ugliness. A famous red-figured Attic cylix of the mid-fifth century portrays a deformed man, with a disproportionately large head set on a gaunt body, who converses with a seated fox. It is generally thought that this painting depicts Aesop together with a typical protagonist of his animal fables.8 Aesop’s deformity gives special point to Herodotus’ story (.) that the fabulist served as a slave alongside Rhodopis, a lovely woman who eventually became a desirable hetaira. Their master thus held in his household one of the most beautiful women and one of the ugliest men in the world, a combination familiar from many myths and folktales (Konstantakos ). The legend of Aesop’s death reflects the primordial ritual of the pharmakos, a form of human sacrifice in which the victim plays the role of the scapegoat.9 The pharmakos was chosen in times of adversity or crisis from the lowest stratum of society, from slaves, condemned criminals, or deformed cripples. His function was to shoulder symbolically the evils of the community and in doing so purify it. He was led outside the city in procession and beaten, stoned, or thrown over a precipice to die. In addition to the case of Aesop, the same storyline underlies the myth of the murder of Neoptolemus at Delphi. Neoptolemus desecrated Apollo’s altar in Troy, thereby making the god extremely angry. Consequently, while Neoptolemus was visiting the Delphic oracle, Apollo caused him to be violently slaughtered, either by the local inhabitants or by the temple attendants. Significantly, Apollo’s enmity is also a central theme in the Life, which runs throughout the narrative.10 Aesop actively offends Apollo and in retaliation the wrathful god incites the people of Delphi to trap and kill him. According to other ancient stories, the sons of a certain Phamis met a similar end. A local man of Delphi planted a sacred vessel among their belongings, causing them to be thrown over the precipice as temple-robbers.11 There was, therefore, apparently an entire cycle of ancient tales based on the story-pattern of the pharmakos. The motif of the incriminating hidden cup is also paralleled in the biblical novella of Joseph (Gen ; Grottanelli ). All these old biographical traditions, which provide the broad outline of the Life, are woven from traditional materials. As for the figure of the protagonist, this is fleshed out with abundant borrowings from other genres that exercised a wide appeal. Aesop combines the cunning protagonist of See Hdt. .; Ar. V. ; Arist. F (V. Rose : ); cf. Heraclid. Lemb. Pol. . Musei Vaticani, inv. ,. See Konstantakos ( : vol. , ; vol. , ), with further references. 9 See Wiechers (), Nagy (: ), Compton (: ), and Zafiropoulos (). 10 See Chapters , , , and in the G. 11 Arist. Pol. b a; Plu. Prae. ger. reip. b. 7 8
comedy, the ironical sage of Greek anecdotes, the wise counsellor of oriental wisdom literature, and the sharp-witted hero of folktales. While in servitude, Aesop regularly acts like the wily slave of New Comedy, concocting schemes to fool his master. His exuberant brio also recalls the Aristophanic heroes, who impose their personal vision on their environment thanks to their inexhaustible vitality. Like them, Aesop unites the animal and the divine in a paradoxical amalgam. His grotesque ugliness makes him resemble a beast. Indeed, he is repeatedly compared to animals by those who behold him. On the other hand, from the very start, he is under the divine protection of Isis and the Muses and his life and career are exalted through a series of monuments that raise him to the level of the gods. In Samos and Babylon, his statue is erected among effigies of the Muses (, ). Even the Delphians, in expiation for his murder, erect a temple and a stele in his honour (W ). The narrative frequently attaches to the figure of Aesop anecdotes which originally concerned other figures of Greek cultural tradition, in particular, the Seven Sages, Diogenes, and Socrates. Aesop thus appears in the role of the ironical apophthegmatic sage found in such tales, who displays a ready wit in various situations, silencing his adversaries with caustic repartee. For example, in Chapter , Aesop encounters an enormous crowd at the public baths, but discovers among the multitude only one person intelligent enough to deserve the name of man. A very similar story is told of the Cynic Diogenes (D.L. .). The scene at the slave market, in which Xanthus purchases Aesop (–), is inspired by the famous novella narrating how Diogenes was sold into slavery.12 The Seven Sages, in particular, were associated with Aesop from at least the fourth century . Aesop was shown conversing with them at Croesus’ court and elsewhere.13 Plutarch makes him participate in their banquet at Corinth. The Life, rather than directly include this established tradition, creatively exploits it by transforming narratives about the sages into adventures of Aesop. For instance, Aesop’s reconciliation of Croesus and the Samians (–) is an adaptation of a story about Bias or Pittacus, who persuades the Lydian king to abandon his plans for war against the Greek islands (Hdt. .). Aesop helps Xanthus to deal with the impossible task of drinking the sea (–), just as Bias solves the same riddle on behalf of Pharaoh Amasis (Plu. Conv. a–e). In the section based on Ahiqar, Aesop’s personality assimilates another model of wisdom, namely, the oriental courtier who offers advice and prudent maxims. Here, in imitation of its Near Eastern exemplar, the biographical narration incorporates a portion of wisdom literature. Once reinstated, Aesop summons his treacherous adopted son and addresses to him a series of moral maxims regarding the appropriate behaviour in various situations (–). These precepts are ultimately based on an analogous collection in Ahiqar, used there by the sagacious vizier for the education of his adoptive child. In the Life, however, the oriental sayings are creatively adapted to the forms and themes of Greek gnomological tradition. Finally, throughout the Life, Aesop solves riddles and related problems. Thanks to this ability, he rises from slavery, first gaining honours as a public benefactor in Samos and then triumphing as a vizier at Babylon. Aesop thus resembles many astute figures of the folk
12 See Konstantakos (). Echoes of vulgarized Cynic doctrine are common in ancient popular biographies, see Adrados (). 13 See Ephor. FGrHist F ; D.S. . ; Alexis F ; Kassel and Austin ( : vol. , ).
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narrative tradition, who find the answers to perplexing conundrums and so win fame, treasures, or princely consorts.14 Other folk story-patterns are also absorbed into the plot of the Life. In a lengthy narrative arc (–), Aesop comically demonstrates that Xanthus’ bitch is a more faithful friend to her master than Xanthus’ own wife. This sequence of episodes is based on a widespread folktale type (Uther : number B). The protagonist of the folktale is usually asked to bring along his best friend and his worst enemy. He chooses his dog and his wife respectively and cleverly proves his opinion in practice. In another entertaining scene (–), Aesop commits adultery with Xanthus’ wife and cleverly hides the truth from his master. This story draws on the rich folk repertoire of adultery tales, which revolve around a similar triangle of lascivious wife, clever lover, and gullible cuckold. Glimpses of this repertoire are often offered by ancient humorous literature, from Aristophanes to Apuleius, while the episode of the Life possesses close analogues in later European and oriental folktales.15 The section based on Ahiqar ultimately derives from narrative schemes widespread in the traditions of the ancient Near East: the disgrace and rehabilitation of the wise minister, the riddle-contest of kings, and the hidden old man whose salutary wisdom saves the kingdom (Konstantakos –). The Life also contains several animal fables and scabrous novellas, occasionally narrated by Aesop in various circumstances, in order to advise or persuade other characters, answer difficult questions, or ridicule adversaries. These embedded narratives multiply in the final, Delphic section, in which Aesop uses them to reflect on his own plight or rebuke his persecutors.16 Together with the numerous riddles and sayings present in the text, they make the Life a repository of a wide range of folk genres. Overall, the work follows the standard tripartite structure of Aesopic fables (Holzberg : –). Its first part (–) provides an introduction to the story of Aesop’s life, delineating the hero’s main characteristics and setting the scene for the adventures to follow. Aesop acquires the gift of speech, which will determine his future career. This corresponds to the first component of Aesopic fables, the exposition, which introduces the protagonist and the circumstances in which his story will unfold. In the second and longest section of the narrative (–), Aesop actively uses his talents in order to transform his own life. By means of his witty responses, he manages to be bought by Xanthus and settle in Samos. He wins the admiration of the people, but also provokes the wrath of his master. Eventually, thanks to his wisdom, Aesop gains his freedom, honours, and the gratitude of the Samians, together with high office and the favour of the greatest rulers (Croesus, Lycorus, and even the petty-minded Pharaoh). Similarly, the second part of the fables constitutes the main action, in which the central figure faces other personages or situations arising from his environment. Finally, the third section of the Life (–) shows the ultimate consequences that result from the hero’s character. After 14
Cf. e.g. Oedipus in Greek mythology, Prince Calaf in the Persian fairytale of Turandot, young Mahosadha in Buddhist legends, and the bright peasant girl of medieval Märchen; see De Vries (). 15 See Konstantakos () and Orofino (). 16 Such ‘emboxing’ of briefer stories within an overarching frame narrative is a common practice in oriental storybooks, notably in collections of fables, such as the Indian Pañcatantra, and in wisdom compositions (cf. the Book of Sindbad). This is another technique which the author of the Life may have borrowed from Near Eastern traditions.
a long period of prosperity, Aesop misuses his charisma, unwisely provoking the Delphians, who bring about his destruction. Now his verbal skills, so often a source of glory in the past, are not sufficient to placate his persecutors and save him from doom. By analogy, the third part of a fable consists of the final assessment, in which the positive or negative consequences of the protagonist’s preceding actions are expounded and evaluated. The Life is therefore a mega-fable, inflating the typical scheme of the Aesopic genre to monumental dimensions, transforming it from a miniature into a fresco. The author of this novelistic biography did not simply borrow individual items from the corpus of fables in order to place them in his hero’s mouth. He delved deeply into the primary structure of Aesopic tales, the essential mould from which all the multifarious fable narratives are produced, and used it as the keystone of his own fiction. Thus, Aesop, the emblematic fabulist, becomes himself the subject of a gigantic fable. The stories he tells in the course of the Life are mirrored in his own life story, and vice versa. This ironic mise en abyme follows from a common Greek idea about the biography of an artist. As noted by Aristophanes, a poet’s mode of living is directly reflected in his poetic creations and, conversely, one may deduce the poet’s character and lifestyle from his works.17 The Life of Aesop expands this widespread biographical notion into a large-scale biography of a great storyteller. Aesop’s adventures follow the same course as those of the creatures of his imagination. His bios copied the products of his art. His story and his stories become one. In all these respects, the Life of Aesop is an exemplary representative of popular biography. Its heterogeneous materials are unified and enlivened above all by Aesop’s omnipresent figure, in which the genre of biography achieved one of its most memorable creations. Despite the rudimentary, accumulative construction of his character, Aesop charms us. Both theriomorphic and divine, he bears the blessing of life. His entire course is driven by brilliance of mind and the joy of existence. Even death cannot check his vitality. Aesop’s spirit survives execution in order to punish his enemies and finally be instituted in a special temple, where the hero will be worshipped henceforward as a demon of liveliness. In this respect, the Aesop of the Life stands out from the other, more or less stereotypical characters of ancient Greek novels. His vivid personality is the source of the freshness and pleasure offered by the narrative, which readers still feel today.
S, A R, H L
.................................................................................................................................. The Life of Secundus the Philosopher (on which see also Chapter in this volume) is a short Greek text composed in the late second century . The title-figure is usually regarded as reflecting a historical character, sometimes identified with the Athenian
17
See Ar. Ach. ; Th. ; F ; Kassel and Austin ( : vol. ., ).
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rhetorician Secundus, a teacher of Herodes Atticus, although the name Secundus was common in Imperial times. In any case, both the concise narrative (hardly a proper Life, given that it concentrates only on two episodes) and the biographee’s personality are made up of folk narrative materials. The first part reworks a sensational novella widespread from Europe to the Far East.18 Wishing to test the chastity of his own mother, Secundus disguises himself as a Cynic philosopher and offers her money in return for sex. The woman accepts and receives him in her bedroom. Secundus reveals his identity, and his mother hangs herself from shame. Blaming his tongue for this misfortune, the young man refuses to speak again. In the second episode, the silent philosopher comes to the attention of the Emperor Hadrian. Wishing to test Secundus’ resolve, the Emperor threatens him with execution if he does not speak. Secundus, who is not frightened, courageously prepares to die. Hadrian, admiring the philosopher’s constancy, spares his life and asks him to write his answers to a series of theoretical questions. This section rests on another traditional legendary theme: the confrontation between the sage and the king (as found also in, for example, the story of Diogenes and Alexander the Great). The liking for sensational effects persists, recalling the naïve suspense of today’s commercial thrillers. During the execution scene, the headsman exhorts Secundus three times to speak and save himself. The philosopher is pardoned only at the last moment, after he has held out his neck for the blow and seen the naked sword. The text ends with Secundus’ sententious answers to Hadrian’s philosophical questions. Biographical narrative is once again combined with a wisdom collection, this time betraying Cynic influence. In this case as well, the biographee’s character is an accumulation of well-known roles from anecdote or legend. Secundus begins as a moralist castigating the vices of women, a common figure in Greek satirical anecdotes. The touch of family tragedy transforms him into an Oedipal hero. As in the myth of Oedipus, Secundus’ insistence on discovering the truth forces his mother to hang herself. The guilty son then punishes himself by voluntarily incapacitating one of his vital organs of communication (for Secundus, this is the tongue; for Oedipus, his eyes). Finally, the protagonist becomes a philosophical martyr, a figure like Socrates, prepared to die in defence of his convictions. These disparate roles, however, do not fuse together, to create the sort of lively, versatile personality that we have in the Life of Aesop. Rather, the roles are strung together in linear fashion, one replacing the other in quick succession within a brief narrative. As a result, Secundus remains a sketchy figure, a conglomerate of traditional motifs that functions as a mouthpiece for a series of gnomic platitudes. If the Life of Aesop represents popular biography at its best, Secundus marks the lowest level to which this kind of writing could degenerate. Nonetheless, the text was well loved in the medieval period and translated into many European and oriental vernaculars. Other Greek works usually included in the category of popular biography are the ancient Lives of Homer and the Alexander Romance. These are the subjects of Chapters and respectively in this volume; therefore, only a few words will be dedicated here to them, and to their popular features in particular.19
See Krappe (: ) and Perry (). See more extensively Gallo (), Konstan (), Hansen (: ), Jouanno (), Karla (b), Hägg (a: ), and G. Anderson (). 18 19
The Alexander Romance revolves around an archetypical folk hero, Alexander the Great, whose exploits had already become the stuff of legend in his lifetime. In the latter part of the narrative in particular, Alexander becomes the protagonist of a travelogue, a kind of Odysseus or Sindbad, who explores the remotest places of the earth and encounters marvellous sights. Several widespread fairytale motifs have been absorbed into his adventures, such as the island that proves to be a huge fish, the water of life, and the hero’s flight to heaven. The biographee once more bears traits of the trickster. He displays verbal dexterity in dealing with his opponents and disguises himself to infiltrate the enemy camp as a spy (Konstan ). Overall, Alexander’s life story is built on the pattern of the ‘hero myth’, which includes a supposititious birth, glorious feats, and death through treachery (G. Anderson ). The ancient Lives of Homer and the Contest of Homer and Hesiod are based on folk traditions about Homer’s life. These were in circulation at least as early as the fifth century . They include a simple tale about Homer’s death following his failure to solve a childish conundrum (Ps.-Hdt. Vit. Hom. ; Certamen ). The Contest in particular incorporates many riddles similar to those propounded for entertainment at Greek social gatherings. These are used as tests of wisdom in the agōn of the two consummate bards. Contests between poets or other intellectual figures involving riddles formed a frequent motif in mythical and legendary tradition.20
F R On the legends of the Seven Sages, see Snell (), R.P. Martin (), Adrados (), Jedrkiewicz (), Bollansée (; a: , ), Busine (), Konstantakos (; ), and Schubert (). The main Greek versions of the Life of Aesop were edited by Perry (), Ferrari (), Papathomopoulos (; ), and Karla (). For commentary, see Jouanno (). The structure and design of the work were analysed by Holzberg (; ). Important literary studies include La Penna (), Winkler (: ), Jedrkiewicz (), Hägg (), Pervo (), and Jouanno (). On the popular features of the text generally, see Wills (: ), Jouanno (), Karla (b), and Hägg (a: ). On earlier traditions about Aesop and their use in the Life, see West (), Luzzatto (; ), Jedrkiewicz (: ), Giannattasio Andria (), Ragone (), Adrados (: , ), Robertson (), and Kurke (). On popular material assimilated into the narrative (fables, folktales, anecdotes, riddles, sayings), see Adrados (), Merkle (; ), van Dijk (), Luzzatto (), and Konstantakos (; ; ; ; ; ). On the Life of Secundus, see Perry (), Adrados (), Gallo (: ; ), Aune (), Hansen (: ), and Hägg (a: ).
20
See R.M. Rosen () and Konstantakos ().
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J have produced a rich literature in Hebrew (and some in Aramaic), included in the Hebrew Bible, as well as works now lost to us. After the conquests of Alexander and their coming into the orbit of classical civilization, they also contributed to Greek literature, mainly in two forms. First, the Pentateuch, and then the other books of the Hebrew Bible were translated into Greek (the ‘Septuagint’), and, second, they produced a copious literature in Greek intent on conforming to the language, styles, and genres of Greek literature, but true to their own traditions, concerns, and beliefs (‘Jewish-Hellenistic literature’).1 The vast literature in Hebrew and Aramaic produced under the Roman Empire, and partly in Babylonia (‘rabbinic literature’), was not only deliberately unhistorical (Geiger ), but also intentionally not biographical, and will thus not be considered in the present chapter. While with the progress, and eventual triumph of Christianity the Septuagint gained in spread, importance, and prominence, Jewish literature of all kinds, except for rabbinic literature, all but ceased to be produced following the disastrous end of the BarKokhba rebellion ( ). Presently, I shall briefly survey the biographical elements in the Hebrew Bible before discussing the few biographical and autobiographical works of JewishHellenistic literature and eventually the entire genre, with a view to trying to understand the reasons for the relative dearth of biographical works as against other literary genres. The possible Jewish influences on the authors of the gospels will be discussed in Chapter .
S B E S
.................................................................................................................................. Even applying a very wide-ranging attitude to biography and not sticking to a strict definition of the term,2 nothing approaching a biography is included in the Hebrew 1
It has been observed that the Jews and the Romans created Hellenistic literature in uncommon fashions: the former used the Greek language for their own concerns, the latter their own language for Greek genres. 2 Following the lead of Hägg (a).
Bible. True, the stories of the Patriarchs, and especially of Jacob, of Joseph, of Moses, and of a number of heroes leading up to and including the Kings Saul, David, and Solomon contain stories with strong biographical elements, but they never aspire to a treatment, however succinct and ephemeral, of the subject’s life from birth to death. Some of the later books of the Hebrew Bible, composed already in the Hellenistic Age, such as Daniel, though anecdotal, also retain significant biographical elements, while parts of Ezra-Nehemiah are decidedly autobiographical, even if restricted to a relatively short span of the life of their subject, and are thus akin to certain kinds of memoirs produced, e.g. under the Late Roman Republic (on which see Chapter in this volume). In this respect, Ezra-Nehemiah is not far removed from the prophetical books, which also restrict their autobiographical events and anecdotes to those relevant to their main themes. The subject matter of the Hebrew Bible is the children of Israel and their God, and individual characters, however important, receive their share only insofar as these contribute to the understanding of the workings of God in his world and of the fate of his chosen people. This tradition is crucial for understanding the total absence of biographical writing from rabbinic literature, the relative dearth of biographical works in Jewish-Hellenistic literature, and, in fact, the almost total failure by Jews to produce such works up to modern times and the blending of Jewish writers into all trends of world literature.3 It is this state of affairs that brought about the following first sentence in the entry ‘Biography’ in the Encyclopaedia Judaica (): ‘Apart from the Book of Nehemiah, which may well be considered an autobiography, Josephus’ apologetic Vita, and hagiographic works, autobiographies and biographies are completely unknown among Jews in ancient times.’4 Nevertheless, as we shall see, the biblical stories of the Patriarchs, of Joseph, and of Moses provided the material for some of the most important Lives of JewishHellenistic literature. Whatever the truth behind the story of the translation of the Pentateuch in Alexandria (Wasserstein and Wasserstein )—the first great and by far most influential translation project of the ancient world—the translation of other Hebrew books continued piecemeal and by a variety of translators, and some of them received significant additions in the process. The Hebrew Bible underwent its final canonization only around , so that eventually what came to be known in a more general sense as the Septuagint included a number of works conventionally labelled as apocrypha, still part of the Catholic and Orthodox, but not the Protestant, canon of the Bible. A great number of other Jewish works, conventionally referred to as pseudepigrapha, some of them preserved in languages other than Greek, were never canonized. Both apocrypha and pseudepigrapha contained works originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic as well as in Greek, and in some cases the original language is uncertain. Though none of these works is a biography or autobiography, some of them belong to genres close enough to be mentioned here. On the whole, it may be said that some of these works, such as Judith, though far from a biography, betray a greater interest in the personality of the hero, or in this case the heroine, than customary in biblical literature. Though the widow Judith is beautiful, wise, and wealthy, she is above all pious, and it is her piety that enables her to do the horrible and courageous deed that saves 3
Indeed, Jewish writers, from Stefan Zweig to Richard Ellmann, had more than their fair share in modern biographical writing. 4 However, in the sequence no hint is given about what is meant by ancient hagiographic works, nor can the present writer supply an answer to it.
Israel and cut off the head of Holophernes.5 The book Tobit, telling the story of Tobit from childhood to death and that of his son Tobias in similar detail, is again but a didactic story reminding the reader that piety only can bring about miracles and that the truly pious will receive their reward from God. However, one of the works in the apocrypha compilation deserves a somewhat fuller treatment.
J C S B M
.................................................................................................................................. Despite such titles as On the Kings in Judaea and the like, none of the writers known to us from fragments, such as Demetrius (late second century ), Eupolemus (mid-second century ), or Josephus’ contemporary and rival, Justus of Tiberias, wrote anything close to biography. However, one work, extant completely and of great literary (and historical)6 importance derives from a Greek genre of writing closely linked to biography. The so-called Second Book of Maccabees,7 preserved for us in its original Greek, is a rather complex work consisting of a number of distinct components, sewn together with the seams still showing. Before the main part there are quoted two letters from the Jews of Jerusalem and Judaea to their brethren in Egypt inviting them to celebrate the feast of Hanukah, the purification of the Temple of Jerusalem and the restoration of its cult, followed by the introduction by the author of the present text. There follows the main part of the text, telling the story from the eve of the religious persecution under Antiochus IV Epiphanes to Judas the Maccabee’s victory over Nicanor; into this part there are inserted (Chapters and ) the stories of the martyrdom of Eleasar and of the seven brothers, evidently following a Hebrew original. But it is the main part we are interested in, since the author—or, as it turns out, the epitomator—expressly acknowledges (:) that his work is but a one-book epitome of a (now lost for us) work in five books by a certain (not otherwise known) Jason of Cyrene. It is this work that earns the inclusion of Maccabees in the present discussion. It appears that the title of Jason’s book was The Deeds of Judas the Maccabee (: Τὰ κατὰ τὸν Ιούδαν τὸν Μακκαβαῖον); this is supported by the subscriptions of two manuscripts.8 Now the Hellenistic age produced a great number of biographies of men from various intellectual walks of life (see Chapter in this volume) but for kings, generals, and statesmen, it was works focusing on their deeds that were thought appropriate: while one wished to understand (and in many cases had to invent) the lives of men whose philosophy or poetry were admired in order to interpret and better to understand their works, in the case of statesmen and generals, it was thought advantageous to learn about their actions so
For Judith’s background in Greek literature, see Gera (: ). Owing to the detrimental divisions in the study of the ancient world, this work belongs as a rule in departments of theology or religious studies, and some ancient historians are not acquainted with this Hellenistic historical work, second in importance only to Polybius. 7 Not related to the First Book of Maccabees, a work originally written in Hebrew but preserved in a Greek translation, except for their partial correspondence of contents. 8 Ιούδα τοῦ Μακκαβαίου πράξεων ἐπιτομή (Venet.); Ιούδα τοῦ Μακκαβαίου πράξεων ἐπιστολή (Alex.). 5 6
that these could be imitated and emulated.9 It was no doubt such a work that Jason of Cyrene composed; thus, the fact that we hear nothing about Judas prior to his part in the Jewish uprising can be paralleled, for example, by Arrian on Alexander, despite his writing a generation or so after the biography by Plutarch that dwells extensively on Alexander’s birth, upbringing, and youth and must have been available to him. Also the fact that the story ends with Judas’ last victory, only a few months before his defeat and death has a number of Hellenistic parallels. Moreover, even that prince of ancient biographers, Plutarch, did not tell the stories of his emperors, as far as we can judge from the extant Galba and Otho, from birth and childhood onwards (see Chapter in this volume). Though not a biography, Jason’s work was the closest the Hellenistic age came to deal with the life and achievements of a statesman or general. Its many Jewish motifs, such as references to Jewish history or epiphaneiai (one is reminded of Raphael’s Heliodorus in the Vatican) and the centrality of the Temple of Jerusalem do not detract from the Hellenistic colouring of the work—on the contrary, the Greek language and genre and the Jewish contents make it a prime example of Jewish-Hellenistic literature. However, works that can truly be labelled biography were written only by a Jewish author from Alexandria well known to us.
P’ B W
.................................................................................................................................. Two authors of Jewish-Hellenistic literature stand out not only by the volume of their preserved writings, but also for their influence: the historian Josephus and Philo of Alexandria. Philo’s variegated works, intent on harmonizing Greek philosophy and the Jewish scriptures, exerted great influence on Christian theology and biblical exegesis. It is Philo alone, who may represent what truly can be called Jewish biography—though the recent comparison with Plutarch on equal terms as a biographer may have been too confident.10 Be that as it may, as we shall see, he was consciously composing biographies and was experimenting in the genre. Nevertheless, he has been all but ignored by the main works on biography: McGing (: ) complains that there is nothing on him in Leo (), Stuart (), Dihle (), and Momigliano (), and of more recent works one may add the papers edited by Erler and Schorn () and, most remarkably, even the all-embracing Hägg (a). Scion of a well-connected Jewish family in Alexandria, steeped in both Jewish (though not necessarily Hebrew) and Greek wisdom, the only safe date concerning his life is his participating in the Jewish embassy to Gaius Caligula in opposition to that of the Alexandrian Greeks, when he was already of advanced years.11 Hence his dates may tentatively be given as c. – . Among his extensive writings three surviving works will be discussed here: both his Abraham and his Joseph, following on De opificio mundi, are parts of his introduction to the large section of his oeuvre known as the Exposition, while 9 Geiger (). It is only fair to note that this view has been challenged and has been also recently discussed and a modification of it proposed by Stem (). 10 Niehoff (). There is no warrant for her suggestion that Philo’s concern with biography was aroused by his interest in the emperors and his sojourn in Rome and consequently no basis for her very late dating of the biographies. 11 See Ph. Leg. and J. AJ ..
the question whether also the two books of Moses belong there is disputed. There exists no external evidence for the dates of composition of Philo’s works, except for the abovementioned Legatio ad Gaium and In Flaccum, but it stands to reason that he dealt with the biblical characters in their chronological order. This assumption is convincingly supported by both the progress and the perfection of his biographical technique from the Life of Abraham to that of Joseph, and from Joseph to Moses. And let it be said, he was intentionally composing biographies, repeatedly referring to each of these works as bios (see Abraham, title; Joseph, title, ; I Moses, title, ; II Moses, ad fin.). This need not evidently be construed as evidence for Philo’s familiarity with Greek biographies, though a superficial acquaintance, such as the possibly technical use of the word bios, need not necessarily be ruled out. His proficiency in Greek literature is well attested for the classics, such as tragedy or Plato, but he nowhere seems to exhibit awareness of what were considered lesser literary genres: holding the works of Homer and Euripides in high regard does not unavoidably entail reading their largely fictitious biographies. On the contrary, there exists a strong indication of Philo’s independence in choosing the way he approached the lives of the great men of his nation. The above-mentioned progress in biographical technique and its perfection in the three extant Lives were achieved by experimentation, the author finding his way for conveying his message by way of trial and error. For these Lives were not meant to entertain, but were written with a clear message to instruct, as part of Philo’s great enterprise to interpret the sacred law of his people, exploring its philosophical depth and its divinely inspired excellence by employing his method of allegorical interpretation. The highly encomiastic nature of his Lives is a natural consequence of these biographies being only part of the exposition of this divinely inspired excellence. Thus, in I Moses –, he proposes to write the life of the greatest and most perfect man, who has been neglected by Greek logioi, who instead of the lessons (ὑϕήγησιν) of the lives of good men chose to write comedies and ‘pieces of voluptuous licence’ (ἀσελγείας). The very title of the essay on Abraham, the only one surviving from among those on the three Patriarchs, provides the clue to Philo’s initially totally allegorical approach also to biography: The Life of the Wise Man Made Perfect Through Teaching, or (The First Book) on Unwritten Laws, that is On Abraham.12 The story of Abraham himself starts () only after a brief exposé of the allegorical figures of Enos, Enoch, and Noah, and the introduction of the following triad of the Patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who have acquired virtue respectively through teaching, nature, and practice. The description of the life starts with the command to Abraham to leave his country for a new one (). Throughout the work, Philo sticks to his accustomed method—never letting the text speak for itself, but devoting most of the space to explanation and to his allegorical interpretation. The Life is divided into sections, each consisting of a narrative telling us a part of the life of the Patriarch in chronological order of self-contained episodes, followed by a more or less equally long section of allegorical interpretation of that narrative. This is not to say that the narrative part is free from reflections, advice, and interpretation. Moreover, the biblical story, Philo’s model, is used with a great degree of liberty, though of course some of the interpretative material was traditional and present before Philo. It not only embellishes the biblical narrative with vivid details but also every means is 12
Βίος σοϕοῦ τοῦ κατὰ διδασκαλίαν τελειώθεντος ἢ νόμων ἀγράϕων τὸ πρῶτον ὅ ἐστι περὶ Ἀβρααμ.
used to convey the message and remove anything potentially harmful to it. Thus, at –, on the occasion of Sarah’s death, we are told the story of her magnanimity in giving her handmaid to Abraham, so that her own barrenness shall not deny him offspring. However, in the sequence of the story, Sarah’s urging her husband to expel Hagar and her son Ishmael from the household and their subsequent suffering and salvation in the desert are passed over in silence. Similarly, in the extensive story of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham’s haggling with God over the number of just men there is omitted. As a not at all uncharacteristic example of Philo’s allegorical interpretation, one may choose the story of the war of the four kings against the five (–; Gen ); the four kings signify the four passions (pleasure, desire, fear, and grief) and the five kings symbolize the five senses: it is the five who become subject to the four. As an example of Philo’s reflections, one may mention the story of Abraham and the three angels (–; Gen :–), where the lack of hospitality of the Egyptians is contrasted with that of Abraham; this kindness is a product of piety (θεοσέβεια) (–). An interesting feature, retained also in the later and better arranged Lives, is his sparing use of personal names, e.g. even in the much better composed Moses, his brother Aaron, often referred to, is never named. In a similar vein, ethnic and geographical designations are adapted to current concepts.13 Interestingly enough, missing from this Life is the most important feature of the Patriarch’s life: his belief in and worship of one God and their covenant. Were these too commonplace and self-evident to discuss? Yet even on Philo’s own terms, the Life of Abraham is in some respects unsatisfactory and, as we shall presently see, less meticulous than the two following biographies. One case in point is Philo’s failure to live up to the promise in the title and demonstrate the central part of ‘teaching’ in the character of Abraham. Yet it is practice that makes the biographer. The story of Joseph is by far the most eventful and dramatic in the Pentateuch, lending itself effortlessly to retelling and moralizing. Its presentation by Philo under the heading of the statesman, πολιτικός, may have, however, served, beside his usual and immediate goal of allegory, also a political purpose: considering the antagonistic relations between Jews and Greeks in Alexandria, the story of a Jew, who eventually became viceroy of Egypt and saved the country from famine, had an obvious moral. The question of the targets of this moral is linked with that of Philo’s intended audience. Even assuming the Alexandrian Jews’ familiarity with the Pentateuch in their own version, the Septuagint, their instruction in its deep, allegorical meaning must have been the prime ambition of Philo’s life work. However, an in part gentile readership could never have been ruled out, and may have been actually hoped for: Joseph would have made an ideal subject for them. The Life of Joseph is very close to our modern notion of a biography, giving in great detail and with embellishments the entire story of its hero, including his dreams in his youth, his being sold by his brothers, the story of his intended seduction by Potiphar’s wife, his incarceration and subsequent elevation to viceroy after solving the dreams of the butler, the baker, and eventually of Pharaoh, and the encounter with his brothers and the concluding happy end; nothing of importance is left out of the story. Thus, I Mos. speaks of Jewish immigrants from ‘Babylon and the inland (ἄνω) satrapies’, in Moses goes to Arabia, in there are Arabs in the story of the maidens at the well, and in the Israelites arrive at the land occupied by Phoinices; for Syria as the land the Israelites are going to, see ; II Mos. ; . 13
This Life, too, like that of Abraham, is divided into chronologically arranged sections, each split into narrative and allegorical interpretation. Nevertheless, and perhaps significantly in view of the following Life of Moses, its last section lacks the allegorical part. The narrative is more vivid and accomplished than Abraham, and Philo also introduces a new element: though of course the biblical narrative does contain speeches, they were not brought into play in the Life of the Patriarch; in the Life of Joseph, on the other hand, they are employed to great effect, and in ways serving the author’s purpose, a sure sign of his experimenting and progressing in his biographical art. Now Philo was familiar not only with biblical narrative but also with Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon so that at this stage of his biographical project it must have dawned on him that speeches could be employed in biography no less effectively than in historiography. Once he saw the advantages of introducing speeches into his biographies, he did so with skill and to the greatest effect. A good example is provided in the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife (–). Her lecherous designs and his resistance are described in brief, followed by her active attempt to seduce him, holding on to his clothes and eventually accusing the resisting innocent youth of attempted rape. Joseph’s two-verse speech to Potiphar’s wife in Genesis :–, when she first attempts to seduce him is turned into nine highly rhetorical paragraphs (–) and deferred to the more dramatic moment when she tries actively to grab him and seizes his clothes. (The modern reader is reminded of opera, when at the height of dramatic action and in acute danger, the hero finds himself delivering a lengthy and well-thought-out speech/aria.) The episode is followed by the allegorical interpretation focussed on self-control (καρτερικόν), the third of the characteristics needed of the statesman after those of shepherding and household management (ποιμενικόν, οἰκονομικόν). The episode ends with an internal dialogue of the true statesman (–), and finishes with a flourish—a quotation from Euripides. Some ideas of Philo’s intellectual world and perhaps that of his envisaged readers may be shown by the episode of Joseph’s imprisonment and solution of the dreams (–; Gen :–:), followed by the moral of the story (–) and the protracted allegorical interpretation (–). The statesman is the best interpreter of dreams, also of waking ones, he must like some wise expounder of dreams, interpret the day time visions and phantoms of those who think themselves awake, and with suggestions commended by reason and probability shew them the truth about each of these visions: that this is beautiful, that ugly, this just, that unjust, and so with all the rest; what is prudent, courageous, pious, religious, beneficial, profitable, and conversely what is unprofitable, unreasonable, ignoble, impious, irreligious, deleterious, harmful, selfish. (; trans. Colson : )
His historical examples are Dionysius and Croesus () as well as the fate of Egypt, of Macedon (), and the Ptolemies (). The last and most accomplished of the biographies is the two-book essay on Moses.14 As mentioned, already in Joseph the last section lacks the separate part of the allegorical interpretation. In the Moses, Philo seems to have realized the literary drawbacks of the 14
See the fine analysis by McGing ().
division of the text into narrative and ensuing elucidation and decided instead to integrate the story and reflections to much improved effect—it is only the story of the burning bush, not too far into the events, that receives a truly allegorical interpretation. In consequence, instead of the episodic structure of the two preceding biographies, we are presented with a fluent narrative. Moreover, the two-book division is anything but technical: it heralds a more sophisticated approach to the life of the man who was, after all, the most important person in the history of the nation, and the divinely inspired author of the work that was the target of Philo’s lifelong exegetical undertaking—the Pentateuch. Moses, the most perfect man, is treated under four headings, rather than as the prototype of one virtue, like Philo’s earlier heroes: he is king, legislator, high priest, and prophet all in one. This perfection is clearly the outcome of Moses’ self-education—he trains himself to the two best types of life, the theoretical and the practical (). The two-book division serves the purpose of emphasizing these different aspects of the great man. The first book describes, in chronological order, the life of Moses from his birth and upbringing at the court of the king of Egypt to his leading his people out of that land into the desert and finally to the pact of letting the (unnamed) tribes of Reuben and Gad settle in the Transjordan—in this book, the leader of his people features as king. The second book’s structure is entirely different: here Moses’ achievements are discussed by categories, as those of the legislator, the high priest, and the prophet. It is all but incredible that this typical exemplar of what Leo dubbed ‘Alexandrian biography’, by the Alexandrian author from whom we have more writings extant than from any other, did not earn even a mention in his book (Leo ), the fountainhead of all modern discussions of biography.15 The new structure was not without its difficulties. Some items, such as crossing of the Red Sea and the story of the manna, would be repeated (both in Book under the heading of prophet), some important incidents in the desert, such as the story of the Golden Calf, are told only in Book (under the heading of high priest). Sometimes Philo’s choices strike one as odd: while the Song of the Sea, after the successful crossing of the Red Sea and the drowning of the Egyptians, is referred to in extreme brevity, other stories, like that of Balak and the prophecy of (the unnamed) Bileam are given extensively and in parts almost word for word. On the whole, of course, Philo does what also every other biographer is bound to do in disposing of his source material, though obviously in the present case we are in the fortunate position of having the biographer’s source before us. Indeed, McGing () lives up to perfection in the title of his chapter, ‘Philo’s Adaptation of the Bible in the Life of Moses’, where his task is conceived as similar to that of Russell (), an analysis of Plutarch’s Coriolanus, another case where the biographer follows a single extant source. Only a few self-explicatory features of this Life will be mentioned here. Again, the employment and adaptation of speeches are remarkable. Moses’ scolding speech to the shepherds at the well (–), for example, replaces his three words at Exodus :: ‘Moses saved them.’ At –, Philo departs from the biblical order of the Ten Plagues so that he can group them according to the philosophical division into elements; the description of 15
This description should by no means be construed as the present writer’s concurrence with Leo’s thesis of a tidy division of the genre of biography into ‘Alexandrian’ and ‘Peripatetic’ types. It would be idle to speculate on Leo’s reasons for this omission was it that Philo did not belong to classical philology but to theology and the study of religion, or was it the unease of the converted Jew in Wilhelmian Germany?
Exodus : of those going along with the Israelites as ἐπίμικτος πολύς (‘mixed multitude’) is explained at as children of Egyptian women by Hebrew fathers, surely of some contemporary relevance to his readers. The neglect of Philo by almost all discussions of ancient biography has been referred to above. Here it is essential to stress the truly biographical nature of the works here surveyed and their being quintessential examples of Jewish-Hellenistic literature, clothing the most traditional Jewish contents in a truly Greek dress. However, the loss of so much of Greek biographical writing prior to Philo does not allow us to paint a clear picture of his dependence in form on his predecessors or of his possible innovations. Nor should the fact that the source material of the Lives is extant and well known detract from his achievement. As for the fact that Philo made biography a vehicle for ulterior motifs, in this he was hardly different from many Greek biographers, his aim being the allegorical interpretation of the Jewish law and the vindication of its excellence rather than the goals Greek biographers set themselves. And not always entirely different: these writings convey ‘the lesson (ὑϕήγησιν) taught by good men and their lives’ (I Moses ). Philo indeed is to some extent comparable to Plutarch in presenting exemplary Lives as models to his readers (see Niehoff : ). Nevertheless, it is remarkable that Philo insists that there were also Greeks among the teachers of Moses (I Moses , ). Even in stating the importance of small actions (I Moses ), he seems to be anticipating Plutarch’s famous dictum in Alexander (on which see Chapter in this volume). Finally, one suspects that some of the above-mentioned neglect was due to the fact that Philo’s biographies did not lend themselves to quarrying from them historical facts the way e.g. Plutarch’s biographies were used up to two generations ago. It is time to restore Philo to his proper place in the history of Greek biography. In contrast to the neglect of Philo, one Jewish work in Greek has been often discussed under the heading of autobiography. However, before proceeding to that work, another work under the same caption deserves to be introduced.
T A K H
.................................................................................................................................. Thanks to the extended reports of Josephus, both in the Jewish War and in the Jewish Antiquities, King Herod of Judaea is one of the best-known figures of the Augustan age, and certainly one of the most colourful.16 For our present purposes, it is especially fortunate that we happen to know that Josephus’ main source for the history of Herod was Nicolaus of Damascus, who after the deaths of Cleopatra and Mark Antony moved to the court of Herod and served him for many years as friend, diplomat, and political adviser. In addition to these roles, Nicolaus was at the centre of an intellectual circle at the king’s court and acted as his counsellor in Greek learning.17 He vouches for the king’s intellectual interests, telling us that after studying philosophy and rhetoric, he turned to history, a subject most
See Geiger (: ). For this intellectual circle, see D.W. Roller (: ); for a more restricted view, see Geiger (b: ). 16 17
commendable and useful for rulers (FGrHist F ). The remark that it was Herod who encouraged Nicolaus, eventually the author of an historical work in books, to apply himself to the writing of history should be taken with more than a grain of salt. Nicolaus was, of course, beside the History and other writings, also the author of a biography of the young Augustus (see Chapter in this volume), based on the latter’s autobiography published at an early stage in his career, and of an autobiography. It is thus hardly a daring guess to envisage him as the prime mover behind the king’s autobiography.18 Josephus tells us about the designs against Herod by Hyrcanus, instigated by Alexandra, Hyrcanus’ daughter and the mother of Herod’s wife, the Hasmonaean Mariamme, leading to the condemnation and execution of Hyrcanus (J. AJ .–), and he adds: We have written about these matters as they are found in the Memoirs (ἐν τοῖς ὑπομνήμασιν) of King Herod. But other sources do not agree with this account, for they hold that it was not for such reasons that Herod killed Hyrcanus but rather that he did so after bringing charges against him which were invented with characteristic trickery. (; trans. Marcus and Wikgren : )
There follows an account hostile to Herod. No doubt both the reference to Herod’s Memoirs and to the account of the ‘others’ is taken from Josephus’ source, Nicolaus. This single passage is probably a good sample of the general tendency of the work—Herod had a lot to answer for and to be apologetic about. Unfortunately this is the single reference to the work so there is no knowing whether it displayed also other significant features. Of more interest for our present concerns is the genealogy of the work and its fitting into JewishHellenistic literature and into the history of Jewish (auto)biography. The penchant of Hellenistic rulers for intellectual accomplishments, and more particularly for writing works with an autobiographical content is well known.19 Their letters, diaries, memoirs, and autobiographical inscriptions were aimed at assuring their place in history by way of justifying some of their actions and improving on and boosting others. Though we cannot guess to what extent Nicolaus introduced him to these or other royal works, it is inconceivable that Herod, an important member of the club of Roman clientkings, was not acquainted with at least the writings of two of his contemporaries. Archelaus II of Cilicia’s daughter Glaphyra was married to Herod’s son, Alexander; Archelaus was the author of a chorography of the territories covered by Alexander the Great and of other works (FGrHist ) and it is more than likely that Herod made a point of not being seen lagging behind his relative by marriage in intellectual achievements. The learned Juba II of Mauretania20 was the author of a wide variety of works in both Greek and Latin; like Herod
18 Though not expressly stated, it goes without saying that the autobiography reported by Nicolaus was written in Greek. We have no information of Herod being acquainted with Latin, so he was not likely to have read the autobiographies of his close friend Agrippa or of Augustus, though one may assume second hand acquaintance with them, perhaps through the agency of Nicolaus. 19 See Bearzot (). She criticizes my denying the existence of Greek autobiography without commenting on the sequence of counting genres close to autobiography, and goes on herself with an extensive, and indeed impressive, recount of such works. 20 On Juba II, see D.W. Roller ().
he founded a Caesarea and was married to a daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, the important court closest to Herod’s, but after her divorce from Herod’s son Alexander, married Glaphyra, thus creating a sort of royal marriage connection with Herod. Though Herod could hardly contend on an equal footing with the truly scholarly Juba, he seems to have amassed at least one library,21 and having Nicolaus at his side and at the centre of an intellectual circle, he must have done his best to keep up with his fellow royals also in his scholarly interests—in his generosity towards Greek cities and cultural institutions such as the Olympics, he seems to have outdone them all.22 To what extent is it justified to regard Herod’s Memoirs or Autobiography as a work of Jewish-Hellenistic literature? Despite the occasional contemporary23 and later Talmudic scoffs at his Jewishness, both our major literary source (J. BJ .; AJ .) and documentary evidence coming from Italy (Cotton and Geiger : nos. –) refer to him as king of the Jews, though his realm contained also considerable non-Jewish populations. Yet it seems that the Memoirs stretched the above-mentioned definition of Jewish-Hellenistic literature to its limits. Even though one may assume that the Greek language and style of the work conformed to at least the minimal standards required, and the genre was one fairly widespread in the Hellenistic age, and especially popular with rulers, one assumes that the contents were Jewish only insofar as the author, the main subject, and most or at least many of the other characters were Jews, and some subject matters that must have been extensively discussed, such as Herod’s rebuilding of the Temple of Jerusalem, were of great importance to all Jews. Herod’s Autobiography, a work if at all only fleetingly referred to in modern discussions, deserves to be included in this survey before turning to the autobiographical Vita of Josephus.
T V J
.................................................................................................................................. Flavius Josephus, the author of the seven-book Jewish War and the twenty-book Jewish Antiquities,24 also composed two shorter works, the polemical Against Apion and the Life of Joseph.25 Appended to the end of the Antiquities (.), that were written in the thirteenth year of Domitian and the fifty-sixth of the author’s life ( –), but probably published only after Agrippa II’s death in (Vit. ), it displays a truly autobiographic structure: it starts with the subject’s ancestors, his youth and education, relates the main events of his life and includes his marriages and children, up to the time of writing. The main objections to this appraisal rest on the extreme imbalance in the construction of the work: Chapters – describe Josephus’ early years, Chapters –, the bulk of the text, are
21 Hirschfeld (). If he had a library on Masada, he more than probably would have libraries in his other important palaces too. Needless to say, such a library would consist of Greek books rather than of scrolls of the Torah. 22 Although a great number of biographies of Herod have appeared since, and keep appearing, Schalit (), not free from faults and severely out of date, has not yet been truly replaced. 23 His rival, the Hasmonaean Antigonus called him (AJ .) ‘an Idumaean, that is, half Jew’. 24 See, most recently, Villalba Varneda () with previous bibliography. 25 The title in the most important manuscripts is Ἰωσήπου βίος.
devoted to only about six months, between the end of and early , with an excursus against Justus26 at –, followed by –, his misfortunes and survival, and – (epilogues). The digression against Justus is acknowledged for what it is, παρέκβασις (), though as often, it is the digression that is the heart of the work. In fact, it seems to be the consensus, that the main part of the text and its core were written as a report of Josephus’ actions as general of the Galilee and the motivation for its present form and publication was the recent publication of Justus of Tiberias’ version of the events () and Josephus’ need to settle the score with him and to publish what he hoped would be regarded as the true version. In it, Josephus the Wise, Josephus the Brave, the Resourceful, the Beloved by the People stars against a host of evil persons harming their own people, among whom Justus and John of Gischala are only the most prominent ones. Moreover, the Life takes for granted the reader’s acquaintance with Josephus’ earlier works, and thus abstains from retelling the story of his defence of Jotapata, the suicide pact, and his capture (), though in the earlier parts parallels to the narratives of the War are related. Were the central part shorter and better balanced, nobody would doubt the work’s definition as an autobiography, although the preceding and following parts are rather short; nevertheless we do get a good (and boastful) account of his lineage, his date of birth, his education, and early brilliance, his embassy to Rome and his appointment as general of the Galilee, his actions there, and after only a reference on what has been told about his defence of Jotapata and his capture, a short account of his accompanying Vespasian to the siege of Jerusalem, his journey to Rome, his family life, and his connections and controversies in Rome to the time of writing. Though the style is rough, apparently without the advantage of the helpers in the Antiquities, this appears to be a good complete example of memoirs or autobiographies of generals and statesmen, of which elsewhere we have only fragments preserved.
C
.................................................................................................................................. Only the two Hellenized Jews, Philo and Josephus, produced Jewish biographies and an autobiography, while Herod’s memoirs belong here only insofar as the king was a (in traditional terms probably not very good) Jew. The reason for the abstention of the vast Jewish literature in Hebrew and Aramaic to produce such or even related works, and in fact be anti-biographical27 belongs in the sphere of Judaic, not Classical, studies. Though the question has apparently not often been raised and discussed except in contrasting the absence of rabbinic biography with the gospels,28 it has to be explained by the preference for the community as against the individual, and by the direction of the affairs of humans by the God of Israel rather than by themselves. However, as said, this discussion belongs elsewhere. Nevertheless, it is not devoid of interest to contrast the Greeks and rabbinic 26
On Josephus’ rival in the war and in its historiography, see Rajak (). An example for non cognoscenti: to the present day, traditional and rabbinic authorities are referred to by the name of their chief work, to the extent that in wide circles their names remain unknown as if, say, Tolstoy were known only as ‘The War and Peace’. 28 See Burridge () and Goldhill (). 27
Judaism. The Greeks’ interest in the lives of their great intellectuals produced largely fictional biographies of, say, Homer or Euripides (see Chapter in this volume and Lefkowitz ). The similar interests of the Jews produced only disconnected anecdotes, in the form of midrash, filling in ‘missing’ parts of the life, without ever an attempt to connect these and shape them into a biographical mould. Perhaps the appropriate question concerns not the failure of the Jews to produce biography, but its invention by the Greeks.
F R There exists no overview of ancient Jewish biography but the numerous discussions of Jewish Hellenistic literature all contain surveys and analyses of the works dealt with in this chapter. Among these surveys, the best informed are Schürer ( ) and Stone (). McGing () is an excellent discussion of the Life of Moses and Villalba Varneda () takes a literary approach to this text.
A As always, discussion with Deborah Gera was stimulating and constructive; she bears no blame for this chapter’s shortcomings.
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T Christian biographical tradition is simultaneously fundamental to the early church and also fundamentally different from Graeco-Roman biographical traditions. This difference emerges from the distinctive discourse of the canonical gospels. These foundational texts were not sui generis across the board in terms of form and genre, but their distinctive discourse and their devotion to narrative as a standard of orthodoxy, combined with their role as historical and theological authorities in the church, gave them a paradigmatic status never held by Graeco-Roman, or even most Jewish, biographies in their own reception histories. In this chapter I attempt to trace this influence by means of comparison with various genres that arose subsequent to the canonical gospels and with direct reference to them: apocryphal literature, saints’ Lives, and miracle collections, among others. By necessity, this will require moving into unfamiliar territory linguistically with respect to Graeco-Roman biography—this Handbook, indeed, sets out to do precisely this in Part IV. Much of the bulk of Christian biography survives outside of Greek and Latin: Syriac (Chapter in this volume), Coptic (Chapter ), Armenian (Chapter ), and other languages all preserve a huge number of biographical texts (Stone ; ; Debié and Desreumaux ; Binggeli ). One view of the success of such texts, as evidenced by their linguistic plurality, asserts that these were ‘popular’ texts which thrived in ‘popular’ (i.e. non-elite) language circles (Cameron : –). Definitions of such terms are elusive, however, and arguments have been made recently that categorizing literature or language by putative social function can distort complex systems of identity and communication (Papaconstantinou ; ; S.F. Johnson : Introduction). The biographical impulse permeated every corner of early Christianity, and to study it in its fullness one has to venture into literary histories that look strikingly different from classical literature (Cameron ; Whitby ; Hägg and Rousseau ).
O N G
.................................................................................................................................. One of the most important starting points for understanding the legacy of the gospels as biographical literature is the axiom that the gospels as they stand are already
interpretations.1 The process of canonicity does not concern us here, but the cognitive impact of the canon is very much at the core of this chapter. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are individually distinctive in style, emphasis, and theology. At the same time, they did not emerge out of nothing, and they clearly share a great deal of background. Werner Kelber has profitably emphasized the oral-textual nature of their composition and, further, that, from the point of view of Redaktionsgeschichte (redaction criticism), the authorship of the gospels is deeply enmeshed in competition and re-direction. Kelber calls this competitive aspect of the gospels ‘interpretive traditioning’ and posits that the commitment to narrative in Mark, above all, is itself a signal of competitive orthodoxy over and against the ‘sayings’ gospel-genre (e.g. the Gospel of Thomas) (Kelber : , ). Narrative, in other words, was at the root of the conception of the gospels and became itself a distinctive orthodoxy. I contend below that this recognition of narrative as orthodox—true stories— was one shibboleth in late antique literature: hagiographical texts often signal their commitment to the gospel model by imitation and explicit lip-service, even when the execution of the literary work is very different. Which brings us to a question of definitions: are the gospels biographies? Strictly speaking, no, they do not conform to standard definitions of biography. Consider the definition offered by Tomas Hägg in his Art of Ancient Biography in Antiquity: ‘a literary text of book length telling the life story of an historical individual from cradle to grave (or a substantial part of it)’ (Hägg a: ix). As Hägg notes in his discussion of the gospels, they may be book-length, but they certainly do not tell the life story of Jesus (ibid.: –). In his puzzlement over how to ascribe the gospels to a genre—a venerable practice—what Hägg seems to miss is exactly this point, that the gospels as we have them are already participating in an oral-written practice of interpretation. The question of what they are is inseparable from what they were being read as in their immediate context. This is a different point from the question of what other ancient genres the gospels might be related to. First of all, it avoids the obvious genetic fallacy, but it also allows for a proliferation of gospel texts that took very different approaches to biography or towards Jesus, approaches to which the canonical gospels are responding. Moreover, the literary trajectory of Christian literature does not show any clear awareness of genres and forms the gospels could have been drawing on: rightly or wrongly from our enlightened viewpoint, the gospels were taken to be biographies by their ancient readers. Averil Cameron made this point foundational in her Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: Christianity was a religion with a story. Indeed, it possessed several different kinds of stories. But two were pre eminent: Lives, biographies of divine or holy personages; and Acts, records of their doings, and often of their deaths. Narrative is at their very heart; for whatever view one takes of the evolution of the Gospels, the remembered events and sayings from the life of Jesus were in fact strung together in a narrative sequence and ever afterward provided both a literary and a moral pattern. (Cameron : ) Kelber (: , and esp. ): ‘Inasmuch as the Gospel constitutes interpretation itself, readers and hearers who interpret the Gospels continue hermeneutical practices pursued by the evangelists and set into motion by others before them. The encompassing condition that unites hearers, readers, and exegetes with the Gospel tradition is interpretation.’ On studying the gospels through ancient biography, see Licona (). 1
To put this point in different words, in terms of late antique literary history, the cognitive impact of the gospels is more important for questions of biography than the gospels’ relationship to the intentions of their authors, or even to the person of Jesus, for that matter. Nevertheless, when read alongside one another, you can see clearly the tensions over genre, as well as the felt anxiety of influence of Hellenistic biography, present in the gospels. This is true even as each gospel writer seems to have been free of the overt influence of classical biographical genres (like biography/autobiography itself, but also romance, fable, aretalogy, etc.) and competed with internal Judaeo-Christian traditions, oral and otherwise, for the right to claim an authoritative structure. To take an easy example, the Gospel of Mark includes no discussion of Jesus’ birth or youth but begins from the public proclamation of his ministry through his baptism by John the Baptist in the River Jordan (Mark ). Luke, who used Mark as a source, saw an opportunity to create an infancy narrative (as did Matthew) and did so, while also providing a few tantalizing sentences about Jesus’ precocious youth. But Luke’s pre-baptism narrative amounts to only two chapters out of twenty-four. Unlike Hellenistic and Roman biography, no description of Jesus’ physical features is given (Hägg a: ). Luke thus includes a veneer of birth-to-death biography, in the traditional style, but he is clearly not committed to that type of writing, and in the end none of the gospels adheres to biographical convention. Nevertheless, if Luke chose to gesture towards the biographical in this matrix of oral and written sources, then it stands to reason that he is doing so to bring kleos to his own picture of Jesus. Of course, in this regard, the church deemed Luke successful, and, as a consequence, later Christian writers saw a similar narrative structure, gesturing towards biography but never completely whole with it, as requisite for orthodox writing about holy individuals. The performative setting of these not-quite-biographical saints’ Lives—in churches and monastic environments—was shared with the gospels themselves, and the liturgical propinquity of narrative biography only led to further reinforcement of orthodox narrativity.
A
.................................................................................................................................. The texts categorized today as ‘Christian apocrypha’ are often celebrated by scholars because of their heterodoxy in comparison to the familiar canonical books. This approach, however, misses the fact that the apocrypha, though occasionally legislated against by church leaders, were wildly popular and clearly influenced Christian writers throughout the late antique period. There is no doubt that apocryphal narrative represents a ‘Wild West’ of Christian literature: innumerable competing stories about Jesus, Mary, and the apostles explored every narrative door left open by the New Testament and even reimagined canonical scenes on occasion (Shoemaker ). Elsewhere I have characterized the enormous bulk of apocryphal literature as the ‘dark matter’ of Late Antiquity, both because of the corpus size and also because it rarely gets treated as a mainstream force in Christian literature (S.F. Johnson ; ). The supposed heterodoxy of apocryphal literature needs to be tempered by the fact that, in terms of narrative style, these multifarious texts adhere very closely to the biographical impulse already present in the gospels, and it is clear that the vast majority of apocryphal texts took the gospels and acts as an assumed starting
point for their own imaginative creations. The gradual closing of the canon was, in fact, a stimulus to Christian literature rather than an obstacle. Collections of apocrypha existed in Antiquity. The most important was the collection of apocryphal acts of the apostles attributed to a Leucus Charinus and championed in Manichaean circles as part of their received holy books.2 This collection included the five standard acts: in rough chronological order of authorship, the Acts of John (c.–), the Acts of Paul (c.–), the Acts of Peter (c.–), the Acts of Andrew (c.), and the Acts of Thomas (c.–) (Klauck : ). The apocryphal acts of the apostles are not consistent enough among themselves to constitute their own separate genre (Bovon ). They are frequently compared to the ancient novel, however, particularly in their commitment to a lively and fluid Mediterranean world in which travel was common, public dialogue and debate prominent, and in which the heroic acts of the protagonists often retained a romantic flair (Pervo ; Schmeling ; Futre Pinheiro, Perkins, and Pervo ). Biographically speaking, the martyrdoms of the apostles often provide the centrepiece of the narrative and in this they reinforce the paradigmatic quality of the gospels while also aping the form of early martyr acts and anticipating the genre of the saint’s Life. They often begin in medias res and usually do not tell the biographical history of the apostles: indeed, they presume a knowledge of the basic facts of the apostle’s career and offer unknown (or ‘hidden’, i.e. apocryphal) stories to satisfy the readers’ curiosity about gaps in the canonical accounts. It is a significant fact, therefore, that, among the plethora of apocryphal literature surviving from Early Christianity and Late Antiquity, no complete birth-to-death biographies of the apostles seem to have been attempted. The closest we get are the encyclopaedic (or anthological) collections from early Byzantium which collect the traditions of the travels of the apostles, especially the bishoprics they founded and their final resting places (S.F. Johnson ).3 These apostolic hand-lists are sometimes very spare, with only one or two lines of summary biography, but they were significantly enlarged as time went on and the collections were eventually expanded to include all of the seventy-two disciples mentioned in Luke . This disembodied number from the gospels was given flesh by culling all of the names mentioned throughout the New Testament, particularly the individuals mentioned in the closing sections of Paul’s letters, and attaching them to known bishoprics and apostolic traditions throughout the Mediterranean. The hand-lists survive today under pseudonyms such as Ps.-Epiphanius and Ps.-Dorotheus, and, like much of the earlier apocryphal literature, were active sites of rewriting, expansion, and epitomization.4 The biographies of the apostles, especially the seventy-two, were moving In the ninth century, Photius knows these texts as a collection entitled ‘Circuits of the Apostles’ (αἱ περίοδοι τῶν ἀποστόλων), authored by Leucus Charinus. The Manichaeans claimed Charinus as the author of the entirety of their apocryphal canon. See Phot. Bibl. cod. , with a discussion by Klauck (: ). 3 On the place of these collections within a larger ‘encyclopaedic’ or ‘antiquarian’ turn in Byzantium, see Odorico () and Rapp (). 4 See the edition of most of these texts in Schermann (). See Van Esbroeck () for the rich eastern Christian traditions surrounding these collections. See Dolbeau () for the western tradition. Van Esbroeck (: ) notes the desideratum of working out the genealogy of these texts, which he was not able to fulfil before his untimely death in . Dolbeau () has largely achieved this within the Latin tradition. However, the relationship of all the versions to the surviving Greek exemplars has not been satisfactorily explained, an especially difficult task given the numerous versions in eastern Christian 2
targets and could be manipulated to coordinate with present-day ecclesiastical concerns during Byzantium and the western Middle Ages. Apart from the apocryphal acts of the apostles, the apocryphal gospels that survive certainly include more details about the childhood of Jesus than do the canonical gospels (e.g. Infancy Gospel of Thomas, c.). And the second-century Protoevangelium of James focuses on the immaculate conception and birth of the Virgin Mary. Clearly there were more stories in circulation about Jesus and his family than have survived in the canonical gospels themselves. The closing of the Gospel of John tells us as much: ‘But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written’ (John :, RSV). Likewise, the opening of the Gospel of Luke refers to ‘many’ other attempts at telling the history of Jesus’ life (Luke :–). However, the surviving apocryphal gospels presuppose the existence of the canonical gospels; it cannot be these works the gospels are referring to. Instead, the manifold apocryphal texts of the period should be read as commentaries, extensions, and corrections to the canonical gospels rather than as independent traditions competing with the New Testament. The Manichaeans were, it seems, the only significant religious community to set up what represented an alternative canon based on apocryphal texts.5 In other words, the biographical imprimatur of the gospels had a lasting effect on the Christian literary tradition. While, again, it is difficult to call the gospels strict biographies in the Graeco-Roman sense, they were read as narratively authoritative, and individuals throughout early Christian history were given similar narrative treatments, which derived their value partly from the expectations of readers conditioned by the received lives of Jesus.
S’ L
.................................................................................................................................. Innumerable ‘Lives’ of saints were written, in every early Christian language, throughout the late antique period. These Lives continued the same trends present in the process outlined above. The reception of the gospels as narrative models among the varied authors of the Christian apocrypha finds an analogue in subsequent centuries in the varied corpus of late antique ‘hagiography’. In fact, apocryphal literature continued to be written, alongside and in conjunction with hagiographical texts, to the degree that the modern separation between these types of texts is historically artificial and serves to keep these overlapping literary histories too neatly in isolation. Authors of the different categories were inspired by each other and, eventually, apocryphal literature about the apostles was treated as hagiographical in its own right (S.F. Johnson ). languages published since Schermann (). In some cases, as Van Esbroeck notes, it appears that the eastern versions retain an earlier tradition than either the Latin or Greek, and it may even be the case that the surviving Greek manuscripts (or portions of them) represent re translations from Syriac or Georgian. The cache of ‘gnostic’ documents discovered at Nag Hammadi in published in critical editions and translations from onwards do not represent a consistent world view or ethical outlook by any means. The variety of cosmology is very impressive and interesting in its own right, but there is no evidence that these were the collected ‘scriptures’ of a single community, in opposition to the proto orthodox community represented by the New Testament. On this point, see Emmel (). 5
To begin with a well-developed example of the saint’s Life, the sixth-century Coptic Panegyric on Abraham of Farshut opens with a bare narrative about his upbringing: Our saint then, father, prophet, and archimandrite Apa Abraham, belonged to the district of Diospolis, being from a village called Tberčot. He was the son of some prominent people among those who lived in that village. I myself was one of his relatives. And it happened after he was born and was progressing, that he increased greatly in good favour before God and men, as it is written concerning the prophet Samuel ( Sam. :). And it happened that after he had grown up and completed twelve years, that his parents enrolled him in school under a diligent and devout teacher who instructed him in the teaching of the divinely inspired scriptures, as it is written concerning the lawgiver Moses, that he was instructed in all the wisdom of Egypt. I myself was also in the same school with him, under the same teacher with him. And we studied in this same school together. But I, because of my insignificance and slothfulness, was not able to comprehend this teaching fully. But he, because of his purity and the brilliance of his soul, completed the education fully. And it happened after he completed the education (that) he advanced in wisdom and years as it is written in the Gospel according to Luke (Luke :). (ed. and trans. Goehring : )
This passage offers a number of genre-markers that signal the subject and mode of expression in a saint’s Life. Abraham’s place of birth is given, thus offering a historicogeographical foothold to the reader, even though personal knowledge of this town is not at all required to understand the Life. His parents’ role in fulfilling societal expectations is noted, and he is duly educated and excels in his education. The Old Testament figure of Samuel is cited, who spent his early years attached to the Tabernacle at Shiloh before starting his public ministry as a prophet. Interestingly, but not unusually, the author inserts himself into the narrative, saying they shared the experience of schooling. The author, however, was not as successful as Abraham, thus distancing himself from the excellence of the saint while also confirming his trustworthiness as an eyewitness of the events he is narrating. This short introduction is capped by a reference to the perennially valuable verses about Jesus’ own success in youth from the gospel of Luke. Indeed, the whole passage is reminiscent of Luke , and it serves as a reminder of how the gospels, and biblical texts more generally, were often the primary literary models for the authors of saints’ Lives. In the course of the Panegyric on Abraham of Farshut many key terms from Greek hagiography are used which further signal the literary setting of the narrative. In particular, the word ⲁⲛⲁⲥⲧⲣⲟⲫⲏ (ἀναστροϕή in Greek) is used to describe the ‘way of life’ that Abraham adhered to: one of devotion, above all, to the monastic principles of Pachomius of Tabennesi and Shenute of Atripe (ibid.: – and passim). This life included the renunciation of the values of the world and the retreat into monastic and ascetic seclusion. However, as with many saints’ Lives, Abraham’s seclusion is something of an illusion: he is summoned by letter to appear before the emperor Justinian, which he does, but he refuses to accept the emperor’s demand to submit to Chalcedonian doctrine (ibid.: –).6 This refusal is, of course, praised by the author, and the scene offers the opportunity to condemn
6
Similar letters are received by other holy men in saints’ Lives, most famously by Antony. For Antony’s correspondence with the outside world, see Rubenson ().
the emperor’s (‘Nestorian and Arian’) policies while also condemning historical persons involved in the debate, such as Pope Leo I, author of the Tome accepted at the Council of Chalcedon a century prior (). While the specifics of these condemnations are unremarkable and constitute standard fare for Miaphysite hagiography, they are not limited to that community. Similar denunciations from all sides of the Christological controversy are common in hagiographical writing, such as in John Moschus’ Spiritual Meadow (c.), and the Lives become a vehicle for identity-formation among the readers of these works. Abraham’s seclusion is also interrupted by requests from fellow monks for teaching. As with the Life of Antony in the fourth century (on which see Chapter in this volume), long sermons are embedded in the Life (ibid.: – and passim; Rousseau ). This signals both the expectation that saints would be authoritative teachers but also that this type of literature was valuable to readers. Saints’ Lives almost always mix genres. The gospels had, like many other biographical texts, a very flexible form, which allowed disparate content to be included. This is, equally, one of the defining characteristics of later Christian biographical texts. For instance, the Gospel of Luke is framed as a letter, addressed to a certain Theophilus. Likewise, the two earliest saint’s Lives in Greek, the Life of Antony and the Life of Macrina, are both framed as letters (Hinterberger : , ). The saint’s Life as a literary form was remarkably flexible in this regard, frequently shifting from narrative to homiletics to epistolography to apologetics and back again (Cameron ; S.F. Johnson b). The setting for the reading or performance of such Lives was the monastery itself, usually alongside liturgical readings of Scripture. The pattern of reinforcement between these categories of narrative texts was gradually institutionalized in the form of liturgical collections of saints’ Lives, in the form of, for the East, the synaxarion and mēnologion (Høgel ; ). Mini-biographies of saints thus emerged as definitive epitomes of longer saint’s Lives and conditioned expectations of who the saints were and what they were known to have done. Apocryphal literature related to the apostles contributed to this storehouse of narrative, but traditionally only one narrative version out of many was received as the normative one for the liturgical collections (Burnet ; S.F. Johnson ). Indeed, the structure of the church year and the monastic habitus came to be based, in large part, on the harmonized ‘circuit’ of Jesus’ life in the gospels, supplemented and complemented by apostolic legends and the Lives of the saints. This was true above all for the distinctive Jerusalem liturgy (Galadza ). All of the hagiographical narratives in these collections were reminiscent of the gospels themselves, even if at several removes, and the proximity of hagiography and gospel in the liturgy—alongside the regularity of recitation—reinforced the idea that there were, indeed, expected patterns of biography for saints. Also embedded into Abraham of Farshut’s Life are numerous miracles he performed: for instance, a miracle of vengeance against a monk who stole lemons (Goehring : –). These are told narratively but they often lack any connection to the larger movement of his birth-to-death storyline. As such, the miracles were ripe to be excerpted and collected into free-standing miracle collections, which often happened throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. However, it is sometimes unclear whether the miracle collections preceded the narratives or vice versa. For example, the fifth-century Miracles of Thecla seems to have motivated the author to produce a large-scale reworking of her Life, which was in turn based on a well-known apocryphal narrative from the second century (S.F. Johnson b; Talbot and Johnson ). The miracles Thecla performed
were all posthumous, which is somewhat unusual for saint’s Lives, and they were not performed through a famous relic, as is the case in many later Lives. Instead, she performs them as a kind of living ghost, haunting the area around her shrine in Seleucia-on-theKalykadnos in southern Asia Minor (modern Silifke) (S.F. Johnson : –). The saint as an exemplar of piety and interaction with the world has been the subject of much debate in recent decades (P. Brown ). Abraham of Farshut is said to practise a ⲡⲟⲗⲓⲧⲉⲩⲙⲁ (πολίτευμα in Greek), or ‘citizenship’, which is heavenly and not worldly (Goehring : –). This citizenship stood in direct opposition to daily life in the later Roman Empire, and saints’ Lives can profitably be read as subversive to imperialism and dominant forms of social and religious life. The famous stylite saints from the fifth and sixth centuries—especially Symeon, Daniel, and Symeon the Younger—took to living on columns for decades, in both urban and semi-urban regions. The emperor and the ecclesiastical hierarchy alike, in addition to monks and laity, were required to come to the column to engage the saint, who served as both intercessor and patron (P. Brown b; Lane Fox ; Boero ). This mediative role was at the same time vertical and horizontal, and it is no surprise that the stylites often deliver judgements that benefit the believing laity, over and against the power structures of late Roman society, both secular and sacred. The saint in his Life was thus an immanent and distant figure simultaneously. The Lives bring that dichotomy to the fore. It has recently been emphasized that in the sixth-century Syriac Life of Mar Aba, to take another mature example, the saint’s Life advocates for an imitatio Christi while maintaining the reality that for individual readers a transcendental life of piety and suffering was firmly out of reach (Jullien : lii–lvii). ‘La recherche d’une conformité avec Jésus, tout spécialement dans sa Passion, conduit progressivement à un transfert de la virtus divine, le martyr devenant lui-même un autre Christ en parfait miroir—gage également de son exemplarité dans la persécution’ (Jullien : lv). Aba himself was devout from the beginning of his life—he surpassed everyone in his commitment to ‘paganism’ (i.e. Zoroastrianism) (ibid.: ). In this, he is, of course, reminiscent of Paul the apostle, and after his conversion experience Mar Aba surpasses all other Persian Christians in his commitment to the Christian way. One aspect of saints’ Lives which has been connected, like the apocryphal acts of the apostles, to the ancient novel is the centrality of movement and travel. Mar Aba travels from his school in Nisibis in northern Mesopotamia to the Syriac mother city of Edessa and then from there to Alexandria, the monasteries of Egypt, Athens, and even Corinth (ibid.: –). Once again, his activities show the influence of the received biography of the apostle Paul, especially for Greece, and we should never forget that the New Testament—the book of Acts in this case—served to shape the mental imagination of Christian authors. Nevertheless, Mar Aba does seem to have visited Alexandria and engaged in theological and philosophical debate there, with both Neoplatonic philosophers and the Christian Miaphysite theologian John Philoponus.7 The Life takes pains to emphasize his skills in Greek, honed in Edessa, and his commitment to learning the secular sciences so as to more 7
The only Miaphysite interlocutor mentioned by name in the Life is Sergius of Reshaina, a Syriac scholar and translator who had been a student of John Philoponus (Jullien : ). A disciple of Mar Aba in Alexandria, known in manuscripts as Cosmas Indicopleustes, wrote his Christian Topography in direct opposition to Philoponus’ De opificio mundi (S.F. Johnson : ).
effectively debate his opponents. This aspect of Christian biographical literature is highly variable between texts: the willingness to engage intellectual matters is not always approved of by hagiographers (Rubenson ; ). Increasingly, however, as hagiographical genres became mature art forms in their own right, the expectations of literate authors were mimicked in the lives of their subjects (Krueger ; Rapp ; ).
B O K
.................................................................................................................................. Mar Aba’s travels are predicated, however, not on schooling or debating but on seeing the ‘holy places’ (Jullien : ). This is a common topos and one which serves to structure a number of saints’ Lives. For Mar Aba, the journey begins with the explicit acknowledgment that the holy sites of his faith exist within Beth Romaye, the Roman Empire, and thus across an important political and ecclesiastical border for his community. Hagiography often helped to organize the knowledge about the late ancient world in a specific way. The Holy Land, including the monasteries of Egypt (those at Scetis in the Wadi Natrun, especially), was at the centre of the oikoumenē, even if the local monastery or hermitage was the locus of most of the activities of the saint. Geography thus became a mode of organizing realty and focusing the reader within an imaginary landscape. This imaginary landscape resonated with actual geography but also manipulated it and created an internal geographical logic which served the needs of the story above all. In Syriac monastic hagiography of the ninth century, authors such as Thomas of Marga and Ishoʿdnah of Bas: ra orient a number of the Lives in their anthologies around visits to Jerusalem and Scetis (S.F. Johnson : –). The verisimilitude of geographical accuracy points to a larger issue in Christian biography, which is the relationship of biography to truth. I would like to argue that the organization of historical and moral information into narrative was itself a means for making truth claims about the world: in other words, ‘[was it not] the very construction of these narratives that gave the appearance of truth?’ (Cameron : ). Truth claims were made quite apart from the stories themselves and, indeed, were often incidental to the narrative being told. The claims could be about geography, for example, but they could also be about the order of world powers and the constructedness of social or family relations. The ascetic impulse as exemplified in hagiography was, to a great degree, subversive of dominant paradigms of behaviour and societal belonging. After Constantine, certain concessions began being made in the direction of supporting and encouraging the ascetic and monastic movement, but there were growing pains (P. Brown ). As the biographical mode of writing became more and more ingrained in Christians’ literary expectations, it offered support to radically different ways of viewing human endeavour under God. From this point of view, Kelber’s insistence that the gospels represent ‘interpretive traditioning’ and ‘interpretation turning communal’ can be taken as characteristic of most Christian biographical texts from the ancient world (Kelber : –). Christian biographies did not offer story for the sake of story. They offered stories that incorporated communal ideals and interpretations of the world centred around individuals. Michael
Williams has argued persuasively that Christian biography always includes a philosophy of history in its recording of the history of a life (M.S. Williams : ).8 Thus, the ‘interpretive traditioning’ is not just about the single individual but represents a meditation on the Christian worldview, and thus can often be read allegorically (Krausmüller a). In fact, these interpretations of holy men were often written down, it seems, in an effort to ward off or to correct rival perspectives, not just on the subject of the Life but on life in general in the world. While differing in emphasis and in certain formal characteristics (saint’s Life vs. miracle collection, for example), nearly all Christian biographical narrative before the Middle Ages shares the communal, polemical interpretive mode. While my argument here about Christian biography downplays the entertainment motive for understanding the proliferation of fictional texts in early Christianity, it may nevertheless help to understand the striking formal similarities across time in the same texts.
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.................................................................................................................................. In a recent article, Simon Goldhill () has asked, ‘Why don’t Jews write biography?’ He argues that biography, while appearing anecdotally in the Talmud, was never seen as a formal genre in Jewish Late Antiquity. This was intentional, for, according to Goldhill, the Jews recognized that biography was a marker of Christian (and Graeco-Roman) culture, and they wanted to distinguish themselves by not writing in the genre. Goldhill further argues that biographical writing automatically implies a view of the self, one which Jews rejected. In Goldhill’s reading, Jews recognized that ‘the agenda of Christian biography is to provide the master version of the Christian life’ (Goldhill : ). And, for late antique or rabbinic Jews, ‘the lack of biography is a deliberate, polemical strategy’ (ibid.: ). Whatever one might make of Goldhill’s claims about Jewish literature in Late Antiquity,9 he correctly underlines the fact that biographical literature was highly charged in Late Antiquity. To quote Goldhill once more: ‘There is some novelty in making a biographical narrative the central text of a religious cult in the ancient world’ (ibid.: ). There were multiple reasons why Christians attached themselves to the biographical mode. I have tried to outline above how the influence of the gospels was felt throughout the
Williams defines ‘Christian biography’ more narrowly than I would, excluding the gospels, apocry phal texts, and martyr acts because they are not birth to death narratives. However, almost none of the saint’s Lives from Late Antiquity are true birth to death narratives, and, as such, I would prefer to see late antique hagiography as in constant conversation with canonical, apocryphal, and martyrial literature alike. That said, Williams ambitiously includes Augustine’s autobiographical Confessions in his study, which I have not attempted here, and shows many interesting points of affinity between it and, especially, the Life of Antony, which served to inspire Augustine (see also Chapter in this volume). On autobiography in the Greek East during Late Antiquity and the Byzantine period, see Hinterberger (; ; and Chapter in this volume). 9 One immediate criticism of Goldhill’s approach is that he does not address the multiplicity of Jewish pseudepigrapha written in the Roman period which are predominately biographical in emphasis, at least as much as Christian texts in the same period. He thus elides the intra Jewish debate over the authenticity and value of such texts. On Jewish pseudepigrapha and the difficulties of classifying them, see Bauckham et al. (: Introduction) and Reed (). 8
period in which hagiography rose to prominence. This literary connection between saint’s Lives and the canonical life of Jesus required close attention to the pattern of orthodox narrative: this was at least as much a process of self-recognition and identity-formation as it was a problem of the ‘self ’ in ethical terms. The socio-cultural role of hagiography was linked equally with the organization of knowledge. We must go further than seeing saints’ Lives as patterns for imitation. The role of the imitatio Christi in holy men and women was surely designed, in part at least, to put the exemplar firmly out of the reach of normal readers: the Lives of stylite saints testify to this fact in the strikingly subversive role that the stylites play in society, even when they are located near the city. More fundamental than the saint as exemplar are the imaginary worlds created by hagiography, which insisted on the reality of supernatural miracles and the reality of superhuman individuals. These imaginary worlds invoked symbolic geographies based upon a Christian cosmos, in a world where the Roman Empire was now ruled by a Christian emperor. That the writers of the gospels could never have foreseen such a world did not make them any less valuable as models for literary imitation. We must keep in mind that none of the Christian texts normally categorized under the heading of biography were true biographies, in the sense that they were not birth-to-death narratives. Entire sections of the subject’s life—usually the childhood or young adulthood—were regularly left out of the story. Emphasis is almost always placed on the prime of a saint’s career, up to and including his or her death. The influence of martyrdom accounts should not be underestimated, but clearly more prominent in these Lives is the model of the gospels. The gospels were very much still living texts in Late Antiquity. As Christian society developed and became institutionalized, the biographical tenor of the liturgy above all— which paired the circuit of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection with the Lives of the apostles and saints—served to continuously draw the Christian mental world back to the individual.
F R Christian biography is a broad subject that covers both early Christian apocryphal literature and late antique hagiographical texts. In English, the most commonly used anthologies for ‘New Testament apocrypha’ are J.K. Elliott () and Hennecke and Schneemelcher ( ), largely covering the same texts. The most authoritative and complete collection of the apocryphal gospels is now the German translation of Markschies and Schröter (). Due to the vast number of hagiographical texts, there is no single repertoire for translations. However, Efthymiadis (a; a) provides an excellent guide to these varied works in the Christian East, including guides to hagiography in multiple languages. For Greek, BHG is still a fundamental resource for manuscript information, with the update of Halkin (). For Latin, the standard guide is still BHL, with the update by Frost (). For eastern Christian languages, see BHO. Much survey work has been done on Syriac hagiography in particular, including Fiey () and Debié (). The webpage at http://syri.ac/hagiography offers quick access to published texts and translations, as well as digitized manuscripts.
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READING BIOGRAPHIES .............................................................................................................
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L history can make one think back-to-front. The very word ‘preliminaries’ tells a teleological tale: we are seeing people like Stesimbrotus of Thasos and Ion of Chios in the shadow of what biography is later to become—or rather of what we happen to regard as biography’s most salient features, as the other chapters in this volume will make it clear what a flexible and wide-ranging genre it is to be. Had Stesimbrotus and Ion been told that they might be regarded as the ancestors of a genre, they might have been gratified, but they would also have been puzzled. One of the perplexing features might be that very word ‘genre’; they would not have had the vocabulary to capture the idea, and even if they could frame ‘tragedy’ or ‘epinician’ in terms of performance context, they might have found it difficult to extend the concept to prose (on generic awareness, see Chapter in this volume). And, if they had been granted a mantic glimpse into what scholars would say about later biography, its definition, for instance, as ‘an account of the life of a man from birth to death’ (Momigliano : ) or the more careful ‘a literary text of book length telling the life story of an historical individual from cradle to grave (or a substantial part of it)’ (Hägg a: ix, cf. pp. , ), that would not have done much to ease the puzzlement: Ion’s Epidēmiai almost certainly had no such structure, and there is no reason to suspect that Stesimbrotus’ work had either. They might indeed have thought that other later genres had closer affinities to their own; rhetorical invective, perhaps, or some sorts of novel, or (in Ion’s case) collections of letters, covering all sorts of encounters but held together by the thread of the author’s own experience. What Stesimbrotus and Ion knew was not where their work was to lead, but where it came from; and they knew a good deal more about that than we do. Some antecedents are still clear enough, above all the Odyssey, with its centring of a rich narrative around the experiences of an individual over a period which, if not ‘from cradle to grave’, at least covered ‘a substantial part of it’, with Odysseus himself telling the back-story of his earlier journeys to fill out the few weeks of the action. Was Odysseus viewed as ‘an historical individual’, and even if he were, would the events of the Odyssey be regarded as ‘historical’? There may not be a straightforward answer to that question; nor may every listener or
reader have given the same answer, or indeed a straight answer at all. Perhaps, in Paul Veyne’s formulation, they ‘believed in their myths’ in a different way from belief in everyday reality (Veyne : –). But in any case we might see later biography, perhaps even these fifth-century writers, as providing some transposition of such a mythical personbased narrative to tell a more straightforwardly historical tale. And even if the linear narrative structure was not there, Ion’s Epidēmiai could certainly be taken as his own version of the experiences of a man who ‘saw the dwelling-places of many men and came to know their minds’ (Od. .). There were other poems too in the epic cycle, Theseids and Oedipodea and Heraclea, which centred around single dominant figures, clearly including many of their exploits. Aristotle later pointed out that such a one-person focus does not in itself give unity (Po. a–), but it is a good start, and later biographies also faced that same unifying problem. Visual art offered its own counterparts: in the first decades of the fifth century the metopes of the Athenian treasury at Delphi featured a series of Theseus scenes, and we can see something similar on a cup in the British Museum of around the same date.1 There were hymns, including the Homeric hymns that survive, that contained narratives of the doings of the gods: not exactly cradle-to-grave, as gods never need graves, but the Homeric hymn to Hermes literally starts with the god’s cradle. There were speeches too, plenty of them, long before we have surviving specimens or theories of rhetoric: Cicero knew that (Brut. , –), and if we had doubted it, we had only to look again at the Homeric epics. Many, doubtless, would have ranged over the merits and demerits of individuals, and it would be odd if they failed to include the most telling stories about them, presented in a more or less linear way. Indeed, if in real life, a guest arrived and, welcomed and fed, was asked the Homeric question ‘who are you, and where do you come from? Where is your country and your parents?’ (Od. .), then a mini-life-story would result. Odysseus himself tells a few, mainly false, but culminating in the true story (with judicious omissions) that he tells Penelope once he is back home (Od. .–). From an early date, too, features of the Homeric poems were explained in terms of the poet’s own experience, and this must have been expressed in some sort of literary form (B. Graziosi ; cf. Lefkowitz : –). Nothing comes from nothing; there were brave men before Agamemnon (Hor. Od. ..–), tarts before Helen (Hor. Sat. ..–), and life-stories well before there were biographies. All those are strands leading to Ion and Stesimbrotus, and then to the biographies that will figure in later chapters; and of course those earlier works also influenced the later works directly, with any mediation through the two fifth-century writers as only a small part of the story. But Stesimbrotus and Ion are still worth particular attention because they, for the first time, allow us a glimpse of how all those earlier strands may begin to come together at a time when prose-writing is beginning to gain new prominence and new authority in the Greek cultural world (Goldhill ). There is a further reason too. However sceptical we may be about any influence on the fourth-century texts which we regard as (proto-)biographies—Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Agesilaus and Isocrates’ Evagoras—we should also keep an eye on the two much bigger
British Museum Vase E = CVA British Museum .: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/ object/G . 1
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beasts, Herodotus and Thucydides themselves. We are used to later biographies in some sense defining themselves against historiography, with authors writing ‘non-history’ (as Andrew Wallace-Hadrill : put it in discussing Suetonius). Might Herodotus and Thucydides be doing something along similar but opposite lines, writing ‘non-biography’— or rather, as they could not have possibly put it like that, writing something that was expressively not what Stesimbrotus and Ion had produced? Well, they might; as we shall see, they probably were. But it is hard to be sure, given how little we really know about these fifth-century antecedents, and the first thing to stress is that limitation of our knowledge.
S T
.................................................................................................................................. Let us take Stesimbrotus first (FGrHist []).2 He is said to have been a contemporary of Pericles and Cimon (T – = Plu. Cim. ., Ath. .d), and he included at least one event as late as the Peloponnesian War, the death of Pericles’ son Xanthippus in the plague of – . Nearly all of the relevant quotations come from Plutarch’s Lives of Themistocles, Cimon, and Pericles. Athenaeus gives the title as ‘On Themistocles and Thucydides’—presumably the son of Melesias—‘and Pericles’ (F a = Ath. .d–e). We have no idea how the work was arranged, and even if the title is accurate3—it may well be— we should not assume that each of the three was treated in a separate section in turn: it may just be that this indicated that the work would treat Athens with a focus on the city’s big men. It is noticeable, though, that the middle figure is given as Thucydides rather than the more famous Cimon. Much of the surviving material does in fact deal with Cimon, though that may just be because Plutarch wrote his Life and did not write one of Thucydides. Yet there may be a hint here that Stesimbrotus concentrated on the internal ructions of Athenian politics, which certainly extended to Cimon but where he was less of a distinctive player than Thucydides (Tsakmakis : –). We know of several other works of Stesimbrotus as well. There was one on The Mysteries (περὶ τελετῶν), and there are also several fragments discussing Homeric problems, presumably from a further work. The Mysteries is usually assumed to have been particularly concerned with the Mysteries of Samothrace, and that would be understandable, given the island’s closeness to Thasos: certainly one fragment deals with those (F = Strabo ..–), and others dwell on details particularly relevant to Troy, again not too far away. Still, for all we know, it may have ranged much more widely. The Homeric work in particular may have had some details with a ‘biographical’ flavour. It seems to have discussed the poet’s lineage and date (F ) and claimed that he came from Smyrna (F ), and given that interest in explaining features of the poems in terms of his life-experience 2
For an explanation of the double numeration, see Further Reading. Von Wilamowitz (: ) thought that this was ‘of course not the original title’, and others have been similarly sceptical, e.g. Carawan (: ) and Tsakmakis (: ). It may be that this was originally the theme setting phraseology of the first sentence rather than a ‘title’, but without one or the other it would be unlikely that a later librarian or cataloguer would specify Thucydides rather than the better known Cimon. 3
(see above p. ) it would be odd if there were not more. But there were clearly other aspects as well, including philological discussion: why make Nestor the only one who could lift his wine-cup (Il. .–, F )? Should Lycaon really have talked of ‘eating Demeter’s grain’, for would it not have been barley (Il. ., F )? So nothing suggests that Stesimbrotus would have thought of himself as primarily a ‘biographer’, even if he had had the vocabulary to do so, and it may be Plutarch’s biographical interests, not his own, that explain the prominence of those features in the snippets that survive. Naturally enough, too, Stesimbrotus was particularly useful to Plutarch when he offered material that the more standard and familiar historians did not have, and these were also the cases where Plutarch needed to mention his name, justifying items that might make a sceptical reader lift an eyebrow. Thus, the fragments often suggest a gossipy flavour: again we should be cautious in assuming that this was the dominant feature of the work as a whole, but he at least found space for such items as the scandal that Pericles was sleeping with his daughter-in-law (FF , = Ath. .d–e, Plu. Per. ., .). The closeness of Cimon to his sister Elpinice clearly featured too: F = Plu. Cim. . tells of her personal pleading with Pericles to be gentle with Cimon during a trial, and Pericles’ smiling reply— ‘You’re too old, Elpinice, too old, for business as big as this.’ It would be no surprise if he were also the source for the claim that the two had some youthful incestuous hanky-panky (Plu. Cim. ., cf. F ). There was clearly some interest in education as well, though our impression of that may again be exaggerated by Plutarch’s own preoccupations. He said that Themistocles was a pupil of Anaxagoras (F = Plu. Them. .): that would appear to be absurd on chronological grounds, as Plutarch points out, but we shall return to this later in this section. Cimon, by contrast, ‘had not been taught any of the lessons that go with a liberal and characteristically Hellenic education, and was totally lacking in Attic smartness and wordiness’ (F = Plu. Cim. .). That might be less barbed than it seems, simply suggesting a bluff, laconic style: Plutarch goes on, still quoting Stesimbrotus, to say that there was ‘a basis to Cimon’s character of great nobility and truthfulness, and his soul had a shape that was more Peloponnesian’ than Attic. That goes with Cimon’s habit of responding to criticisms of Sparta by saying ‘But the Spartans are not like that’, and predictably not being popular for it (F = Plu. Cim. .). The difficulty in pinning down Stesimbrotus’ attitude to Cimon is matched by a similar difficulty in knowing his attitude to Athens as a whole. It used to be assumed that, as a Thasian islander, he would naturally be unsympathetic:4 after all, Athenians had been pretty beastly to their island subject-allies, Cimon prominent among them. Yet the fragments themselves show little to suggest this, and we will see something similar in the case of that other islander, Ion of Chios. For all we know, Stesimbrotus may just have posed as the interested outside observer, one who was too canny to take sides. The taste for the juicy story is clear enough, but a welcome for juiciness need not always mean antipathy: after all, 4 Thus, Jacoby characterized it as ‘a partisan political pamphlet’ (‘eine politische Tendenzschrift’): FGrHist II (), . Engels (: ) sketches the scholarly debate since then. Piccirilli (: ) continues to see Stesimbrotus as the voice of the oppressed islander, critical of Athenians in general and of Cimon as well as Themistocles and Pericles. Pownall () limits the hostility to Themistocles and Pericles. For reservations, see Pelling (a: and n. ). Hägg too is cautious (a: ).
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many admirers of Churchill or Kennedy willingly allow that the one was fonder of drink and the other fonder of women than it would have been comfortable to admit. That was even more so in a culture where heroes such as Theseus or Heracles, and even the gods themselves, were hardly unblemished behavioural models. We should also remember Stesimbrotus’ audience as well as himself: his audience was doubtless not confined to Athenians, but that was the greatest cultural centre of his world, and he would have been unwise to cause offence. Another problem in our reliance on later quotations lies in the tendency of the quoting authors to focus on, not just what is questionable or sensational, but also what they thought was simply wrong. The academic love of correction has a long tradition. Thus, Plutarch several times focuses on errors: if Stesimbrotus was really right in having a certain Epicrates help Themistocles’ wife and children to escape and make their way to the Molossian king Admetus, how could that be consistent with his saying that Themistocles also sailed to Sicily and sought the hand of Hiero’s daughter (F = Plu. Them. .–)? (There may be possible answers to that: Marr : –.) It can all add up to an impression of total waywardness: ‘this [i.e. the alleged inconsistency concerning Hiero] should remind us what a peculiar treatise Stesimbrotus must have written’ (Frost : ). Still, one must again remember our uncertainties: for all we know, the rest of Stesimbrotus could have been full of accurate data, not worth the while of Plutarch to quote because it simply matched what he already knew on the better authority of Herodotus and Thucydides. One fragment, once more centring on education, again shows Plutarch’s taste for correction:5 . . . Yet Stesimbrotus says that Themistocles attended Anaxagoras’ lectures and gave serious study to Melissus, the natural philosopher. His chronology is poor: for Pericles was much younger than Themistocles, and Melissus was Pericles’ opposing general during the siege of Samos, while Anaxagoras and Pericles often shared conversations.6 (Plu. Them. . = Stesimbr. FGrHist F )
Plutarch is not wrong about the figures’ relative dates. The passage remains odd, though; Stesimbrotus was after all a contemporary of these people, and should have known better. Von Wilamowitz (: – = Zucker : –) thought it was some sort of barbed joke, comparing the manner of Old Comedy; if so, it does not sound very funny. But it may be that Plutarch or some intermediate source was misled by some word like ἀκούειν in the sense of ‘heard speak’ rather than ‘attended lectures’, and Stesimbrotus was talking about Themistocles’ continuing intellectual interests in old age.7 Whatever we make of that, Thucydides’ famous summing-up is also relevant: For Themistocles showed himself in possession of force of natural ability in an extremely stable way, and was singularly remarkable for that: it was a matter of his own natural intelligence, without any previous or further learning, that he became the strongest evaluator
This chapter of Themistocles is discussed by T.E. Duff (: ; a: ). All translations are my own. 7 This too was suggested by von Wilamowitz (: = Zucker : ). So also Schachermeyr (: ), Carawan (: ). 5 6
of immediate action on the basis of the swiftest calculation, and also the best at predicting what was to come, looking the furthest distance into the future. (Th. ..)
The passage is so familiar that it is easy to miss how odd is that stress—‘without any previous or further learning’ (οὔτε προμαθὼν ἐς αὐτὴν οὐδὲν οὔτ’ ἐπιμαθών). The second part is perhaps the odder, and it is uncertain exactly what this ‘further learning’ means: ‘without the application of hindsight’? ‘Without needing to find out anything in retrospect’? But the first part is itself strange enough. This lack of ‘learning’ cannot be simply a negative point: the passage is too laudatory. It is similar to a recurrent emphasis in a biography of the s British prime minister Jim Callaghan, stressing that his lack of a university education was a matter of some sensitivity and comment at the time, but in fact he held his own very well and eventually won the respect of all those Eton-and-Oxford types at the Foreign Office (K.O. Morgan : esp. ). In other words, the debate on Themistocles’ education that we see in that chapter of Plutarch is going back to the fifth century itself, one that persisted in the fourth,8 and it looks as if Stesimbrotus is himself taking part in it. But how? Von Wilamowitz and Jacoby both thought that Stesimbrotus was creatively responding, not evidently to Thucydides himself, but to the line Thucydides was later to take, and made it a gibe at Themistocles’ expense.9 That does not convince: it would be such a feeble riposte—‘Stop praising him for being such an intelligent ignoramus! He in fact studied lots and lots of things, the rotter!’ Surely it is better to take it the other way round, and have Thucydides responding to the sort of thing that Stesimbrotus was saying: perhaps indeed to Stesimbrotus himself (Carawan ; Pownall ) but just as likely to the sort of educational claim that Stesimbrotus was reproducing, perhaps (unless Plutarch is misrepresenting him) in an under-informed way. His point is presumably similar to that of the Callaghan biography: he did not have a top-class education, but the really impressive thing was how he ensured that it did not matter. There may be more. It is even possible that Thucydides has Stesimbrotus among others in his sights when he criticizes earlier ‘prose-writers’ (logographoi) for their excesses and inaccuracies at .., even though he cannot be the main target (Tsakmakis : –; Pelling a: –). I also suggest elsewhere that Herodotus may hint at alternative, more grisly versions of the end of Polycrates in his more restrained version at ..–; if so, a questionable fragment may suggest that Stesimbrotus was one of those who had not spared the grisliness (Pelling ). But that takes us to something bigger, the sort of defining against the biographic that I suggested earlier. We will return to that in our final section.
8 Notice the similar discussion in the Socratic writer Aeschines of Sphettus’ Alcibiades, where Socrates tells a sceptical Alcibiades that Themistocles may have been deprived of education and horsemanship in his youth but later became cultured and horsey: Aeschines SSR VI F , cf. T.E. Duff (: n. ). Still, that ‘later’ does not seem to be as late as old age. 9 Von Wilamowitz (: = Zucker : ), followed by Jacoby in his commentary on FGrHist F . Engels (: ) makes the passage suggest that ‘Themistokles was no traditional aristocrat’ and no man of culture, associating with such disreputable sophistic and philosophical thinkers as Anaxagoras and Melissus.
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.................................................................................................................................. Versatility is one feature that Ion of Chios (FGrHist )10 shares with Stesimbrotus.11 Ion’s work extended over both prose and verse. We know of tragedies in particular, but also lyric poetry, elegies, dithyrambs, paeans, epigrams, hymns, and possibly even comedies too (the combination of tragedy and comedy was particularly unusual); there were also various prose works including a Foundation of Chios and the more or less serious philosophical Triagmos (‘Doing things in/with threes’). It was not unusual for fifth-century writers to produce works of very different sorts, but Ion remains the extreme example. No wonder that Callimachus chose him as the model and precedent for the ‘many forms’ of his writing (polyeideia, Iamb. F ; Pfeiffer – = T L). The clearest forerunner of biography among his works would seem to be his prose Epidēmiai,12 a word that has variously been translated as ‘Travel Pictures’ or ‘Travel Memories’ or ‘Visits’: in fact, it is best captured by the stodgy ‘Residences’, dealing with the various periods that he spent in different cities. In one way it therefore prefigures autobiography as much as biography, as the only linking figure in the arrangement would seem to be Ion himself; still, there is no indication of much linkage at all—‘it looks as if the book was more of an album than an integrated composition’ (West : )—and the fragments do not suggest that he talked much about himself rather than the famous celebrities with whom he hobnobbed. Thus, his forte was the anecdotal vignette, with an ear for the good remark and an eye for the visual: Cimon was ‘not bad to look at, but a big man, with lots of curly hair’ (F J = L = Plu. Cim. .), while in another work someone is ‘sparse-bearded’ (F J = L = Poll. .). It was not just the political big men who figured, but also the intellectual and literary stars. Thus, Aeschylus and Socrates occur in individual fragments (FF , J = , L), and a long verbatim quotation concerns Sophocles, whom Ion ‘met in Chios, when he was sailing as a general to Lesbos’. He goes on to describe Sophocles’ stylish misbehaviour at a symposium—presumably one at which Ion was present, though he does not quite say that. Much impressed by the wine-boy’s looks, Sophocles first has a witty exchange with a schoolmaster on the inappropriateness of poetic descriptions of colour: just let a painter try taking things literally, painting a blush as purple or Apollo’s hair as gold, and as for ‘rosy-fingered dawn . . . ’. Then the poet’s attention turns to the boy: just bring your head a little closer to blow away this straw from the wine—that will save you from getting your finger wet. The boy is taken in (though a savvy wine-boy probably knew what was coming), and Sophocles duly grabbed his kiss. ‘Pericles said that I knew how to write poetry but not to lead an army—but didn’t that stratagem work out well?’ (F J = L = Ath. .d–e). It is a plausible guess too that Ion was Plutarch’s
10
See Further Reading on the treatment of Ion’s fragments in FGrHist and in other collections. I have discussed Ion elsewhere (Pelling a), concentrating especially on issues of genre and on Plutarch’s use of Ion. Several points in what follows are argued more fully there. 12 As with Stesimbrotus, the title has been doubted: cf. Katsaros’ BNJ comm. on F = Ath. .a. Once again, though, it is so unexpected that it is likely to be original or at least to mirror a striking word in the first sentence. The work is presumably the same as that described as Hypomnemata (T = schol. on Ar. Pax ), a much more regular word for ‘Memoirs’. 11
source when he recounts Sophocles’ description of his own poetic development, moving (enigmatically) from Aeschylean pomp through a harsh and technical phase to, finally, the ‘most characterful and best’ (S. T Radt = Plu. How to Observe One’s Progress in Virtue B).13 The political figures also had their moments in Ion’s limelight. Cimon again features prominently, and it is indeed interesting that so much of this material in both Stesimbrotus and Ion concerns him: perhaps, though, this is just because Plutarch was short of material for that Life—it is less than half the length of its Roman pair Lucullus—and had to sieve contemporary literature particularly thoroughly. Our longest fragment again comes from Plutarch, and once more starts with a personal encounter at a symposium, this time in Athens when Ion was a young man (F J = L = Plu. Cim. ). Cimon was there, and was complimented on his singing and on the contrast with Themistocles, who had said that he did not know how to sing or play the lyre, but did know how to make a city powerful and rich—not, one would think, the most tactful remark for Cimon’s fellow-guest to make, but maybe by that stage of the evening the drinker was not at his best. The conversation then turned to Cimon’s own great achievements (one senses someone’s tactful remedying of the faux pas). Cimon himself said that the cleverest came when he had taken a number of barbarian prisoners ‘from Sestos and Byzantium’, and separated out the people and their possessions. The allies were present and protested that the division was unfair (a glimpse there of the sensitivities that were already arising between ‘allies’ and the dominant imperial city). He gave them the choice of which to take, and they immediately chose the rich pile of booty. Cimon looked silly—until a few days later, when the prisoners’ relatives came to ransom their kin, and he was the one who had come off far the better. This last example shows that the anecdotal manner can deal with matters of considerable importance: we do not know much about that campaign against Sestos and Byzantium, but it was clearly an important as well as a lucrative moment of the early Delian League (Badian : , n. ). Another fragment reports Cimon’s advice to the Athenians about Sparta: they should ‘not leave Greece lame, nor allow Athens to have an ill-matched yokefellow’.14 That touches on the distinctive Cimonian policy of maintaining good relations with Sparta (F J = L = Plu. Cim. .), and that is Plutarch’s reason for quoting it. Doubtless that public dimension would have added an extra frisson at the time, but what is less clear is that Ion himself mentioned any of these things because of that political importance, or was even very interested in analysing or evaluating the figures’ political lines. For all we know, his cult of celebrity was just that, extending to celebrities in all fields. He commented negatively on Pericles’ aloof manner and contrasted it with the cultivated affability of Cimon, but that may just have been evaluating Pericles as a party animal, not as a statesman (F J = L = Plu. Per. .). It was also Ion who recorded Pericles’ remark that Agamemnon had taken ten years to capture Troy but he had defeated the rich and powerful Samos in just nine months (F J = L = Plu. Per. .–): probably Ion did not mean it kindly, but it may again just have been Pericles’ self-important style that grated, not necessarily his imperialistic politics (Geddes : –). Indeed, The interpretation of each phase is much disputed, and is discussed in Pelling (b). F J = L also deals with Sophocles (= Vita Sophoclea ), stressing his ‘Homeric’ manner of characterization; but this is attributed only to ‘a certain Ionian’ unless we emend the text. 14 On the interpretation of the phrase, see Pelling (a: ). 13
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attempts to pin down Ion’s attitude to the Athenian empire as a whole have proved just as elusive as their counterparts with Stesimbrotus: in his case, it would be even rasher to assume that an islander must have felt negatively about the imperial city.15 After all, someone who competed successfully at the Athenian festivals16 would not have wanted to alienate his audiences and judges, and he does not come over as a man indifferent to all the city’s social glitter. In what ways, then, can Ion be seen as a proto-biographer? Not in arrangement: nothing suggests that he organized his work in any way around any particular personality other than his own experience, and we cannot see anything cradle-to-grave about it. Possibly in mingling the personal and the political: at least, that remark of Cimon about Athens’ need for a yokefellow would have required some understanding of the politics to be comprehensible, though nothing suggests that there was any political analysis that was more than surface-deep. Nor can we see any attempt to understand what made the individual personalities tick. His talent, it would seem, was in presenting rather than probing those personalities, and doing so through the telling anecdote and the big man’s own remarks. That would certainly recur in later biographies and works with strong biographical elements, such as Xenophon’s Memorabilia (Dover : –; Hägg a: –). The first-person presentation and the focus on his own encounters are interesting too, even though we do not sense any strong attempt to project his own personality. The firstperson voice rarely recurs in biography, even in cases where a biographer knew his subject well—consider Xenophon again, in Agesilaus as well as Memorabilia, and, for that matter, even in Anabasis where the (auto-)biographer is the subject. But there is a broader sense in which biographers so often reveal something of themselves in their selection of subjects and in the qualities they highlight. It is no coincidence that one of the authors of Antiquity who leaves the strongest impression of his own personality is Plutarch, and his first-person intrusions are only a small part of that (Stadter ; Pelling ). One comes to know biographers by the company they keep, and what they say about them: just as one gauges people in real life.
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.................................................................................................................................. Still, that is true of other genres too, especially historiography: we are not short of an impression of the intellectual personalities of Herodotus and Thucydides, however much or little they say about themselves. It is time to return to that initial suggestion that the two great historians were in some sense defining themselves against these biographic precursors—along, doubtless, with other writings, such as local history, fable, and epic— and not just occasionally nodding at particular alternative versions. Let us begin with Thucydides’ ‘digression’ on Themistocles (.–). Whatever Ion and Stesimbrotus were saying and writing about Themistocles, they were probably saying and writing it about him as a one-off case, or (if Stesimbrotus’ title is correctly reported), at 15 It is less rash to speculate on the tensions that, as an islander, Ion must have sensed: Blanshard (). 16 On such foreign competitors, see Taplin (: ).
most, a three-off case, Themistocles, Thucydides, son of Melesias, and Pericles. Thucydides the historian incorporates the important things about Themistocles within a much bigger picture, setting the scene for other developments where we see how Athens can develop individuals like this and how difficult the city finds it to come to terms with them. Themistoclean elements come back with Pericles, charismatic and percipient but cast rudely out of office, and especially Alcibiades, with his talents and his rift with the city and his periods of exile. The individuals have very different personalities, but that makes the recurrent pattern all the more telling, something about the city more than about them, just as (to look ahead) it is a thing about Persian kingship, not just the individual kings, when Herodotus’ very different characters reproduce a similar pattern of overreach and come-uppance in their reigns. Thucydides’ juxtaposition with Pausanias (.–) is telling too, prompting the reader to reflect more on the differences, and this time the similarities too, between Athens and Sparta and their victorious leaders, refining the rather crude contrast of national characteristics in the Corinthians’ speech at .. So the response to ‘the biographic’ is a complex one: individual characteristics matter; but to see how they matter, they need to be tied into something bigger, into the investigation of cities and perhaps even of a transcendently shared human nature. Certainly, too, there is enough in Plutarch’s Life of Themistocles to demonstrate a lively fifth-century debate about Themistocles’ talents and morality, private and public: we have already seen something of that in the case of his education. It is again not too rash to see Herodotus doing something along the same lines as Thucydides, taking some of those allegations against Themistocles and tying them into a wider picture. Themistocles’ characteristics mirror those of his city too: that has been well argued by Blösel () and then Baragwanath (: e.g. , –). He is self-serving: he pocketed most of a talent bribe for himself (.–), and was concerned to store up credit for himself with the Great King (.–). But his slipperiness and disingenuousness were also what saved Greece, in the way that he skilfully manoeuvred the fractious coalition into fighting in the straits at Salamis (.–). In a way, too, his behaviour is emblematic of a much broader point about that Greek coalition. The danger that each state will go its own way, driven by self-interest rather than the public concern, is always there. If Themistocles’ self-serving ends up paradoxically as what helps Greece as well, then that is a microcosmic equivalent of the way that Athens’ concern to be ‘the first city of Greece’ drives them on at Marathon (..), or that the antagonism of Athens and Aegina leads them to build the ships that save Greece (.). So, as with Thucydides, ‘the biographic’ details about Themistocles’ strengths and failings are made suggestive of something much wider. So, yes, Herodotus and Thucydides may well be responding to that earlier ‘biographic’ material; but to do with it what they wanted, they needed to do something different, something magnificently, epoch-makingly new.
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.................................................................................................................................. This can help with one final important ‘preliminary’. Almost sixty years ago Helene Homeyer made a suggestion () that was then taken further by Momigliano (), raising the possibility that Herodotus was inspired by some biographical material from the
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Near East. As Momigliano puts it (: , cf. , –), more strongly than Homeyer herself, Herodotus ‘includes several biographies’ of eastern figures, especially Cyrus and Cambyses; the Persian Empire naturally encouraged interest in the single figure, given the clear impact that the personality of a Great King could have (and we know some powerful autobiographic statements of their achievements: that is most familiar from Darius’ Bisitun inscription: Balcer ). Neither Homeyer nor Momigliano quite says that Herodotus knew a biography of Cyrus, though Momigliano almost does, but that is the clear drift of where they were heading. Homeyer then goes on to suggest that Herodotus was unable to do the same for his Greek figures because the material was just not there for a Miltiades or a Themistocles; the implication is that he would have done it for them too if he could. This takes some disentangling.17 The last point is the hardest to accept: one has only to think how different the narrative of Herodotus’ later books would have looked had he tried to organize it in that way. But there is no difficulty in thinking that some genuine Persian material has worked its way into the account of Cyrus (cf. e.g. Gera : –), even if that is also laced by some distinctively Greek elements such as Astyages’ ‘Thyestes banquet’ (Fehling : –; Erbse : ). Probably indeed that interlacing is not all Herodotus’ work but had begun some time before.18 What Persian material there is may well even have been cast in something like a ‘biography’ (or at least something ‘biostructured’ around the king’s life), though we cannot know its precise form. That is especially true of Cyrus. In later coronations Persian kings ‘took up the dress that Cyrus wore before he became king’ (Plu. Art. .) in a way which not merely confirms that he occupied a special, archetypal position in Persian regal ideology and ritual, but also points to the particular importance in this ideology of his pre-regal youth (G. Binder : , , ). It is worth noting too that Köhnken (; cf. Pelling b) has made a strong case for Herodotus knowing a version of Darius’ accession close to the one we find in the Bisitun inscriptions, and making the alterations he did for his own identifiable literary purposes. If so, that would be another ‘biographic’ version that he knew, in that case, autobiographic, and such works can properly count among the ‘preliminaries’. What is difficult to believe is that Herodotus cast his story of Cyrus in the shape he did because of the literary form any source-material took. The case of Bisitun and Darius itself shows how thoroughly Herodotus could rewrite and reshape such material if he chose; and if he did not reshape it so thoroughly in the case of Cyrus, we have to ask why. We can give an answer. He could not have rewritten Greek history in that form because it was too complex, too intermeshing, too interpersonal and intercivic; but he could leave at least some Persian history in more ‘biographic’ a presentation. That is not because his material was like that but because the two worlds were like that. It captures that insight
Hägg (a: ) shows his usual good judgement: ‘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.’ 18 In any case, Cyrus’ Romulus and Remus style exposure and paradoxical rescue has parallels all over the world and cannot be claimed as distinctively either Greek or eastern: von Fritz (: ). B. Lewis (: , ) tentatively identifies a Mesopotamian or western Asian origin for the folktale; but () it is uncertain whether such a quest for an Ur form is methodologically sound, and perhaps we should rather think of polygenesis; and () even if Lewis is right, the folktale motifs will have spread from their place of origin at least a millennium before Cyrus. 17
projected by the conversation of Xerxes and Demaratus at .–, that the one side is driven by the decisions of one man with all the cohesion that can give, and the other is not. Seen positively, as by Demaratus, it is because they have a master who is more fearsome than you, sire, and that is the Law. Seen in the more realistic register that Herodotus often suggests, it can also be because the Greek side is simply a mess, a glorious, folly-ridden, ultimately triumphant mess. The form of each part of the narrative reflects that. The second half of Book can be neat and ‘biographic’, and the Cyrus tale can be moulded to introduce all sorts of motifs that are going to be useful for the later narrative; but once we turn to Greece, it becomes more complicated, for good and—so nearly—for ill.
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.................................................................................................................................. We have seen enough to be clear that these ‘preliminaries’ are not the roots of a single tree thrusting upwards, shortly to blossom into something called ‘biography’, with Evagoras, Agesilaus, and Cyropaedia then gratefully feeding off this single sap. Stesimbrotus and Ion represent several different seeds, and some will be productive in quite different ways: the anecdotal, the focus on self, the miscellaneity, the graphic descriptions are all important features that will recur in many different strands of later literature, and are no more prominent in biography than elsewhere. Equally, the fourth-century biographers would have thought that other precursors mattered more, the Odyssey and praise-oratory in particular. Even those eastern influences may go on to operate directly on, particularly, Cyropaedia, even if the impact of that eastern material on Herodotus had already prepared that particular path. The picture is a complicated one—but then talk of ‘influence’ so often is. Counter-suggestibility, we have also seen, may matter too. Some of those seeds will grow in a historiographic direction, with Herodotus and Thucydides interested in many of the same people and some of the same events. What then becomes interesting is where they differ, with Herodotus leading the way. If he is incorporating and defining himself against ‘the biographic’, he does so in different ways in different parts of his work; and those differences are expressive. When Herodotus is most ‘biographic’, that is because history— Persian history—allows, perhaps even demands, it. When he is least, that is because history—Greek history—has too many interrelated strands to be so controlled. But, in his way, he too is exploring the manner in which individuals and individual tales have to be interwoven to make the sorts of points he wants to explore. And for those, one narrative life, even a series of lives in sequence, is not enough; nor are the sorts of celebrity anecdote that featured in Stesimbrotus and Ion, at least on their own. Instead, he has to invent history.
F R Of the two classic overviews of biography, Momigliano () treats this material at length, reaching the fourth century only after pages of his ; Hägg (a) is more judicious in proportion, as his chapter sub heading ‘Glimpses of a pre history’ ( ) suggests. The discussions of both
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Stesimbrotus and Ion in FGrHist are still indispensable. Stesimbrotus was discussed by Jacoby himself as FGrHist ; the fragments from ‘On Themistocles, Thucydides, and Pericles’ were re edited by J. Engels in FGrHist IV () (Bollansée, Engels, Schepens, and Theys : ), and then by D. Smitriev for Brill’s New Jacoby (BNJ). Ion’s historical fragments were edited by Jacoby as FGrHist . There are many non historical fragments as well, not printed by Jacoby: the fullest collection is that of Leurini (), whose numeration is also recorded above. Jennings and Katsaros (: ) give a concordance. The BNJ commentary is by A. Katsaros. Von Wilamowitz () has heavily influenced the study of Stesimbrotus; important studies have been Meister () and Schachermeyr (). Ion has been more discussed, and is now the subject of an illuminating collected volume by Jennings and Katsaros (). Of earlier work, Dover () and West () are particularly important, and Strasburger () is helpful on both authors. On the possibility of eastern biographical writing, Homeyer () and Momigliano () set the agenda, but the issue requires revisiting in the light of the more general, and much discussed, question of Herodotus’ sources. I say more about biographical and non biographical narrative shape in Pelling (), especially Chapters and .
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’ The Educational Ends of the ‘First’ Biography in Classical Greece ......................................................................................................................
O of many ancients to explore the genre of biography, the Athenian rhetorician Isocrates is reputed to be the first to have written a detailed account of a person’s life, in a form still recognizable today as biographical:1 a series of events arranged in linear sequence from birth to death, and shaped into a life story. By today’s standards, Isocrates’ biography of Evagoras—a lengthy exaltation of the recently deceased king of Cyprus—comes across as a verbose chronicle laden with exaggerated praise and magnified significance. But to those interested in the origins of biography, this work provides a rare opportunity to witness this genre in the early process of its formation. As is the case with any literary form, the ‘first’ instance of a genre always turns out to be a consolidation of previously existing formal elements and generic traits. And so it is with Isocrates’ ‘invention’ of the genre of biography. His was a version of biography born out of a long tradition of orators and poets who had infused biographical elements into their songs and orations of praise. (On prose traditions preceding Isocrates, see Chapter in this volume.) In addition to being a rhetorician experimenting with a new genre, Isocrates was an educator, a teacher of rhetoric, who used his works as textbooks for his students’ learning. This brings an added interest to the Evagoras. For the new configuration of praise manifested in this work—as the life story of a person, rendered in a chronological order of real events—comes into existence as a form developed not only out of the rhetorical and poetic traditions of praise but also within a historically specific educational context. More than borrowing from his predecessors their practices of infusing biography into established forms of praise, he appropriated these practices for educational purposes and aligned them to his own pedagogical ends. This chapter examines the link between biography and education by exploring the process through which Isocrates developed this genre out of the rhetorical and poetic traditions of praise; it also explores how the process he followed on the way to achieving a fully developed biographical account was guided by his deliberate efforts to make this new genre serve pedagogical ends intrinsic to his programme in rhetorical education.
1
I use translations by Van Hook ().
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.................................................................................................................................. Prior to Isocrates, the tradition of praise was established by the first teachers of rhetoric, the sophists, who advertized their craft to potential students through clever renderings of mythical stories familiar to their audience. The best-known example of this tradition is Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen, an oration aimed at reversing the reputation of Helen of Troy from being a woman who betrayed her husband, her king, and her country to an innocent victim taken away by force (bia), seduced by love (erōs), or persuaded by words (logos). Other lesser-known orations by the sophists include Protagoras’ ‘great speech’ (as recorded in Plato’s Protagoras c–d, on which, see Nathan ), which lauds the civic arts as the most important factor in the progress of humankind towards civilization; and the story of Heracles at the crossroads, which is attributed to Prodicus in Xenophon’s Memorabilia (..–) and pronounces an implicit praise of the life of virtue that Heracles ended up choosing over the more facile and pleasurable life of vice. Through their unique retelling of ancient myths, the sophists put a distinctive stamp on the rhetorical tradition of praise: displaying dexterity in eloquence and persuasion through a gesture of praise that demonstrated an orator’s ability to teach students interested in the effective uses of language. In the sophists’ handling of the rhetoric of praise, biography makes its mark in terms of ‘factual’ information associated with the subject of praise. Gorgias, for example, includes in his speech the ‘fact’ that Helen is the daughter of Leda and Zeus. A keener interest in biography is exhibited by Isocrates in his own rendition of praising Helen. In addition to offering a more elaborate version of her divine lineage, he includes in his Helen several known events about her life as well as a number of mythical persons honouring her beauty. The biographical ‘facts’ and events about Helen add up to a well-rounded portrait of her person and appear to justify the orator’s choice to exalt her. This playful exercise makes evident the stakes behind Isocrates’ interest in biography—albeit within the world of myth. By grounding the gesture of praise on the known life of the person being praised, biography gives legitimacy to an orator’s selection of the subject of praise. At the same time, it provides a standard for discerning the praiseworthiness of a given subject for orators and audiences alike. Aware of the new role that biography can play in modifying the rhetorical tradition of praise, Isocrates casts his praise of Helen in the introduction to the Helen as a corrective to his contemporaries who display their eloquence by praising insignificant and trivial subjects. ‘To be a little superior in important things,’ he remarks, ‘is of greater worth than to be pre-eminent in petty things that are without value for living’ (Hel. ). His scorn of orators, who choose ‘to praise bumble-bees and salt and kindred topics’ (Hel. ) rather than display their art of rhetoric by choosing subjects meritorious of praise and beneficial to the audience, reveals Isocrates’ efforts to change the rhetorical tradition of praise from showcasing the orator’s display of linguistic dexterity to exhibiting a subject worthy of praise and of relevance to the audience. Already in this playful encomium, Isocrates implicates biography in his own interests as an educator—to integrate the rhetoric of praise with themes important to contemporary audiences. The narrative account of Helen’s ‘biography’ revolves around her beauty— which is said to have compelled the Greeks to unite their isolated kingdoms and, in an unprecedented show of unity, launch a unified expedition against Troy under the common
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purpose of getting Helen back. Composed at a time when Hellenic unity was a popular theme among the various Greek city-states, the praise of Helen functions as precedent and pretext for Greek unification. Bringing biography under the auspices of the rhetoric of praise and within the purview of his rhetorical education, Isocrates is showing his students how a successful blending of praise and biography can enhance the visibility of current themes—a lesson he perfected through the Evagoras, an oration in which biography takes centre-stage.
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.................................................................................................................................. In sharp deviation from earlier practices, Isocrates’ Evagoras engages neither abstract ideas nor mythical personages, but an actual person, a king—and seeks to ‘make his virtues never to be forgotten among all mankind’ (Evag. ). This marked departure from tradition has been noted by modern commentators who regarded the Evagoras as a truly innovative work. Van Hook (: ) identified the novelty of this oration in its serious treatment of the subject of praise in comparison to frivolous ‘exercises on mythical subjects written by the sophists’; T.C. Burgess (: ) characterized the work’s uniqueness in terms of Isocrates’ ‘choice of a contemporary as the subject’; and Marrou (: ) pointed to this oration as ‘the first known example of a prose oration over a real person’. Isocrates was cognizant of the innovative character of his undertaking. ‘What I propose to do,’ he remarks, ‘is difficult—to eulogise in prose the virtues of a man’ (Evag. ). None of his predecessors, he declares, had ever ‘attempted to compose a discourse on such a theme’ (Evag. ). For the glorification of virtuous men had always been the domain of the poets, who could ‘employ song and verse’, and by ‘the spell of their rhythm and harmony bewitch their listeners’ (Evag. ). That Isocrates is exploring something new is made evident by his preface to this oration, which ends on a note of deliberate experimentation: ‘we must make the effort and see if it will be possible in prose to eulogise good men’ (Evag. ). The challenge he faces is similar to the challenge all biographers face: how to transform real facts into a story, subordinate events to a theme, and make the actual as appealing as the possible. Such a task could only be accomplished by means of an artistic representation that would shape human events into a model of everlasting virtue (aretē). Aristotle acknowledged this challenge when he pointed to the difficult but necessary task of epideictic orators: on the one hand, to praise those who had achieved something and, on the other, to give the impression of a virtuous character by making actions appear so (Rh. b–). And who better to consult than Pindar, on the workings of art and its propensity to transform human action into a manifestation of an ideal. The type of praise attempted in the Evagoras, T.C. Burgess (: –) remarked, had long ago ‘found a place in encomia in Pindar’. Indeed, it was Pindar’s artful verse that had immortalized victor-athletes and turned their actual deeds into the very essence of the idea of victory. Isocrates’ project, then, to create a portrait of virtue manifested in a real person, and to display an excellence on the basis of actual events, finds a precedent in Pindar, who had crafted his hymns of victor-athletes around such factual information as the victor’s name, the name of his father, the place of his birth, and the protective deity of the community (Lattimore : xi). The goal of fashioning the deeds of Evagoras into a display of human
excellence puts Isocrates in the tradition of Pindar’s art, that is, the poetic use of language and its workings of fashioning the possible out of the actual. Pindar’s work had set the stage for incorporating biographical elements into encomiastic praise, and we may be tempted to consider his hymns as important precedents that might have ushered Isocrates’ encomiastic praise of Evagoras in the direction of the genre of biography. Yet, it is important to note here that, however much Isocrates might have been influenced by Pindar’s victory odes, he exhibits a substantively different orientation towards biography than his predecessor. Far from inserting some factual information into his encomiastic composition, Isocrates included a great deal of actual events. Instead of merely enabling audiences, as Pindar had done, to recognize the real person behind the artistic portrayal of an ideal, Isocrates sought to familiarize his readers with the entire life story of the person portrayed. From the perspective of biography—and the sustained references to the real that the genre of biography demands—commentators’ claims about Pindar’s direct influence on Isocrates’ Evagoras appear to be overstated. Indeed, even as Pindar constructs a portrait of virtue based on real facts about victor-athletes, he uses these facts as a springboard for his poetic creation of the essence of victory. In the words of de Romilly (: ): ‘Pindar never describes the feats he praises, nor does he tell us anything about the victors’ lives. He aims at once for the highest meaning of the victory, its universal and symbolic implications for the whole of human life’. Pindar’s treatment of praise, in other words, provided only partial guidance for Isocrates’s praise of Evagoras. For the poet’s artistic representation of the real had shown how the real could be subsumed by the artistic, and how the possible could be created at the expense of the actual. That the possible can only be enacted through the non-referential function of language—and be crafted beyond outside the actual—is made explicit in modern times by Paul Ricoeur (: ): ‘The role of most of our literature is, it seems, to destroy the world. That is true . . . of all literature which could be called poetic, where language seems to glorify itself at the expense of the referential function of ordinary discourse.’ By contrast, and as he makes explicit, Isocrates sets out to praise Evagoras not by focusing exclusively on the essence of virtue but by ‘recount[ing] the deeds of Evagoras’ (Evag. ). The portrait of virtue he undertook to create did not entail the act of creating a possible world in which actual events had ceased to play a role. In effect, Isocrates sought to represent a virtuous king, not at the expense of real events but alongside them. From the perspective of representation, this meant that Isocrates was facing the daunting task of finessing the inherent tension between the contradictory linguistic acts of shaping and reflecting the real. This is the very tension Aristotle articulated as the most basic opposition between literature and history, when he wrote that the difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse—for even if the writings of Herodotus had been in verse, he points out, they would still be a kind of history: ‘the real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen’ (Po. b–). Pindar’s song had displayed the glory of victory by suspending the actual victorathlete; he had created a possible world—what might happen—by suspending references to the real—what had actually happened. Isocrates’ task was very different: he sought to give an account of real events in the life of the king and, at the same time, construct these events as parts of the story of a life lived in virtue. His exploration of biography directed him simultaneously in two contradictory directions: art and history, the possible and the actual.
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.................................................................................................................................. Unlike the sophists who had framed the rhetoric of praise as a display of the orator’s virtuosity in language—a self-display—Isocrates sought to frame his rhetorical composition as a display of the person praised. His commitment to a biographical undertaking guided him to develop the tradition of praise from a playful exercise aimed to show off an orator’s linguistic dexterity to a respectable form of rhetoric suited to the purpose of exhibiting the excellence of a person, based on actual events associated with that person. To accomplish this purpose, Isocrates—much like biographers in modern times—had to create a universal story and a personal history, a theme of excellence, and a chronicle of events. The Evagoras demonstrates Isocrates’ successful rendering of a biography encased in the form of encomiastic praise. The chronicle of the king’s life, from his heritage and birth, through his exile, return, and ascent to the throne, to the wars against Persia and his eventual death—all these events taken together comprise a personal history, a narrative account that functions, as Havelock (: ) argues about ancient narratives in general, ‘as an act of reminder and recall’. Indeed, this narrative was designed to enable audiences to recall the actual history of the Cyprian ruler. In the words of Jebb (: ): ‘[t]he chief facts known about Evagoras speak for themselves’. At the same time, the events recounted do not occur as a series of disjointed moments but are framed by a story that gives them thematic unity and casts them as contributing parts to a larger totality. This means that Isocrates’ selection of events was guided by the demands of story-telling. As T.C. Burgess (: ) puts it, facts included in Isocrates’ and other orators’ encomia ‘may be selected at will, grouped in any order, exaggerated, idealized, understated . . . invented in some cases’. Van Hook (: –) similarly notes the effect of story-telling on the representation of real events when he notes that there is ‘much exaggeration in the delineation of [Evagoras’] character’. Isocrates was able, then, to render the biography of Evagoras as a story and a personal history, at once an artistic making of a world within which virtue dwells in all its glory and an account of a particular life. Following Pindar, Isocrates could recount real events by subjecting them to the dictates of artistic representation, that is, by severing their relation to empirical reality and re-articulating them as so many parts of a possible world. Shaped through art, events portraying the virtue of Evagoras do not reflect the world as experienced by the audience of the composition; and Isocrates’ manner of representing these events cannot be understood as an imitative act, a mere copying something prior to the making of this composition, but as a creative act, an act through which something new comes to be and a novel world is being disclosed—an ideal example of everlasting aretē. On the other hand, Isocrates composed the chronicle of Evagoras’ life episodically: the events surrounding the king’s heritage, birth, upbringing, exile, return home, seizing power, and governing his subjects, fighting the Persians—all these events follow one another in a loosely arranged manner of composition. This episodic structure of events preserves a sense of contingency for the audience—since it is temporality rather than art which guides the narrative movement from one incident to another. As the account of Evagoras’ life progresses from his heritage to his birth, for example, it moves forward by the dictates of chronology,
not the requirements of thematic logic; as such, the narrative maintains some connection to the real world of circumstance and happenstance. That an episodic arrangement of events breaks the illusion of art was recognized by Aristotle who, in the Poetics (b–), condemns as inartistic all episodic plots: ‘Of “simple” plots and actions the worst are those which are “episodic”. By this I mean a plot in which the episodes do not follow each other probably or inevitably.’ And since each event in the Evagoras comes not because of a previous one but merely after a previous one, the illusion of a self-enclosed theme and a self-contained story is being shattered by an emphasis on the actual. The dual function of the narrative to recount a personal history and to tell a universal story is also made evident by the act of narration. On the one hand, the story about the virtuous king unfolds by forging together scattered events into meaningful ensembles and by endowing them with the meaning of the story they are meant to confirm. Aeacus’ piousness, which had helped to end the drought, Peleus’ marriage to Thetis and the singing of their wedding song by the gods, Teucer’s founding of Salamis—all these events acquire through the art of narration a status beyond their singular eventfulness. Transformed into parts of a bigger story, they contribute to a larger totality of meaning—in this case, Evagoras’ noble heritage and praiseworthy ancestry. Following events in the process of their narration is tantamount to transforming singular events by placing them in larger meaningful ensembles or, in the words of Ricoeur (: ), to ‘extracting a configuration from a succession’. In other words, to follow the account of Evagoras is to ‘reflect upon’ events with the aim of understanding them in successive totalities (Ricoeur : ). Yet, the act of narration also unfolds by arranging events chronologically and, as such, follows a sequence that remains unaffected by the thematic logic of the story. It is this sequence that generates in hearers questions like: ‘and then?’, ‘what happened next?’, ‘and so?’ The combined artistic and historical character of the narrative, then, is made evident by the chronological and the non-chronological dimension of the art of narration, and Isocrates may be said to conduct his praise of Evagoras as a biographer, at once a story-teller and a historian or syngrapheus.
B E
.................................................................................................................................. The tradition of poetic praise was inherently tied to educational goals. The pedagogical ends of ancient poetry were recognized in the classical period during which the myths of Homer found their way into the education of children. Aware that he is carrying on the didactic ends of the poetic tradition of praise—aiming ‘in prose to eulogize good men’— Isocrates addresses in the introduction to his oration the son of Evagoras and new king of Cyprus, Nicocles: we praise ‘those who in their own time had proved themselves good men . . . [so] that the younger generation might with greater emulation have striven for virtue’ (Evag. ). By displaying Evagoras as a good king, the oration challenges Nicocles to demonstrate the moral strength of his father in his own conduct as ruler. Unlike the poets who crafted general models of excellence and exhorted audiences to emulate them, Isocrates created a particular model built out of events of a person’s life, and designed specifically to influence Nicocles. Even though he was exploring this genre without a real
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precedent, he understood that biography could be far more persuasive than the exhortations of poets and the arguments of orators. To be sure, he did not explicitly comment on the persuasive thrust of biography, since the language about this new genre was not available in his time. But he did speak about the credibility of life stories. As a rhetorical theorist, he believed—like Aristotle—that character is the most important factor in persuasion. Unlike Aristotle, who situated a speaker’s ethos within the context of a given speech, Isocrates placed it not within but beyond textuality onto a speaker’s lived life. As he puts it in the Antidosis (), ‘who does not know that . . . the argument which is made by a man’s life is of more weight than that which is furnished by words’. Isocrates’ treatment of biography in the Evagoras illustrates an important principle of his rhetorical education: just as we are more influenced by the manner in which orators live their lives rather than by the speeches they give, so too the life story of Evagoras will have a greater influence on his son’s conduct as ruler than anyone else’s words of advice. This principle was at the core of Isocrates’ ambition to rescue the art of rhetoric from the negative treatment it had received in the hands of his intellectual predecessors as well as from the devastating critique it suffered by his contemporary and rival educator, Plato. The legitimacy of the aim he assigned to his school—to shape students into leaders-to-be—rested entirely on his ability to disassociate his teaching of rhetoric from the practices of rhetorically powerful demagogues, who were driving Athens to her destruction, and by instructing his students that their success as rhetoricians rested principally on their ability to establish a reputation as good men. In biography, he discovered a form that would lend substance to his credence—that claiming to have a good character can only be demonstrated through the life one lives. Isocrates boasted that Nicocles was one of his students. In addition to the Evagoras, he sent two other orations to the new king, Nicocles and To Nicocles, whose expressed purpose was to advise Nicocles to temper the excesses of the constitution of tyranny in Cyprus. Within the context of these orations, the life story of Evagoras—as a ruler acting out of a commitment to virtue rather than a pursuit of personal gratification—makes a powerful case to Nicocles to emulate his father and conduct himself as a moderate rather than autocratic ruler, and to reign over his subjects by principle rather than by whim. This reading makes evident that Isocrates approached biography not only to promote a model of human excellence for emulation but also to influence conduct in a manner that would affect the domain of politics. Part of the educational aim of his school was to influence a state by educating its leaders—in the apt title of W. Jaeger’s (–) chapter on Isocrates, his was ‘The Education of the Prince’. Clearly, he viewed the genre of biography as a reliable way of carrying out that aim. Moreover, his goal to influence Nicocles through the life story of his father implicated the genre of biography in Athenian politics. We have already seen how his playful exercise with Helen had sought to link the rhetoric of praise with advocacy by constructing the person of Helen and the mythical Hellenic expedition against Troy as a warrant for advocating Hellenic unification in his day. Through the Evagoras, Isocrates attempts something similar. In light of the rising sentiments in favour of Panhellenism—a time during which questions were being raised as to who could be a strong enough leader to unify the Hellenic city-states against Persia and put an end to the threat of yet another invasion by the Persian Empire—the portrait of Evagoras as a good king was designed to direct Athenian attention towards Cyprus as a
state where the constitution of tyranny serves the interests of the people. For the dividing line about constitutions for the Athenians of the fourth century was not so much between democracy and tyranny as much as between a good or a bad democracy and a good or a bad tyranny (Konstan ). Should Nicocles follow in his father’s footsteps and become a tyrant with the welfare of his people in mind, the Athenian demos—Isocrates was certain—would be more inclined to perceive Nicocles as a viable future candidate for assuming the leadership of Hellenic unification. In view of Isocrates’ goal to align his rhetorical education with the project of bringing about the unity of Hellas, the biography of Evagoras can be read as paving the way towards the implementation of a political goal.
C
.................................................................................................................................. The Evagoras was composed as an oration to be delivered at a festival held by Nicocles in honour of his father. As part of the tradition of the oratory of praise—and much like a eulogy—the biography of the deceased king functions as a vehicle for exalting his rule of Cyprus in the presence of his subjects and for reminding them of his most important accomplishments. As a written composition addressed to Nicocles, the biography of the king functions as a text to be studied—something that Isocrates points out to Nicocles at the conclusion of the work: ‘I submit [your father’s achievements] to you for your contemplation and study’ (Evag. ). As a written work circulating among the small reading public, and disseminated by word of mouth to the rest of the Athenians—as is the case with oral cultures at their initial stage of writing literacy—the biography of Evagoras functions as a work whose aim is to influence public perceptions about the Cyprian tyrant and, by extension, his successor. The gradual shift from orality to literacy provided the necessary conditions for the emerging genre of biography to assume, in the hands of Isocrates, multiple rhetorical ends: to display the praiseworthiness of the subject of praise, to provide a listing of his accomplishments, and to act as a resource for shaping individual and public perceptions. These strategic uses that Isocrates made of the genre of biography reflect his deliberate effort to align biography with the ends that his programme of rhetorical education aspired to attain. The aim of his school was to position the art of rhetoric at the heart of Athenian politics by addressing enduring themes and ongoing issues that would likely have a great impact on the future direction of the polis. By committing his orations to writing, he transformed the previous educational ends of the art of rhetoric—as instruction in and training for speaking effectively in the courts and the assembly—that had given rhetoric its raison d’être. Outside the time pressures of reaching a verdict in the court or voting on a policy in the assembly, rhetoric could aspire towards a new kind of deliberation beyond addressing time-bound questions of policy (Poulakos ). It was in the context of committing rhetoric to this new type of public deliberation that Isocrates developed the genre of biography. As such, his contribution to biography can neither be reduced to the intrinsic development of the genre nor be understood in formalistic terms alone. By framing biography within the rhetoric of praise, he looked beyond the requirements of the genre to the potential effects that life stories might have on audiences. As I have tried to
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show, he understood well the power of biography to define what merits praise to the Athenians and, by extension, to base his political agenda on a vision of the polis as it could be if it approximated the ideals disclosed by admirable life stories.
F R Another angle on Isocrates’ strategic use of biography is offered by Too (), who argues that Isocrates creates a persona in his works based on real attributes of his person. For Isocrates’ educational programme, see Poulakos (); for his programme in civic education, in contradistinc tion to the sophists, Plato and Aristotle, see Poulakos and Depew ().
A This chapter is reprinted with minor alterations from Poulakos, ‘The educational ends of the “first” biography in Classical Greece’, Vitae Scholasticae . (): .
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A of Xenophon’s literary skills have always been positive within discussions about ancient Greek biography and its development. Scholars have recognized how remarkably diverse are the literary forms which he uses in order to explore character and assess individual lives, even if they do not agree precisely on which of his works ought to fall within the ambit of the study of ancient biography. Thus, for example, Momigliano examines the encomium Agesilaus, the character sketches in the Anabasis, the Memorabilia, and the Cyropaedia, though his characterization of the last is that while it is ‘Xenophon’s greatest contribution to biography’, it is not in fact biography but a ‘paedagogical novel’ (Momigliano : –). He also briefly discusses the Anabasis and Apology under the rubric of autobiography. Sonnabend (: –), by contrast, examines only the Agesilaus and Cyropaedia, the two stand-alone, birth-to-death accounts of an individual within Xenophon’s corpus. More recent examinations have occupied a middle ground between Momigliano and Sonnabend, but still without any agreement. Reichel () concentrates on the character sketches in the Anabasis, the Agesilaus, and the Cyropaedia, while Hägg deals with the latter two but sets apart the character sketches in the Anabasis as not quite yet biography proper and also includes the Memorabilia because of its claim to present the author’s personal recollections and because of the consistent portrait presented therein (Hägg a: –). Reichel (b) discusses the Anabasis separately and argues against autobiography as an appropriate category into which to place the work, regarding it rather as a type of apologetic writing, and Hägg eschews discussion of the Anabasis as a whole, despite the fact that his conclusions about the Memorabilia (Hägg a: –) could equally well describe this also. Clearly part of the problem is how, precisely, we are meant to be defining (auto) biographical writing at this period in time. So the first thing I want to do in this chapter is to present a brief case for being as inclusive as possible (see also Chapter in this volume). In some ways, Momigliano, I think, had the right approach, though there will be some modification to his views in what is presented below. The pivotal role the figure of Socrates plays in Xenophon’s biographical experiments will then be discussed, as his influence goes far beyond the fact that he is one of Xenophon’s subjects. The case will then be made for why the Anabasis needs to be front and centre in any discussion of Xenophon’s biographical experiments, followed by a brief overview of his most obviously biographical works, the
Agesilaus and Cyropaedia, and a reassessment of his overall aim in examining individual lives in these various ways.
T Q G: T C I
.................................................................................................................................. Xenophon’s works in general are difficult to define generically. None of his fourteen extant works is exactly like any other. Even those that fall under the broad rubric of so-called Socratic writings or Sokratikoi logoi—Memorabilia, Apology, Symposium, and Oeconomicus—are significantly different from one another in form and shape. Though he does not engage in overt self-reflective musing about breaking or expanding generic conventions in the way that Isocrates does (e.g. Antid. , and Evag. ), or attempt to contextualize or codify generically his own writings or those of others, as do Plato and, even more so, Aristotle,1 the very fact that the structures of his works vary so dramatically signals his interest in pushing generic boundaries. Further, though Xenophon is obviously interested in prominent and striking individuals, ‘biographer’ has never been one of the labels used to define him; instead, ‘philosopher’ (or ‘Socratic’), ‘historian’, or ‘rhetor’ have been the main choices over the course of the past two millennia.2 Yet, as is clear from the survey above, over a third of his output (including three of the four longest works) is deemed worthy of examination by those looking at the development of Greek biography, even if at the same time these works also show clear affinities with other types of writing.
1 On early Greek reflection on generic definitions, see Chapter in this volume. Plato is also important in this picture too, as Nightingale () shows, even though he is not perhaps as systematic in his codification as Aristotle. The later fourth century codification of types of rhetoric found in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the Rhetoric to Alexander are a clear response to the literary experimentation in the arena of oratory of the late fifth and early fourth centuries. Statements of intention, like that of Thucydides (. ), should also not be ignored. They show a much earlier awareness of, and self reflection on, how form and content can be used to support purpose. 2 Henri Estienne, in the prolegomena to his edition of the complete works of Xenophon in Greek, encapsulates the issue nicely:
For sure Lucian refers to him among his catalogue of philosophers in the book in which he enumerates the long lived. But when the same man talks about the historians he also calls him a historian and indeed a just one. Hermogenes also makes mention of him among the other historians, Herodotus, Hecateaus, Thucydides . . . But when the same man is going to speak words about the historians, he says there are some who ‘share in both, i.e. history and other types of writing’, among whom is Xenophon. Indeed, since Xenophon, even if he had written nothing, could have taken the title of ‘Socratic philosopher’ and to a fair extent gained this in my view before he wrote, and moreover since it is more honourable to be called a philosopher than a historian, I would think that he should be called a philosopher rather than a historian. But why am I saying so many things about this matter? Perhaps someone might say because certain ancient manuscripts call him in some of the titles of his books not a ‘philosopher’ or ‘historian’ but a ‘rhetor’. But on what grounds such an appellation could rest, I leave to others to consider. For the Latin text, see Kecskeméti, Boudou, and Cazes (: ). All translations in this chapter are my own.
In assessing which of his works ought to be examined as examples of early biographical writing, it is important to keep in mind that even in the twenty-first century the boundaries of biography as a literary genre are still being debated (see, e.g. Holmes and H. Lee ), and those who wish to separate out as discrete genres memoirs and autobiography find themselves compelled to go to some lengths (and not always successfully) in order to circumscribe these as distinctive types of life-writing (see, respectively, Couser and DiBattista and Wittman ). The term memoirs has in fact been frequently used to describe a number of Xenophon’s works, not just his Memorabilia and Anabasis, but even his most overtly historical offering, the Hellenica (Cawkwell : ), though it is not first person, relational, or focused on an individual, and even if it is all based on memory, that memory is not always Xenophon’s nor can it even be said to be that only of people close to Xenophon (all criteria of memoirs listed by Couser : –). The compulsive need we have to pinpoint beginnings and fence off boundaries, in order to categorize and then canonize all writing into specific genres, both moves us forward and constrains us at the same time, no less with respect to ancient Greek forms of life-writing than to current practices. Given the very fragmentary state of our evidence and our increasingly more sophisticated understanding of how all generic boundaries have always been constantly in a state of flux, and challenged and distorted almost the instant they appear to be solidifying,3 it is important to pay attention to Xenophon because, quite simply, he provides us with an extremely rich case study of biographical experimentation (Hägg a: , echoing the opening quotation from Momigliano). It seems counter-intuitive, for example, when we have two narratives from Xenophon’s pen which more or less proceed from birth to death (the Agesilaus and Cyropaedia) to search for origins of ancient biographical writing among the later, either fragmentary or lost, works of the Peripatetic school or more broadly of the Hellenistic period, an approach influenced strongly, both directly and indirectly, by the work of Leo ().4 Nor, I think, is there as obvious a break with practices in the fifth and fourth centuries as Momigliano posited (: ). Even with the paucity of information available, it is possible to see literary precursors of almost all the types of writing Xenophon engages in, even though he clearly develops them in novel ways. For example, though the Agesilaus may be an early example of a prose encomium, this genre was a development of the long-existing practice of composing poetic encomia (see Chapters and in this volume). Elements characteristic of Xenophon’s narrative strategy in the Memorabilia are very likely developments of what we see earlier in Ion of Chios’ Visits (Epidēmiai).5 Thucydides’ summing up of Themistocles’ life and character (Th. .) anticipates the biographical sketches in the Anabasis. Further, it is not beyond imagining that there is a thin line connecting Herodotus’ account of Cyrus’ life (see Chapter in this volume) and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, or that the marvellous fictional autobiographies put in the mouth of Odysseus in the Odyssey, with their carefully crafted self-presentation, did in some 3 See D. Duff (: ) in general, Conte () on Latin poetry, and Marincola () on Graeco Roman historiography. 4 Compare, by contrast, C. Cooper (), whose aim is to argue for recognizable biographical texts in the Hellenistic period rather than to exclude earlier material. 5 On Ion, see Chapter in this volume. V. Gray (: ) briefly discusses links between Ion’s Visits and Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Symposium.
way have an impact upon Xenophon’s self-presentation in the Anabasis and on the playful pseudonym—Themistogenes the Syracusan—he gives himself, as author of the Anabasis, in his own Hellenica (HG ..).6 It is important to note that biography and fiction have been intertwined right from the start, from our earliest example, the fabricated autobiographies of Odysseus, through Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius in the second century , right down to J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime () and Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life (). Summertime is an autobiography using the third person and presented as interviews conducted by a fictional academic for a biography he is researching about the already deceased Coetzee, while John Aubrey: My Own Life is a biography written in the first person in the form of a fictional diary. All these works illustrate the difficulty and even the futility of setting the boundaries of what is to be considered biographical writing too narrowly. In all, too, fiction is used to get at a deeper truth, and this process is of fundamental importance to Xenophon’s biographical experiments.
T I S
.................................................................................................................................. It has long been recognized that the Socratics’ memorialization of their mentor has played an important role in the development of biography. The particular feature of works such as Plato’s Apology and Xenophon’s Memorabilia that is of interest in this respect is their transmission of a ‘picture of Socrates’ personality by displaying and interpreting his life . . . as an ethical unity’.7 Thus, while these works are in no way chronological birth-to-death accounts of Socrates, Socrates is the subject and the reader comes away from them with an understanding of a coherent moral individual. In the Sokratikoi logoi, instead of the biographical element taking second place to the historical such as is found in fifth-century historiography—e.g. in the Croesus logos in Herodotus (Hdt. .–) or Thucydides’ character sketch of Themistocles (Th. .), on which, see Chapters and respectively in this volume—here the historical is subordinate to the biographical, and used only insofar as it can illuminate the character of Socrates. Thus, whenever concrete historical events are brought into the text, they are used to elaborate upon a particular aspect of Socrates’ character rather than to situate him within a specific historical timeline. So, for example, Socrates’ unwillingness to go along with the condemnation of the Athenian generals after the Battle of Arginusae in (Mem. ..; cf. Pl. Ap. b–c) is mentioned as a concrete example of his steadfast refusal, despite fierce opposition, to break the oath to uphold the law which he swore upon taking up political office. Historical considerations are subordinated in other ways too. Identifiable events are not necessarily presented in chronological order (Hägg a: ), and there is no sense that the Socratic conversations, which make up the bulk of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, necessarily occurred in the order they are presented, if they even occurred as presented at all. Fiction 6
For Homeric overtones in the Anabasis in general, see Tuplin (). Tuplin rejects Odysseus’ lying tales as a specific model for Xenophon’s use of the pseudonym ( ) but the point here is a broader one about autobiographical narrative in general. See also V. Gray (: ) on Xenophon’s pseudonym. 7 Hägg (a: ; his italics), drawing on Dihle (: ); see also Momigliano (: ).
and anachronism of one sort or another are features of Sokratikoi logoi in general, and Xenophon no less than the other Socratics employs them (Vander Waerdt : –; Kahn : –). It seems clear, too, that these features are deliberate ‘metafictional indicators’ (to use the terminology of Hodkinson : –) and that there was, therefore, no intent to deceive the reader. No one, for example, reading Xenophon’s Symposium could have imagined, even though he says he was present at this particular gathering (Smp. .), that he actually was present, since the dramatic date is c. when Xenophon was at most years old. Likewise no one would have worried about the fact that in Aeschines’ dialogue Aspasia, Socrates is seen dispensing advice to Xenophon and his wife, even though Xenophon was almost certainly not married while Socrates was alive (Gera : n. ). If Xenophon (or, in the second example, his wife) could not have been present, we, along with the original audience, are at liberty to regard the discussions within the work as, at least in part, fictional.8 In the case of the Symposium, therefore, whether or not the conversations are some amalgamation of later ones which Xenophon, as an adult, did hear Socrates having with the same or other interlocutors, the literary end-product must still be regarded as fictional. The aim after all in the Symposium, as in the Memorabilia, was not historical precision but the delineation of a particular individual and the type of life he led. This is not to deny the equally important aim of the Memorabilia as a defence of Socrates. Xenophon makes it very clear at the start (Mem. .–) that his intent is to defend his mentor against the charges brought against him for which he was put to death. But no less important is the setting forth of a consideration of the life of Socrates as an ethical model for imitation. This ethical aim, so central later on, for example, to Neoplatonic biographies of philosophers (see Chapter in this volume), has its roots here, in the Sokratikoi logoi, but is also present in all Xenophon’s biographical experiments and owes at least some of its impulse to lessons he personally imbibed from Socrates. Thus, Socrates is important, not just because he was a charismatic figure whose ethical entirety his followers tried to encapsulate in the Sokratikoi logoi, but also because of how his own example of selfexamination, as well as his examination of others as a means of self-improvement and for the improvement of others—a consistent feature of how he is portrayed by the different Socratics—was taken up by Xenophon as the overriding principle behind his whole literary oeuvre. Xenophon, barred from political life because of being exiled, found an alternate way to be useful: if he could not himself benefit his polis by engaging in political life there, he could usefully teach others about leadership and civic engagement through his writings (Humble ). One of the ways in which he did this was by capturing the potentiality of individual lives in different ways and presenting these lives as ethical exemplars of one sort or another. He did not arrive at this path, however, without some serious Socratic self-examination.
(A)B A
.................................................................................................................................. While none of the texts being examined here is unproblematic, the Anabasis is perhaps the most complex in terms of its biographical credentials. On the surface, the work presents a Or ‘halfway houses’ between fiction and history, as Danzig () so nicely puts it when summing up the case made in Dorion and Bandini (). 8
historical narrative of a journey taken by a group of mercenaries from to . The expedition ends roughly where it begins, in Ionia, after having advanced far into the interior of the Persian Empire. This simple description, however, belies the complexity of the narrative structure of the work: Xenophon, the author, creates an anonymous narrator to recount events in which he himself participated (though with occasional intrusions of a first person ‘I’, e.g. An. ..) and, further, he portrays himself as a character in the third person (for a discussion, see M.A. Flower : –). The multiplicity of interpretative approaches testifies to this complexity. It has, for example, been deemed memoir (Hägg a: ), self-advertisement (Robert : –), apologetic (Sonnabend : ; Reichel b), the first war memoir (J.W.I. Lee ; Laforse ), and has been examined for its affinity to travel writing (Roy ; V. Gray : –; Humble ). M.A. Flower aptly sums up why there is so much difficulty categorizing the work: ‘he was an innovator of a most singular kind—one who lets the innovations speak for themselves without any cues from the author that the reader is about to experience something new.’9 But these labels have something in common: they all attest to the autobiographical nature of the work, even if some prefer to eschew that term. In general, the argument that it should not be labelled an autobiography centres around the following facts: it is too limited in scope, it is written in the third person, and Xenophon plays only a marginal role in the first two books (e.g. Reichel b). These points are not unimportant, but equally there are others which can be made in favour of the work being considered an early experiment in autobiographical writing as we understand it, in particular its self-reflexivity. Self-reflexivity and introspection are considered core elements of modern autobiography and the late fourth-century Confessions of St Augustine (on which, see Chapter in this volume) is generally deemed the earliest ancient autobiography.10 But much of what is said to distinguish the Confessions applies in certain ways also to the Anabasis. The Anabasis reflects an absolutely pivotal moment in Xenophon’s life, as transformative for him as conversion would be for Augustine. Xenophon’s two years abroad as a mercenary led, either directly or indirectly, to his exile from Athens (Tuplin ) and quashed any hopes he might have had of a political career. While he does not explicitly tell us that he was aiming at politics, there are enough pointers across his works to suggest this had been his goal. The vignettes which Xenophon presents of his younger pre-Anabasis self portray him as an Alcibiades-like young aristocrat, hanging about with Socrates but more intent on showing off his own youthful wit than listening to the advice of his mentor (An. ..–; Mem. ..–). The Anabasis, like the Confessions, represents the later reworking, with the benefit of mature self-reflection, of the narrative of this pivotal period. Certainly Xenophon does not give as expansive a picture of his younger, rasher self as Augustine does, nor in fact does he deal directly with the turning point in his own life in the Anabasis. His exile, for the duration of the narrative, remains for the most part in the future (‘for not yet had the vote concerning exile been passed against him at Athens’, An. ..), and even when he remarks
M.A. Flower (: , esp. ) on issues of genre in the Anabasis in general. For example, Gentili and Cerri (: ), L. Anderson (: ), and DiBattista and Wittman (: ). 9
10
upon it during the one place in the text where he flashes forward in time (An. ..–, especially .. ‘when Xenophon was in exile’), he does not elucidate the circumstances which led to it. Yet the very fact that in the work he makes it clear, by means of a flashback, that he was warned by Socrates that his campaigning with Cyrus was very likely to be looked upon unfavourably by the Athenians, that he ignored this warning, and that he was subsequently exiled, all point to some degree—probably, in fact, to a very high degree—of introspection.11 Further, like Augustine, whose self-portrait is carefully crafted to suit his theological message (Fredriksen : –), it seems certain that Xenophon’s self-portrait in the Anabasis has been reconfigured also to suit the didactic aims of the work. For again, like Augustine’s Confessions, the Anabasis is ‘more than an examination of his personal past’ (ibid.: ). Like all of Xenophon’s works, it is an exploration of leadership and Xenophon’s own self-portrait is only a part of how this exploration is carried out. Another key element in the work which contributes to this aim are the character sketches found at the ends of the first two books, and these mini-biographies are the second way in which this work is of importance for the development of biographical writing. There are four in total and they are placed in the text at the point at which their subjects die: Cyrus the Younger (An. .), Clearchus (..–), Proxenus (..–), and Menon (.–). The length of each sketch reflects the relative importance of its subject in the preceding narrative. These sketches bear a familial resemblance to Thucydides’ summary of Themistocles’ character and death (Th. .) and the post-mortem assessment of Nicias (Th. .) in their positioning and ethical tone (Stuart : –), but they differ also in significant ways. They certainly complement the way in which these four leaders have been portrayed in the prior narrative, but they also expand on that portrayal by the addition of new details. So, for example, we learn about the Persian education system and how Cyrus’ exceptional nature already shone forth during this period of his life (An. ..–), the reason Clearchus had been exiled from Sparta (..–), that Proxenus had been a student of Gorgias (..), and that Menon’s sexual propensities were contrary to acceptable norms (..). Further, just as they add information, so too are they selective in the summation, and in this way anticipate in some ways what Plutarch will later do in his syncrises. For example, Clearchus’ oratorical skills, so prominent and important in the prior narrative (e.g. .), are completely ignored in the character sketch. Indeed, overall the sketches are more rhetorical than Thucydides’ offerings and have the feel of types (Momigliano : ). Each of the four represents a particular kind of leadership style: Cyrus rules by benefitting his friends and harming his enemies, Clearchus through severity, Proxenus through mildness, and Menon by means of deception. This stylization of their characters (anticipating the even more stylized late-fourth-century Characters of Theophrastus) points to an extra-narrative role for the sketches. They are quite clearly meant to be judged against one another, and it is difficult to imagine that Xenophon did not mean his reader to then judge against them the behaviour of the leaders who replace them, himself included.
Halliwell (: ) argues cogently that self awareness and introspection are evident even in the Homeric epics. 11
B--D L-W: M G-B
.................................................................................................................................. As we have seen in Chapter , Isocrates in his Evagoras claims to be the first to compose a prose encomium. When precisely to date this work (in order to test the claim) is unclear, but guesses range within the period to , i.e. after the death of Evagoras and before the death of his son Nicocles, to whom the work is addressed (Hägg a: ). Xenophon’s Agesilaus is not much easier to pinpoint: it has no specific addressee but must post-date the death of Agesilaus in and predate Xenophon’s death c.. Even if we cannot be more precise in dating either of these two works, it is still possible to see that Xenophon is again at the forefront of experimentation with a type of life-writing, the generic markers of which were currently being pushed in new directions. There are tantalizing hints about other contemporary, but no longer extant, encomia, including some composed for Xenophon’s son after his death in the Battle of Mantineia in (D.L. Life of Xenophon .): ‘Aristotle says that the countless numbers who composed encomia and epitaphs for Gryllus wrote partly to please his father. Hermippus, also, in his On Theophrastus says that Isocrates composed an encomium for Gryllus.’ These encomia may not, of course, have been prose encomia, though the fact that Isocrates is said to have written one of them points in that direction. And while discussion of the Evagoras and Agesilaus usually centres on issues of priority and the differences between their respective structures, the evidence in Diogenes suggests the possibility of a closer connection between Isocrates and Xenophon than is usually envisaged. There are, at any rate, enough structural and thematic correspondences between Isocrates’ Evagoras, Xenophon’s Agesilaus, and the rules laid down a few decades later for this type of writing in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the Rhetoric to Alexander, to be confident that Xenophon could have expected his audience to recognize both what type of work he was composing and any features particular to the Agesilaus itself.12 It is noticeable that Xenophon is neither as vocal as Isocrates about the paradigmatic value of his encomium (cf. Evag. , –, , with Ages. .), nor does he devote any space to theorizing about the form of his work in the way that Isocrates does in the Evagoras.13 Both points are usually taken as confirmation of the priority of Isocrates’ work, but they are likely tied also to the circumstances of the composition and their respective audiences. Both these factors are unknown for the Agesilaus but there are some aspects of the content of the work that can help direct speculation on these fronts. The virtues attributed to Agesilaus in the encomium look, at first glance, to be fairly standard and include the big four: justice (δικαιοσύνη; Ages. .–, .), moderation (σωϕροσύνη; .–), courage (ἀνδρεία; .–), and wisdom (σοϕία; .–). These are likewise all attributed to Evagoras (e.g. Evag. –) and to Eros in the mock-encomium found in the roughly contemporary Symposium of Plato (b–b), and they are recommended 12 See Humble (). Noël () argues that the later handbooks acknowledge and reflect the differences between the Evagoras and Agesilaus. 13 On which theorizing, see Chapter in this volume, and also Hägg (a: ).
in Aristotle’s handbook (Rh. b–). But a second glance shows that two of these in particular are narrowly qualified. First, Agesilaus’ justice is only ‘in respect of financial matters’ (εἰς χρήματα δικαιοσύνη, Ages. .) and consists essentially of benefitting his friends, and his moderation (σωϕροσύνη) is explained as ‘sexual self-control’ (ἀϕροδισίων ἐγκράτεια, .). In Xenophon’s analysis of the key features of the Spartan politeia which he believes led to Sparta’s power and renown (Spartan Constitution), both justice and moderation are absent as aims of the Spartan system (Humble ), but he does foreground the importance of enkrateia, both in general (Lac. ), and in pederastic relations (Lac. .). Indeed, Agesilaus’ justice in financial matters is also described as ‘financial self-control’ (ἐγκρατείας χρημάτων, Ages. .). It is possible, therefore, that Xenophon has tailored the standard encomiastic virtues to a Spartan setting, emphasizing aspects of virtues which were particularly valued in Sparta. Since the broader aim of encomia in general seems to have been to provide ethical paradigms for imitation, it would make sense that they would be tailored, as necessary, to their primary audience. This is of course speculative, but it is striking that the discussion of Evagoras’ justice and moderation are less idiosyncratic and this does provide an explanation why. Is an encomium a biography? If the Memorabilia can be considered biographical because it transmits a picture of Socrates by displaying and interpreting his life as an ethical unity, then the same can be said about the Agesilaus. The deceased subject’s career is carefully tailored to present an ethical exemplum for others to imitate. Like Sokratikoi logoi, too, encomia in general have a flexible relationship with the truth, as a comparison, in this case, with the portrait of Agesilaus in Xenophon’s Hellenica shows. The Agesilaus is, in fact, more obviously biographical than the Memorabilia to modern sensibilities in the sense that, even if narration of Agesilaus’ life begins when he is about years old, the coverage of the rest of his life is much more thorough and, at least for part of the time, told in chronological succession (Ages. .–). This overview situating Agesilaus firmly within the historical timeline then in turn acts as an anchor for the more loosely-structured explication of his virtues (.–.). The other forerunner among Xenophon’s work for biographical status is the Cyropaedia. It stands apart from the rest of Xenophon’s biographical experiments in several ways. Not only is it the only actual birth-to-death narrative, it is also the longest of his fourteen works, it is not about contemporary events, and it is set entirely outside the Greek world. All the rest, bar the Hiero, deal with contemporary events or people or have dramatic dates within the time period Xenophon lived, c.– , and all have a foot in the Greek world in one way or another. Like most of Xenophon’s writings, however, its preface gives only a partial clue as to what will follow in the rest of the work. It opens thus (Cyr. ..): I once considered how many democracies had been overthrown by those who wished to live as citizens in any way other than in a democracy, and again how many monarchies and oligarchies had been abolished previously by the people, and how many of those who have attempted to become tyrants have been either overthrown swiftly and completely or, if they continue ruling even for a short time, are marvelled at as being wise and happy men.
This opening sentence leads the reader to expect some sort of exploration of politeiai and that indeed is what (s)he gets, though that exploration is not as broad as might initially be expected. Xenophon quickly narrows the scope by observing further how difficult mankind
is in general to rule over. It is only at this point that he mentions Cyrus the Great and how exceptional he was as a ruler because his subjects willingly obeyed him. The preface concludes (..): ‘We have examined this man, then, on the grounds that he is worthy of being marvelled at, asking what his origins were and what sort of nature he possessed and what sort of education he was trained in that he excelled so greatly in ruling men.’ This statement of purpose does not lead us to expect a birth-to-death narrative, but it is characteristic of Xenophon not to reveal fully at the beginning of his works all the strands that will unfold and intertwine over the course of the coming exploration. And what follows is very much a hybrid work—politeia literature (Gera : –) grafted onto a biographical framework, i.e. a philosophical exploration of political (specifically monarchical) leadership by means of a fictionalized biography. Xenophon, as far as can be discerned, was the only one to use such a structure for a discussion of this sort. His slightly older contemporary and fellow-Socratic, Antisthenes (c. – ) seems to have written at least one work about Cyrus the Great (Cyrus, or On Kingship, D.L. .), but there is no indication that this took a biographical form. Xenophon’s choice of form, however, cannot be accidental, particularly since he had before him a form which was being used by his contemporaries for such deliberations, the Sokratikos Logos (compare, for example, Plato’s Republic). Indeed, Xenophon himself explored the nature of tyrannical life in his Hiero using a modified form of Socratic dialogue, and though the Syracusan tyrant Hiero is a key figure in that work, it could in no way be labelled biographical writing. Further, neither it nor the Cyropaedia would have been mistaken for historical works. Their subjects, Cyrus even more than Hiero and Simonides, being removed from Xenophon’s world, temporally, geographically and culturally, allowed for significant freedom for literary invention.14 By employing a biographical framework which at this time, as Xenophon’s own corpus demonstrates, is being used to capture the potentiality of individual lives without a rigid regard for accuracy and truth in order to present them as ethical exemplars of one sort or another, Xenophon could explore both what was singular and what was universal about Cyrus’ rule. To label the work a fictional or pedagogic novel, therefore, captures its fictionality, but loses what is unique about it. It blurs the crucial fact that a single individual’s life has provided the framework for the discussion precisely because the philosophical investigation is about successful individual rule. If later novelistic works draw on elements of Xenophon’s work, such as the story of Panthea, for inspiration, that says something about how they too are stretching and reforming generic boundaries.15
M S O?
.................................................................................................................................. With the exception of the character sketches at Anabasis ., scholars tend to regard Xenophon’s main biographical experiments, including his own self-portrait, as primarily See also Hodkinson (: ) on the work’s psychic omniscience as an indicator of its fictional status. 15 See B. Zimmermann () for perhaps the strongest case for adjudging the Cyropaedia a proto novel. It is notable how often, however, he falls back on the terms biography and encomium. 14
concerned with setting out ideal leaders.16 Indeed, it has been argued that Socrates is the model for many of Xenophon’s ‘heroes’ because these figures, including Xenophon himself, have so many of the same qualities which Xenophon attributes to Socrates (Gera ). It is true that those individuals whose biographies Xenophon has drawn share in many different ways some of the core virtues Socrates is also shown to have possessed (e.g. self-control, self-sufficiency, piety), but this does not make them flawless. They all have weaknesses and blind spots. Of the character sketches in the Anabasis, that of Cyrus the Younger is certainly the most laudatory, but it is not, I think, as Hägg argues (a: ), ‘unconditional admiration’. Cyrus is exceptional in many ways, not least in his capacity to inspire loyalty, an aspect of his character which is the focus of the character sketch, and which is illustrated even after his death, as the army he held together through the force of his character gradually disintegrates. The story of his standing his ground against a charging bear when he was a boy, illustrating his great fondness for danger (An. ..), is retrospective foreshadowing of his headlong, somewhat imprudent, attack against Artaxerxes at Cunaxa which, though it might well have been successful, was not, and resulted in Cyrus’ death (..–). Furthermore, Cyrus had been caught off guard by Artaxerxes leading up to this battle, allowing his troops to become disordered despite plenty of signs that an engagement was imminent (..–.). In less glorious circumstances, too, Cyrus was happy not to muddy his cloak—literally! At one point when wagons got mired in the mud, he sent his Persian nobles in all their finery to help out, but there is no suggestion that he himself joined them (..–), unlike Clearchus (..), and Xenophon later on (..–), who lead by example in similar situations. Instead the story about the wagons illustrates further how loyal and obedient Cyrus’ men were to him. Further, if we look outside the text and compare Xenophon’s Cyrus the Younger in the Anabasis with his Cyrus the Great in the Cyropaedia, it might be deemed important that whereas Xenophon repeatedly notes that Cyrus the Younger outdoes his friends in generosity and in doing his enemies harm, it is at excelling in generosity towards friends that Cyrus the Great aims rather than at harming his enemies (Cyr. ..; cf. also Cyrus’ treatment of Croesus and Abradatas) and many of the lessons Cyrus the Great learns as a young man from his father (Cyr. .), Cyrus the Younger has quite clearly not learned (M.A. Flower : ). Cyrus the Younger was good and had potential, but he was not perfect, i.e. he is a particular kind of exemplar and the lessons to be learned from him are both about what to do and what not to do. Is Xenophon, then, the one true, ideal leader in the Anabasis? Certainly, the fact that he emerges as a new leader of the army immediately after the character sketches of the dead Greek generals and repeatedly shows himself acting as though having learned from their failures would suggest this might be the case. Certainly there is much that is positive, perhaps even too positive, about his self-portrait. He is clearly a skilled orator (e.g. An. ..–; ..–), and is usually the one who is able to solve logistical (..–) and tactical problems (e.g. ., where his solution is workable when that of Cheirisophus is not). He even shows himself in this regard learning upon the job: early on, he endangers his men
For example, Due (: ), Dorion (: ), Reichel (: ), and M.A. Flower (: ); on the Cyropaedia, see Hägg (a: ). 16
without harming the enemy whose cavalry protected them (..–), an action for which his fellow-generals roundly admonish him, but Xenophon, rather than becoming demoralized like the others, devises a solution to the problem by employing Rhodian slingers and creating a cavalry unit (..–). He is politically astute (making use of assemblies to diffuse tensions, e.g. ..–), accessible to his soldiers (..–), and he makes the welfare of his soldiers his greatest concern (e.g. ..–, ..– regarding provisioning). Yet, like Cyrus the Younger, he is not perfect. At times he misconstrues situations, nowhere more than when he suggests founding a polis (at Cotyora, ..–, and again at Port Calpe ..–). He is unable to prevent the break-up of the mercenaries at Heraclea (..–), and is certainly outmanoeuvred by successive Spartan harmosts and Seuthes despite his best efforts (An. ).17 With sober hindsight, from his position of exile in Scillus, he is able to see more clearly the sort of headstrong young man he had been. Like many who associated with Socrates, he thought he knew better, and though he clearly showed himself capable of learning on the fly, equally he did not learn the most important lessons of all until he had to confront life in exile. The more overtly biographical narratives are slightly different. The Agesilaus is meant to provide an exemplary model for imitation, but the subject is made to fit a generic model (slightly modified for a Spartan audience, perhaps, in this instance). The encomiastic portrait is not the only picture of Agesilaus which Xenophon drew. Agesilaus, as one of the longest-reigning Spartan kings and the one whose reign encompassed the period of Sparta’s hegemony in the Greek world and her collapse, plays a major role in Xenophon’s historical work, the Hellenica. The portrait drawn there is most definitely mixed: there are positive elements and these find their way into the encomium (some in almost identical language to the Hellenica), but there are also negative elements which, understandably, do not.18 To determine, therefore, whether or not Xenophon himself considers Agesilaus an ideal leader, it is to the Hellenica, not to the Agesilaus, that one should turn. Furthermore, it is not entirely clear either that the fictionalized Cyrus in the Cyropaedia is meant to be regarded as a wholly positive exemplar. Certainly part of the reason Cyrus was chosen as a framework upon which to hang a discussion of the nature of ruling was because he had been so successful at attaining and holding (during his lifetime) a vast empire. But being extraordinarily successful is not the same as being wholly exemplary and there is ample evidence throughout the text that Xenophon is again asking his attentive reader to note just how his Cyrus attains and holds onto rule. It is no coincidence that only two sections after Xenophon has said that Cyrus is remarkable because so many follow him willingly (Cyr. ..), he also points out that they obey him out of fear (..; D.M. Johnson : ). Cyrus is a master of deception not just against his enemies but also towards his friends and allies, as his manipulation of Cyaxares shows,19 and the way in which he convinces the Persian elite to become horsemen, to turn them into centaurs (..– with D.M. Johnson , especially –). In the end, it becomes clear that Cyrus survives in power by destroying the Persian system which was so crucial to his upbringing, and he See also Tuplin (: ) on the ambivalence of Xenophon’s self portrait. For example, compare Ages. . with HG .. , and the analysis of Tuplin (: ). See also Humble (). 19 On Cyrus and Cyaxares, see the different, but complementary, analyses of Gera (: ) and Nadon (: ). 17 18
must in the end isolate himself from his followers in various ways (e.g. ..–) and institute a system of spies so that no opposition to his rule ever has the opportunity to establish itself (..–). Certainly, in this fictional world, he dies of old age in bed surrounding by his sons and friends (.) and not in battle at the hands of the Massagetae, as in Herodotus’ account (Hdt. .). But he has not been able to give his children the upbringing he had, not least because old Persia is gone. Even if they had been by nature such as their father had been—which they were not—it is unlikely that they could have sustained his successes, so much divisiveness did his final measures elicit (as the epilogue to the work shows, Cyr. .). In the end, Cyrus is only the peg upon which Xenophon hangs his political musings. The fragility of empire, even with such a figure of Cyrus at its head, is here a central theme, as it is also in the Hellenica (Tuplin ; D.M. Johnson ). Xenophon had no need to present wholly ideal models for imitation through his biographical experiments. Lessons can be learned equally as well from flawed or negative examples as from positive ones. We need only to look at Plutarch’s Parallel Lives to see this principle at work. The weight of a couple of centuries of scholarly opinion denigrating Xenophon’s skill and intellect in general has, I think, contributed to the reluctance to admit that he is in fact a careful and critical writer. For him, there is only one figure who comes anywhere near being an ideal exemplar: Socrates. No one else comes close to having lived an entirely ethical life, to being useful to and benefitting those around him. One of the key areas in which Cyrus failed was, in fact, as an educator (Tuplin ), and this is precisely the area in which Socrates succeeded, in Xenophon’s view, at least, as the Memorabilia shows. He nearly failed with Xenophon, as Xenophon openly admits, but the dramatic circumstances of exile made Xenophon take stock of himself and his life (hence the Anabasis). It is not just that no one else comes close to him as an exemplar in Xenophon’s oeuvre: no other individual in Xenophon’s ambit could have led Xenophon to undertake the type of literary project he engaged in once he had come to terms with his own status as an exile.
C
.................................................................................................................................. Xenophon’s explorations of lives and characters are more complex and in some ways more modern than we generally admit. Momigliano was on the right track, I think, when he observed that, though the biographical impulse existed before the Socratics, their experimentation with the form had a significant impact on life-writing. The desire to capture Socrates’ essence, to understand how and why he lived as he did, inspired a whole genre of writing, Sokratikoi logoi, which undoubtedly drew on earlier anecdotal collections such as that of Ion of Chios, but which became something more comprehensive and more biographical. A certain flexibility with truth was allowed, for if a fictionalized scenario could better represent a deeper truth about Socrates’ character and life than strict historicity, then that in the end was what was important. This flexibility with the truth characterizes all of Xenophon’s biographical experiments, though in different ways, depending upon the other aims of these works. Most easily understandable to us, perhaps, are the liberties he undoubtedly took with his own self-presentation.
It is characteristic of autobiographical texts to re-write the past with a self-reflexivity which usually seems to result in a more positive portrait (though not always, as the example of Coetzee shows). The character sketches of Cyrus the Younger, Clearchus, Proxenus, and Menon against which Xenophon’s self-portrait is meant to be compared, are stylized in a different way. They are not necessarily fictional, but they are manipulated until they nearly transcend their subjects to become types, designed to encourage the reader to draw the lessons about leadership inherent in the text. The Agesilaus goes even further in this regard. Agesilaus’ life is made to fit a wholly positive generic framework in order to provide an ethical model for imitation. The resulting portrait is neither entirely fictional nor entirely truthful; nor does it make Agesilaus another Socrates. The Cyropaedia is, as Momigliano suggested, probably ‘Xenophon’s greatest contribution to biography’. This is not, however, because it is a ‘paedagogical novel’. It is because Xenophon, though he could have used a Socratic dialogue or the type of writing which, for lack of a better term, is often termed politeia literature and to which Xenophon’s Spartan Constitution likely is affiliated (Humble ), chose instead in a singular move to use the framework of a known, and successful, ruler’s life to examine the nature of individual rule. It is possible that the way we view Xenophon’s biographical experiments would change if a greater proportion of the literature composed in the fifth and fourth centuries had survived. As it is, fully contextualizing the works that do survive, even when the corpus is complete, remains an ever-present difficulty. Consider how Scurr’s creation of a fictional diary of John Aubrey might be received in years if all trace of Scurr herself is lost from the record, or Coetzee’s Summertime, if only a portion of that work were to remain extant (e.g. the interview notes belonging to the fictional academic concerning the late author J. M. Coetzee). The likelihood that readers might then ascertain the original nature and intention of these works would be slim. However, though we are likewise hampered by what has been lost, this should not prevent examination of the extant material from as many different angles as possible and with as much open-mindedness as can be mustered. The diversity of ways in which Xenophon explored issues of importance to him and in particular the way in which he used the lives of others as a vehicle through which to present his own observations, thought processes, and teachings makes him a key figure in the development of biographical writing.
F R Hägg (a) is now the first port of call for an investigation of ancient biography in general, to which V. Gray () can usefully be added as a survey of Greek autobiographical writing. Both include discussion of Xenophon’s works. Reichel (b and ) does keep his focus firmly on Xenophon as biographer, but a comprehensive treatment is still a desideratum. Bibliography on Xenophon’s corpus is huge, and while many scholars comment on the generic categorization of his writings at least in passing, fewer focus on this issue, particularly in respect of biographical affinities, but see Laforse (), J.W.I. Lee (), Roy (), and Humble () on the Anabasis, and Noël () and Humble () on the Agesilaus. Useful discussion on the Cyropaedia’s genre can be found in Gera ().
......................................................................................................................
? Unity and Multiplicity in Hellenistic Biography ......................................................................................................................
A the previous chapters in this volume have explored (Chapters , , and ), biographical and autobiographical elements made their first concrete appearance in Greek literature from as early as the fifth and fourth century . In the fourth century , they started spreading with Ion of Chios, Plato, Xenophon, and Isocrates, albeit not yet in a clearly defined way. This kind of literature only became a self-standing genre, with distinctive methods, tools, and modes of expression, in the Hellenistic period. In this age of cultural, social, and political renewal, biography took a range of different forms which can only partially be distinguished and defined. A considerable influence on the budding genre was played by erudite-antiquarian literature. This is evident both in the case of highly informed, ‘compiled’ biographical texts such as On Demosthenes by Didymus of Alexandria and the Collection of the Philosophers by Philodemus of Gadara, and in the case of what may be described as either monographic (Chamaeleon; Philodemus’ On Epicurus and On Philonides) or ‘periegetic’ works (Neanthes, Aristoxenus, and Antigonus of Carystus). These texts are greatly concerned with presenting credible, trustworthy testimonies (be they written or oral) but at the same time an enjoyable narrative, and display a marked taste for anecdotes. Some of these features are already to be found in Aristotle’s works, in which ‘anecdotes can be enjoyed in themselves or can be a part of an argument or ingredients of a biography’ (Momigliano : ). This is not to claim, a priori, that the predominant influence on Hellenistic biography came from Aristotelian philosophy.1 Momigliano (as well as Fortenbaugh, with some nuances) explicitly rejects this idea:2 Aristotelianism was neither a necessary nor a sufficient presupposition of Hellenistic biography . . . men did not write biography because they were philosophically minded or because they were engaged in some kind of intellectual or political controversy . . . the utmost we can say
1 2
Hägg (a: ). Momigliano (: , ) and Fortenbaugh ().
for the Peripatetic school is that it favored biography, and thanks to Aristoxenus it produced one of the successful and lasting types of Greek biography, the lives of philosophers. (Momigliano : )
While acknowledging Aristotle’s influence, Arrighetti argues that the origins of certain distinctive approaches to the biographical genre cannot be traced back either to the philosopher himself or the Peripatetics (Arrighetti : –). Furthermore, we must also reject Leo’s hypothesis (Leo : –), according to which two different biographical genres emerged in the Hellenistic age: a ‘Peripatetic’ one,3 founded by Aristotle and his immediate followers, and an ‘Alexandrian’ or ‘grammatical’ one, established one generation later by the erudite members of the Museion in Alexandria. The main objection to this reconstruction, according to Hägg (a: ), concerns the practice of ‘schematising 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’.
U M H B
.................................................................................................................................. It is extremely difficult to provide a general outline of Hellenistic biography. On the one hand, the sheer number of authors of genuine or alleged biographies is striking; on the other, almost all these texts are now lost. What survives are numerous titles of what appear to have been biographical books, along with a handful of fragments randomly quoted by later authors. These texts lack any context and in some cases may have been rewritten or manipulated for polemical purposes. The picture that emerges is therefore incomplete; what’s more, it may suggest a prevalence of certain interests over others which does not correspond to actual fact, but simply depends on what material is available to us. One case in point is the apparent prevalence of biographies of philosophers and poets compared to other categories of men of letters or political figures. In certain cases, similarities or common motifs are to be found between some authors and fragments; in other cases, considerable differences emerge that are difficult to account for without a context. This field of ruins prevents us from investigating such aspects in greater depth, leaving us with a sense of dissatisfaction or incompleteness, which once again essentially depends on the fragmentary state of the sources. Even an engagement with the later works of Cornelius Nepos (first century ) and Nicolaus of Damascus (first century –first century ), which were presumably based on Hellenistic models, proves of little help. A contribution towards a better understanding or reconstruction of specific aspects of Hellenistic biography rather comes from those papyrus fragments of erudite works discussing biographical topics. Although these sources are often in a poor and lacunose state, what they transmit are passages from complete books, as opposed to fragments quoted at random and without any context by later authors.
3
On the ambiguous meaning of the adjective ‘Peripatetic’, see Schorn (; : ).
I have selected three examples. My first example is the Life of Euripides by Satyrus of Callatis Pontica (POxy. ; MP3 ; LDAB ), written in the form of a dialogue. Satyrus lived earlier than the reign of Ptolemy VI Philometor (– ); his Lives were epitomized by Heraclides Lembus, probably during the third century . The Life of Euripides was part of a more extensive work, as may be inferred from the complete title of the papyrus, Book Six of the Catalogue (?) of the Lives of Satyrus Including Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The text comes across as an elegant and refined work which provides a light-hearted and dispassionate interpretation of many passages from Euripides’ tragedies. My second example is a short, anonymous Life of Pindar transmitted by POxy. (MP3 ; LDAB ), a late copy (second/third century ) of a faithful summary of a Hellenistic biography of the lyric poet (Momigliano : = FGrHistCont IV A (M. de Kreij)). Finally, my third example is more interesting on account of its unique structure. It is an anonymous, untitled text from PHaun. (MP3 ; LDAB ). The papyrus dates from the second century , but the text itself would seem to be Hellenistic. It apparently consists of a collection of short biographies of third-century Ptolemies in the form of a family tree. Scholars have yet to come up with a persuasive interpretation of this work, which would appear to be a blend of genealogy and biography.4 Other papyri are less striking, yet just as useful. The Collection of the Philosophers by Philodemus is—at least to some extent—modelled after the genre of successions of philosophers which was already flourishing in the Hellenistic age. In other texts—such as On Epicurus and possibly On Philonides—Philodemus draws upon a specific kind of ‘biography’ cultivated by the earliest Epicureans (Carneïscus) in the Garden, and which may be compared to the encomiastic models provided by Isocrates and Xenophon, as well as to idealized biographies such as Plato’s one by Speusippus or the Encomium of Plato by Clearchus of Soloi (fourth–third century ). The most effective way of drawing an outline of Hellenistic biography is the one suggested by Arrighetti (: ). It consists in carefully investigating the personalities of those authors who best exemplify the variety of types to be found in this literary genre. This method makes it possible to define not just the individual or shared features of these authors through the guiding thread of a Bildauthor or Leitmotiv, but also any developments or borrowings from one author to another, or from one age to the next. In the light of these premises, the overview that follows will take two directions. First of all, the horizon and list of Hellenistic authors discussed will extend beyond the one established by Jerome (largely on the basis of Suetonius) in the Praefatio to his Illustrious Men (Chapter ): ‘Among the Greeks the same thing (i.e. writing biographies) was done by Hermippus the Peripatetic [T Bollansée b], Antigonus of Carystus [F Dorandi b], Satyrus a learned man [T Schorn ], and Aristoxenus the musician [F b Wehrli ]—by far the most erudite of them all.’ Second, two specific kinds of authors will be taken into account: those whose contributions in the field of Hellenistic biography have only adequately been defined in recent times (Neanthes of Cyzicus, Aristoxenus of Tarentum, and Antigonus of Carystus) and those who have somewhat rashly been neglected (Philodemus of Gadara). Finally, a few words will be spent on Chamaeleon of Heraclea, Satyrus of Callatis, and Hermippus of Smyrna. 4 Gallo (: ). See Bulow Jacobsen (), Goukowsky (), and now FGrHistCont IV A (Trnka Amrhein).
‘P B’: N C . A C
.................................................................................................................................. The case of Neanthes of Cyzicus (fourth–third century ), a prolific writer and the author of a work entitled Περὶ ἐνδόξων ἀνδρῶν (Lives of Illustrious Men), is particularly revealing.5 Neanthes’ biographical genre and method find an antecedent in the Ἐπιδημίαι (Visits Abroad) by Ion of Chios (c.–/ ; see Chapter in this volume), and a striking parallel in the Lives by the coeval or only slightly earlier author Aristoxenus of Tarentum. They also present some interesting points of contact with the Βίοι (Lives) by Antigonus of Carystus. All that survives of Neanthes’ work is meagre fragments. Jacoby traces only a single testimony back to the Lives (FGrHist F ), while cautiously suggesting that other unassigned fragments (FGrHist F –, –?, , ?, ?) may belong to this work. Whether they come from the Lives or not, these fragments contain details that would fit well with a biographical context; as such, they help define Neanthes’ biographical method. Particularly noteworthy are two texts which were only partially known to Jacoby (FGrHist F b). Preserved by Philodemus (Acad. Ind., PHerc. , cols. .–. and cols. .–. Dorandi ), they concern Plato’s name and two episodes from the philosopher’s life: the time when he was sold off as a slave on Aegina and his last night.6 The name of Neanthes appears at the beginning of the first passage (col. .), but the title of the work is not mentioned. However, it is likely that both fragments are by the same author and come from the Lives. The words Philodemus uses to introduce the extracts (cols. .– and .–) are quite revealing: Neanthes instead states that he heard (ἀκηκοέναι) from Philiscus of Aegina (what follows is an extract on Plato’s name and the time when he was sold off as a slave on Aegina). (Philippus) the philosopher and astronomer (i.e. Philippus of Opus), who had been a pupil and secretary of Plato’s, told him (= Neanthes) (an account of Plato’s last night follows).
Neanthes explicitly states that he obtained his information not from Plato’s writing or accounts written by other authors, but directly from two contemporaries of the philosopher: Philiscus of Aegina7 and Plato’s secretary and pupil, Philippus of Opus. In Neanthes’ time different books on Plato were circulating that had been composed within the Academic milieu: the Funeral Banquet of Plato or Encomium of Plato by Plato’s nephew and successor Speusippus (F –; Tarán ), possibly a work On Plato by Philippus of Opus (T ; Lasserre ) and the text by the same title by Hermodorus of Syracuse (T –; Isnardi Parente ), as well as Xenocrates’ On Plato’s Life (F –; Isnardi Parente ). Neanthes discarded the information that might have been derived The fragments of this work have been edited by Jacoby (FGrHist ). On the author, see Schorn (a; : with addenda). 6 Puglia (; ). 7 Possibly a Cynic: see Goulet Cazé (: ). 5
from these works—no doubt eulogetic texts, intended to provide an idealized portrayal of Plato—in favour of a local oral tradition which he deemed more reliable. As a first-hand witness to the master’s last hours, Philippus of Opus provides a vivid and realistic description. Well on in years, Plato passed away at night from a bout of fever, after a discussion with a Chaldaean accompanied by a Thracian slave girl who sang to a musical accompaniment. Philippus’ version of the episode paints a picture of Plato as an ‘ordinary’ man that contrasts with the apparently idealized one provided by Speusippus and other authors, which failed to impress Neanthes. The same approach underlies two specific pieces of information exclusive to Neanthes: the anecdote (F a) concerning Plato’s name— which someone changed from Aristocles, the philosopher’s ‘real’ name, because of the broadness (πλάτος) of his forehead—and the otherwise unrecorded idea that he lived to the age of (F ). Philiscus’ account of the time when Plato was sold off as a slave on Aegina probably derives from a local tradition; as such, it reflects Neanthes’ distinctive work method and range of interests. Neanthes may instead have learned about the episode we read of in Diogenes Laertius (. = F ) via Philippus of Opus or another contemporary Academic: when Plato travelled to Olympia for the games ( ), the eyes of all Greeks were upon him; it was on such occasion that the philosopher met Dion of Syracuse, who was about to take up arms against the tyrant Dionysius. In order to trace this profile of Plato, Neanthes chiefly drew upon the oral testimonies he had collected during his travels to Aegina, Athens, Olympia, and other places. Neanthes’ portrayal of Plato as the ‘ordinary’ man, while contrasting with the idealized picture offered by other Academics and based on the testimonies of authors from rival schools (such as the Cynics), was not inspired by anti-Platonic sentiments. The image we get from his account is that of a likeable man, a human being struggling with all the difficulties that beset the lives of ordinary folk. The label ‘periegetic’ which Schorn (a; : –) has applied to the Lives gives us a good idea of Neanthes’ method. The author’s ‘periegetic’ interests led him to combine biographical accounts—including many oral testimonies—concerning illustrious personalities not just of his own day, but also of the more or less distant past, such as Sophocles, Empedocles, and Pythagoras, among others. In some cases, this makes Neanthes the only source on biographical details stemming from rare local traditions. Neanthes operates like a historian and the principle of investigation plays a primary role in his work. At the same time, he strongly distances himself from the historiography of the fourth century by refusing to idealize the protagonists of his biographies, so as to provide a more realistic and personal reconstruction of the main aspects and moments of their lives. Neanthes was not the only author to apply the ‘periegetic’ method to biography—nor, in all likelihood, was he the first. Mention has already been made of Ion of Chios and his interest in the illustrious personalities he had met either during their visits to Chios or on his own travels to Athens: political figures, such as Cimon and Pericles, and poets—most notably, Sophocles (Hägg a: –). These elements are what may have inspired Neanthes to travel in search of more trustworthy and factual information, thereby broadening his range of interests beyond the world of his own day. The biographies by Aristoxenus of Tarentum (fourth century ) present interesting similarities with those by his younger contemporary, Neanthes. Aristoxenus studied music under his father Spintharus and later became a pupil of Aristotle. He wrote the biographies
of illustrious personages, especially philosophers: Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans (F –), Archytas of Tarentum (F –), Socrates (F –), and Plato (F –). Many of the fragments of Aristoxenus’ works have been transmitted by late antique authors, apparently without distorting their content. In recent years scholars have rightly come to stress the reliability of Aristoxenus’ accounts.8 Mutatis mutandis, I would not hesitate to apply the label ‘periegetic’ to Aristoxenus’ biographical writing as well. If anything, Aristoxenus displays a more empirical approach than Neanthes: his biographies would appear to have been written according to the criteria of a historian rather than of ‘a philosophical zealot who praised one party and deprecated another’ (Schorn b: ; : ). Themes and elements reminiscent of Neanthes and Ion’s method occur even more prominently in the Lives of Antigonus of Carystus. The personality and work of Antigonus (third century ) were brilliantly reconstructed by the young Wilamowitz. Antigonus was an author of biographies, as well as an art historian and bronze sculptor. Numerous large fragments of the Lives of philosophers contemporary to Antigonus have been handed down by Philodemus, Athenaeus, Aristocles of Messina, and Diogenes Laertius.9 Antigonus composed the Lives as an old man, after his retirement to Mysia around . In this work, the author draws upon his memory to provide a biographical portrayal of various personalities he had met. Most are famous Athenian philosophers, such as the Sceptics Pyrrho and Timo, the Academics Polemo, Crates, Crantor and Arcesilaus, the Peripatetic Lyco, and the Stoics Zeno of Citium and Dionysius the Renegade. The Lives, which do not survive in full, enjoyed great fame, judging at any rate from the influence they exercised not just on biographers of the generations immediately subsequent to Antigonus, but also on authors writing centuries later. We can get an idea of the structure and content of individual biographies by comparing the parallel narratives of Philodemus’ Catalogue of the Academics and Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Philodemus had direct knowledge of Antigonus’ Lives, while Diogenes Laertius used these works only indirectly. The most reliable overall picture may be obtained for the life of the Academic Polemo of Athens, which Philodemus would appear to have faithfully transcribed almost in its full length. It is likely that the other lives presented a similar structure and features, although this remains an unproven hypothesis. What this comparison reveals is, first of all, a lack of chronological indications and elements related to the idea of diadochē (e.g. master–disciple relation, successions of scholars, lists of pupils), as well as of any book lists or observations regarding the literary output of the protagonist. Nor do we find any traces of anecdotes (at least in the surviving sections of the work). This argumentum e silentio is not, in itself, sufficient to rule out the presence of such features in this specific Life or in other biographies written by Antigonus or other authors.10 Likewise, no interest is apparently shown towards the philosophical thought of the protagonists. Antigonus focuses on Polemo’s personality as a man: his virtues, vices, and shortcomings. The philosopher is presented within the framework of the 8
See the essays by Schorn (b), J.M. Dillon (), and Huffman (b). von Wilamowitz (), with a collection of fragments. Dorandi (b) has edited a new edition of Antigonus’ texts. 10 Regarding the problematic issue of the relation between biography and anecdotes, see Arrighetti (). 9
society of his day, yet at the same time, through a process of abstraction, he is given an almost unreal aura.11 How are Antigonus’ Lives best described? Any attempt to answer this question is hindered by objective difficulties, such as the limited extension and fragmentary nature of the surviving passages of Antigonus’ biographical work. His Lives have sometimes been described as a work belonging to the genre of memoirs and as the author’s personal recollection of personalities of his own day, in the style of Ion’s Epidēmiai. There is another work which, in certain respects, shows striking similarities to the surviving passages of Antigonus’ Lives, namely, the books by Seneca the Elder entitled Sentences, Divisions, and Colours of the Orators and Rhetoricians. What I am referring to are the praefationes to the Controversiae (imaginary legal cases), in which Seneca describes orators and rhetoricians he had met in his youth, presenting them as role models for his sons Novatus, Seneca, and Mela. Once stripped of certain elements and peculiarities typical of the Roman world, these unique portraits display remarkable affinities with Antigonus’ method and likely intentions in terms of structure and composition. Both authors, for example, gathered and lent literary shape to their memories late in their life, for what may be described as didactic and educational purposes (at least in Seneca’s case). A fresh reading of Seneca’s praefationes reveals several concordances with Antigonus. This is not to posit any relation of direct or indirect dependence between the texts, but rather to emphasize key points which may be regarded, to some extent, as distinguishing elements of Antigonus’ autobiographical oeuvre.12 On the one hand, Antigonus’ Lives may be compared to the genre of memoirs exemplified by Seneca. On the other, one must take seriously into account both the transmitted title of the work—Βίοι (Lives), not Memoirs— and the affinities it shows with the ‘periegetic’ method of Neanthes and Aristoxenus, as well as certain peculiarities of Ion of Chios. The impression we get from a reading of the surviving passages of Antigonus’ Lives is of a work featuring a unique structure and composition, which finds no parallels—if not in relation to individual aspects—in any biography known to us. This work displays a marked interest in the character and personality of its heroes. The result of this free and independent arrangement of the material according to personal principles and criteria is a series of lively and lifelike portrayals of men immersed in the reality of their age. Finally, it would be interesting to prove that Antigonus was the author of biographies not just of philosophers but also of men of letters, artists, and polymaths. Antigonus’ unquestionably wide range of interests, as it emerges from the many books attributed to him, suggests that the number of protagonists of the Bioi was much larger and more varied, although Diogenes Laertius (.) and Athenaeus (.e) simply quote the title of the work with no further specification. Antigonus, however, was also the author of a treatise On His Art—bronze sculpting—which may well have contained biographical sketches or elements. Nor is it in any way surprising that the surviving fragments should all concern philosophers: for they are preserved either in philosophical works (Aristocles of Messina) or in ones discussing philosophers or the history of philosophy in general (Athenaeus, Philodemus, Diogenes Laertius).
11 12
For a more detailed analysis, see Dorandi (). See Dorandi (b: ) and Citti (: n. , n. , ).
I conclude this section with Hermippus of Smyrna (second half of the third century ). Hermippus is one of the most interesting authors of biographies from the Hellenistic age. His biographies belong to that erudite literary production which is considered a special form of historiography. Hermippus wrote biographies of philosophers, poets, orators, and historians. Several book titles and numerous fragments of his works have survived, which include extracts from more than one book: On Lawgivers (F –); On the Seven Sages (F –); On Pythagoras (F –); On Aristotle (F –); On Theophrastus (F –); On Gorgias (F ); On Isocrates (F –); On the Pupils of Isocrates (F –); On Hipponax (F ). Diogenes Laertius (and other authors) quote various pieces of evidence regarding Hermippus without indicating the book title. They deal with the spectacular or strange deaths of famous men. It is impossible to say whether or not Hermippus ever wrote a separate biography about one of these persons.13
‘E’ B
.................................................................................................................................. An interest in biography is detectable within Epicurus’ Garden from the very beginning, albeit in an embryonic form and within the wider framework of the tradition of eulogizing and commemorating defunct members of the school. Evidence of this interest is provided by the title of certain lost works by early Epicureans: Herodotus’ Training of Epicurus as a Cadet (D.L. .), Metrodorus of Lampsacus’ Of Epicurus’ Weak Health (D.L. .), Epicurus’ Anaximenes, Aristobulus, Callistolas, and Hegesianax (D.L. .–), and in particular Carneïscus’ Philistas (PHerc. ). Carneïscus (fourth century ) was most likely a native of Asia Minor, perhaps of Cos or Rhodes. The name of Carneïscus is all that would have been known to us, had the remains of his writings, entitled Philistas, not been discovered in a fragmentary, carbonized scroll at Herculaneum (PHerc. ). Carneïscus’ name appears in a letter of Epicurus preserved in Philodemus’ Pragmateiai (PHerc. , col. .–; Militello ).14 He wrote a work in at least two books (maybe three) called Philistas, which was dedicated to an unknown Zopyrus and expounded the Epicurean conception of friendship.15 The final section of the second book, the only extant part of this work, is directed against the Peripatetic Praxiphanes. The Philistas is a work that fits within the philosophical tradition of the laudes amicorum, a literary genre popular with members of the Garden. These commemorative writings served the following purpose: emphasising within the Epicurean centers the historical and spiritual heritage of the school and of transmitting it to future generations . . . the praise of an Epicurean . . . is accomplished through the documented representation of his daily conduct or the narration of the events of his life, often implicitly or explicitly contrasted with the diaita of the people not affiliated with the school. (Capasso : )
13 14 15
The best presentation of this author is the one provided by Bollansée (a; b). Capasso (: ). On Philistas and Zopyrus, see ibid.: .
The Philistas may fall within that genre of literature of ‘great educational value’ which ‘constituted a sort of exemplary “autobiography” of the Garden’, even though Carneïscus’ work is dedicated not to the death of Philistas, ‘but to his entire life, because it clearly illustrates the exemplary way in which “from adolescence . . . to death” he fulfilled the Epicurean philosophy, above all . . . the relationship with friends’ (ibid.: ). An unquestionable interest in biographical writing emerged even more prominently a couple of centuries later within a different cultural social milieu, at Herculaneum, with the diverse literary output of the Epicurean philosopher and polygraph Philodemus of Gadara (first century ). Philodemus studied under Zeno of Sidon in Athens and later moved to Italy, taking up residence in the villa of his patron Lucius Calpurnius Piso Censoninus at Herculaneum. His work is known to us through the discovery of the papyri from his library, which were carbonized with the eruption of Vesuvius in . Based on an analysis of the formal features of Philodemus’ biographical works, Arrighetti (: –) has sought to define ‘the similarities and analogies, as well as differences, with traditional biographical-erudite literature’. Philodemus’ biographical writing unfolds along two main lines: the extensive Collection of the Philosophers (Σύνταξις τῶν ϕιλοσόϕων), in at least ten books, and a series of treatises on the Epicurean school and its members. All of these works are either lost or only survive in fragments. The best-preserved sections of the Collection are those concerning the Academy (PHerc. + and ) and Stoa (PHerc. ); some interesting information may also be gleaned from the book devoted to the Garden (PHerc. ). Philodemus had probably also traced the history of the Eleatic and Abderite schools (PHerc. ), along with those of Pythagoras (PHerc. ), and Socrates (PHerc. and ). These last texts are in a very poor state: even after renewed attempts to provide a suitable critical edition, they still provide only a meagre contribution. More substantial information may instead be inferred from the two texts on the Academy and the Stoa.16 The book, known under the conventional title of Academicorum index, has been transmitted by PHerc. +, an anepigraphic scroll that contains a rough copy, if not collection of notes, that was drafted by Philodemus and only partly rearranged for publication. A few fragments of the same book have also been transmitted by PHerc. . Philodemus opens his discussion with Plato and ends it with Antiochus of Ascalon, his brother Aristo and their pupils (first century ). Unlike Diogenes Laertius, he apparently brought together Plato’s life and that of his Academic followers in a single book. Lacunose and fragmentary as it may be, the book on the Academy is often more reliable and rich in detail—at least in relation to Plato’s Academic followers—than the Lives by Diogenes Laertius, who ends his account with Clitomachus of Carthago (second century ). Philodemus makes (often first-hand) use of some important sources, including both biographical and non-biographical works—Antigonus of Carystus, the Chronologies by Apollodorus of Athens, Dicaearchus, Neanthes, and Philippus of Opus, as well as more recent authors who are not easy to identify. It would be a long task to list even just the main innovations introduced by Philodemus’ book, especially compared to Diogenes Laertius. I will draw attention here to the original accounts of the sale of Plato as a slave at Aegina
The reference editions are still Dorandi (; ). Certain sections of the book on the Academy are currently being re edited by K. Fleischer. 16
and his last night in the company of a Chaldaean—drawn from Neanthes; the information regarding Xenocrates’ appointment as scholarch; the extracts on Polemo, Crates, Crantor, and Arcesilaus derived from Antigonus; the information regarding the difficulties surrounding the succession of Carneades of Cyrene, Polemarchus of Nicomedia, Crates of Tarsus, and Clitomachus; and finally the many chronological indications concerning the events of the New Academy, gathered from Apollodorus’ Chronologies. In his book on the Stoa (PHerc. ), Philodemus outlines the history of Stoicism from the time of its founder, Zeno of Citium (fourth–third century ), to Panaetius of Rhodes (third/second century ) and his pupils. The work, which has reached us in a highly fragmentary state, focuses on the same topics and features as the book on the Academy—a wealth of biographical details, anecdotes, and lists of pupils, combined with a lack of interest in the philosophical thought of the protagonists. In one passage (col. ), Philodemus explicitly refers to his main source, Stratocles of Rhodes (second/early first century ), a pupil of Panaetius’ and historian of the Stoic school. The Collection of the Philosophers adopts some of the features of the Hellenistic διαδοχαὶ τῶν ϕιλοσόϕων (successions of philosophers), such as lists of pupils, scholarchs, and namesakes. This literary genre, founded by Sotion, was cultivated by Antisthenes of Rhodes (third/second century ), Sosicrates of Rhodes (second century ), Alexander Polyhistor (second/first century ), Nicias of Nicaea (first century ), and Jason of Nysa (first century ), among other authors. Only small fragments of their works survive, chiefly in Athenaeus and Diogenes Laertius.17 The diadochai are marked by a constant effort to string together the various representatives of the philosophical schools, from their founding to their extinction, in a close and uninterrupted chain of masters and disciples. This takes either the institutional form of a succession of scholarchs or the freer form of an association of individuals based on doctrinal affinities, influences, or intellectual echoes. Other elements must nonetheless be taken into account in order to evaluate the contribution of the Collection to the history of Hellenistic biography. One of these is the ‘colourless objectivity of the narrative’ which Gomperz (: ) detected in the Catalogue of the Academics—and which may well be extended to that of the Stoics. The lack of any polemic overtones in the books of the Collection and the fact that they essentially consist of the presentation of biographical and chronological data, with no real interest in providing even a superficial discussion of the thought of the protagonists,18 are elements that have enabled an alternative and in some ways more realistic reading of the work (Arrighetti : –). In his Collection of the Philosophers, Philodemus draws upon established models and keeps within the boundaries of the erudite biographical writing of the past—exemplified by Hermippus of Smyrna, Satyrus of Callatis, and Antigonus of Carystus, as well as the treatise On Demosthenes by Didymus of Alexandria. Philodemus only rarely makes his own voice felt; he carefully presents the biographical data he has gathered about his protagonists through written and oral testimonies which he inserts within his narrative using welldefined formulas; he lends much importance to anecdotes and introduces lists of 17
The reference edition remains Giannattasio Andria (). One and possibly the only apparent exception is to be found in col. Y of the Catalogue of the Academics, which discusses Plato’s contribution to the development of the exact sciences: see Verhasselt (). 18
namesakes and other erudite material. The Collection has often been described as a historical work. However, there are no significant elements that would make its books fall within the field of history, or even the more specific one of philosophy. The Collection presents itself as a series of self-standing biographies that centre on events in the lives of individual philosophers without considering their contribution to the development of the philosophical current to which they belong. Nor did Philodemus conceive his treatise as a work of propaganda or proselytism addressed to the Roman intellectuals of the first century (Gigante : –); rather, he wished to show that even an Epicurean is capable of writing the kind of erudite biographies typical of other philosophical schools—in particular, the Peripatos. This reading strikes me as being far more convincing than the one suggested by Clay (), namely, that in the Collection Philodemus maintains an objective and nonpolemical attitude because the work is designed to meet the requirements of his cultural plan to expound the thought of his master Zeno of Sidon on παρρησία (frank criticism) and its role in the education of the Epicurean philosopher. The debate is still open, and an attempt has been made to reconcile or harmonize the two different interpretations (Longo Auricchio : ). Philodemus adopted a different strategy for the books on the Epicurean school: the Pragmateiai, the Life of Philonides and two books On Epicurus (Arrighetti : –). These works differ from the Collection on account of some shared features, typical of the ‘composing by compiling’ method: a lack of anecdotes; a wealth of epistolary evidence in the Pragmateiai and the more ancient treatise transmitted by PHerc. ; the presence of letters and other doctrinal texts in the Life of Philonides and On Epicurus. Except for On Epicurus, these books appear to focus not on the entire life of their protagonists (leading philosophers of the school or mere sympathizers), but only on those events that prove that they perfectly conformed to Epicurus’ teaching. In the Πραγματεῖαι—a title possibly meaning something like Courses of Epicurean Records (PHerc. , but also —edited by Militello ), Philodemus uses extracts of letters by the school’s founders to portray a number of early minor Epicureans, such as Cronius (a pupil of Eudoxus at Cyzicus, who later embraced Epicureanism) and Mithres (the finance minister of Lysimachus, presented as a paragon of both public service and adherence to philosophical principles). In writing this book, Philodemus probably found a model in the anonymous text of PHerc. , possibly entitled On Epicurus’ Friends.19 This work presents the biographies of leading first-generation Epicureans (fourth/third century ): Idomeneus and his wife Batis (the sister of Metrodorus of Lampsacus), Leonteus, and Polyaenus. The opening section, now lost, must have featured the profile of Hermachus of Mytilene, the first head of the Garden after Epicurus. The books On Epicurus (edited by Tepedino Guerra ) take a slightly different approach. Philodemus here reserves a greater place for himself by focusing on his own contribution. Still, a considerable number of written sources are quoted. In the first book (PHerc. ), explicit use is made of extracts from letters by Epicurus (col. : addressed to Metrodorus; col. , to Polyaenus). One revealing testimony (col. : a paraphrase of a text
The text was written by an anonymous Epicurean before the second century , the date suggested by the hand of the manuscript. 19
by Epicurus) concerns the establishment in the Garden of permanent ritual practices for the commemoration of deceased friends. In the second book (PHerc. ) quotations would appear to be lacking (or at any rate to be much rarer); the topic is the praise of Epicurus’ balanced conduct in philosophical debate and the coherence of thought and action in his writing. In all likelihood, the book also contains a reference (col. ) to the schism of Metrodorus’ brother Timocrates, who, after quitting the Garden, launched a smear campaign against Epicurus. A more explicit reference is made to Epicurus’ polemic against the school of Cyzicus and an unknown ἀστρολογεωμέτρης (astrologer and geometrician), identified as Eudoxus of Cnidus (col. ). The book On Philonides (PHerc. ++) has yet a different structure. First of all, it consists of the biography of a single figure, Philonides of Laodicea in Syria (fl. – ), whose main life events are recounted, from birth to death. Noteworthy features of this text include the wealth of erudite sources it draws upon; the limited presence of remarks on the author’s part; and the lack of interest in philosophical doctrines.20 On the whole, therefore, Philodemus’ ‘biographical’ oeuvre may rightfully be assigned to the genre of Hellenistic erudite biography, albeit with some nuances: it displays the same constant and continuous use of written and oral erudite sources. The features that distinguish the Pragmateiai (and their model, as embodied by the text transmitted by PHerc. ) and books On Epicurus from the Collection may also be seen to exemplify the different facets of Hellenistic biography. Arrighetti (: ) regards these books as συγγράμματα (monographs) and sees them as reflecting Philodemus’ ability to master the means and different traditional forms of erudite production for the purposes of his own cultural engagement, as well as the fact that this mastery and use had become an established practice in the Kēpos, at least since the second century . With regard to the books On Epicurus and On Philonides, I would also stress the influence of the Περὶ τοῦ δεῖνα (translated as On so-and-so by Schorn a: ): ‘books bearing the title Peri + personal name in the genitive, as distinct from such having titles like Bios + personal name in the genitive’. The most interesting example is provided by the many texts by Chamaeleon of Heraclea Pontica (c.–c. ), a direct pupil of Aristotle. He composed several books on Greek poets (Anacreon, Sappho, Simonides, Lasus, Pindar, Stesichorus, Thespis, and Aeschylus) bearing titles with the formula Peri + personal name in the genitive. Only a few fragments of these works survive, which are nonetheless enough to suggest that although they chiefly focused on literary criticism, they also featured specific motifs typical of the biographical genre.21 Chamaeleon brought together, as phrased by Schorn (ibid.: –), ‘collections of existing biographical interpretations of poetry and other biographical evidence, supplemented by the results of Chamaeleon’s own research . . . typical Peripatetic collections . . . of biographical information on the poets of the past . . . they were, like the works of other authors entitled Peri tou deina, biographies in the ancient Greek sense’.
Edited by Gallo (: = : ). The title might have been Περὶ Φιλωνίδου (Del Mastro : ). On Philonides, see Goulet (). 21 See the edition of Martano () and the other essays collected in the same volume, especially Schorn (a), and also Schorn (): . 20
The Peri tou deina literature and its distinguishing features were first studied by Leo (), after the discovery in PBerol. (MP3 ; LDAB ) of surviving portions of Didymus of Alexandria’s commentary on the Philippics of Demosthenes, simply entitled Περὶ Δημοσθένους, On Demosthenes. The debate has recently been reopened by taking into account Satyrus’ Life of Euripides. This work shows that the ancient Bios of a poet could, unlike a modern biography, contain a remarkable mixture of both biographical data and exegesis of texts [ . . . ] Nevertheless one major difference needs to be emphasised [ . . . ] in Bioi literary criticism and literary history always have a biographical orientation [ . . . ] ancient authors did not see a fundamental difference between the two types and [ . . . ] works of the Peri tou deina type could have corresponded to biographies in the Greek sense of the word. (Schorn a: )
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.................................................................................................................................. This chapter gives a summary but clear enough idea, I trust, of the range of aspects and multiple strands through which Hellenistic biography developed in its spatio-temporal duration of almost three centuries. This extended period witnessed the resumption and— often in-depth—redevelopment of previous models and methods that, in one way or another, influenced different authors at different moments. Acknowledging these ramifications is not tantamount to claiming, a fortiori, that they may all be traced back to a single model or that they are rooted in the work of Aristotle and the Peripatetic tradition. Rather, it seems more likely that Hellenistic biography drew upon a range of distinct models, albeit often only embryonic or not fully defined ones. Individual Hellenistic authors developed those elements or ideas which they found most congenial to themselves or promising, often with very different aims and purposes. Starting from these reinterpretations, they came up with substantial and original redefinitions of the biographical genre, codifying certain aspects which were then transmitted to subsequent generations as established features. Advancing any more specific claims, at the present state of the research and given the dearth of first-hand, complete ancient sources, would be risky or even counter-productive.
F R Momigliano () provides the best general introduction to Greek and Hellenistic biography after Leo (). Some of Momigliano’s arguments must be reassessed, particularly in the light of the research presented in Arrighetti (). Hägg (a: Chapter ) presents a clear overview of the art of biographical writing practised by the four main authors: Aristoxenus of Tarentum, Satyrus of Callatis, Hermippus of Smyrna, and Antigonus of Carystus. Schorn (a; : ) has described the biographical writing of Neanthes of Cyzicus as ‘periegetic’ and then extended this label to the Lives by Aristoxenus of Tarentum (Schorn b; : ). von Wilamowitz () remains a crucial work on Antigonus of Carystus, which is complemented by Dorandi (b). Hägg (a: ) traces a brief profile of the author.
Longo Auricchio () offers an overview of recent publications on Philodemus’ biographical oeuvre. The main contribution on the subject has been made by Arrighetti (: ). Another useful work is Clay (). An updated profile of Philodemus is to be found in Longo Auricchio, Del Mastro, and Indelli () and Blank (). The Περὶ τοῦ δεῖνα (On so and so) literature is explored by Schorn (a; : ) in two contributions of crucial importance for the ‘method of Chamaeleon’.
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C Nepos begins his Pelopidas by expressing some concern about how to present his subject. ‘I am uncertain,’ he writes, ‘how to set forth his virtues because I fear that if I begin to explicate his deeds (res explicare), I would seem not to be narrating his life but to be writing history’ (non vitam eius enarrare, sed historiam videar scribere; see also Chapter in this volume). Yet he also worries that if he touches upon only the greatest moments, then it might not be fully clear ‘how great that man was’ (quantus fuerit ille vir, Pelop. ). Measuring greatness is thus his goal, a goal that he shares with historians, but his means have to be different, for a vita narrates deeds on a smaller and more selective scale than historia. The challenge for Nepos, as he presents it, is to condense extensive historical narratives to their defining anecdotes, yet to contextualize those anecdotes sufficiently for the reader to be able to judge the virtues of the subject’s character properly. In his Atticus, he expresses the same purpose with more confidence from the biographer’s point of view: ‘as best we can, we will teach readers by the examples of deeds (rerum exemplis lectores docebimus) that . . . the mores of each man generally brings about his fortune’ (.). A historian might also seek to teach his readers through the presentation of exemplary deeds (compare Livy’s Preface), but Nepos will relate only the most revealing examples from his subject’s set of deeds, and he will do so in order to reveal the mores of his subject more than the deeds themselves.1 1 All translations are my own. I have followed Marshall (a) for the text of Nepos, and Jacoby (FGrHist II: ) for Nicolaus. For further discussion of programmatic passages in Nepos, see Tuplin (: ), Beneker (), and Stem (: ).
This conception of the relationship between the written forms of political history and political biography suggests a clear distinction between the two. History narrates deeds at length in a wide context, whereas biography isolates the meaningful moments that reveal the virtues of the subject. History explains events, while biography characterizes an individual within those events. This basic distinction also seems upheld by subsequent biographers: consider, for example, Suetonius’ Tiberius in relation to the first six books of Tacitus’ Annals, or Plutarch’s Lysander in relation to the histories of Thucydides and Xenophon. To recognize this similarity is not to suggest that Suetonius and Plutarch wrote biography in the same way, but only that their generic relationship to history is in essence identifiable and comparable to what Nepos claims for his biographies.2 Hence it is tempting to surmise that a basic distinction between writing historia and writing a vita was widely and seemingly intuitively understood. Moreover, Nepos’ easy manner in referring to this distinction would seem to imply that it had already formed before Nepos wrote his extant biographies in the mid-s to early s . But inference is all we have, for there is no definitive evidence for a distinction between vita and historia earlier than what we find at the beginning of Nepos’ Pelopidas. We have encomiastic works such as Xenophon’s Agesilaus (see Chapter in this volume) and we know of several lost accounts of Alexander from the Hellenistic tradition. At Rome, we have Polybius’ description (Hist. ..–) of his now-lost Philopoemen, Varro is credited with designing an illustrated biographical encyclopaedia, and there are references to lengthy works centred upon the figures of Caesar, Cicero, and Cato from the s (Nepos himself wrote a Cicero in at least two books). Biographical accounts of political and military leaders thus seem to have a tradition much older than Nepos, but there is no evidence for anything like the compilation of political biographies in Nepos’ extant corpus, and nothing that offers the firmness of Nepos’ claim to generic difference. In fact, a compelling case has been made that it was Nepos who invented political biography in the serial and comparative structure that now seems so familiar from the later landmarks of the genre, Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.3 Hence it is also possible that Nepos was instrumental in establishing what that later tradition embodies as the intrinsic generic distinction between history and political biography. Our lack of evidence, however, advocates caution. The case for Nepos’ originality is circumstantial, and it turns on whether one believes the absence of evidence is meaningful or accidental. But either way, the development of political biography at Rome seems very likely to have occurred within Nepos’ lifetime (c.—c. ). He is the earliest ancient biographer whose works are extant, and the slender portion of his corpus that survives consists of a series of short biographies of political men. Hence his corpus provides our first substantive opportunity to explore the workings of ancient political biography. At least as important as the murky question of origins is the need to assess the relationship between Nepos and the subsequent tradition. How well defined was the genre of political biography after Nepos? Plutarch, for example, offers generic statements about the difference between For a survey of generic features in ancient biography, see Burridge (: ) (which includes discussion of the Atticus as a representative generic example), as well as Stadter (), and Hägg (a: ). 3 See Geiger () for this argument, the scholarly reaction to which has often been sceptical (see Pryzwansky : ), but which has been reasserted (in a narrower form) by Stem (: ). 2
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Lives and history (Alex. ., Nic. ., Galba .) that are generally compatible with those in Nepos’ Pelopidas and Atticus.4 Is Plutarch likely to be pointing specifically to Nepos’ generic claims? Or does the vita-historia distinction articulated by Nepos appear to be so inherent to the whole tradition of ancient political biography that it cannot be associated with any one of its authors more than the rest? This chapter will take a first step towards answering these questions by comparing Nepos’ Life of Atticus to the next political biography extant in the tradition, the Life of Caesar (Augustus) by Nicolaus of Damascus. These biographies are not often compared, despite their chronological proximity, and the comparison yields significant points of thematic overlap as well as meaningful points of contrast.5 The Atticus is the longest of Nepos’ extant biographies and was published twice, once before and once after its subject’s death (Att. .), with our text forming the second edition written between and . The Atticus in its first edition is the first biography believed to have been published when its subject was still alive. Nepos acknowledges his friendship with his subject within the text itself (Att. .), and the tone throughout varies between apologetic and encomiastic, always in praise of Atticus’ mores. This endorsement of its subject is a feature shared with Nicolaus’ Caesar, which begins by explaining why Augustus is deservedly worshipped throughout the world and continues by consistently defending and admiring its subject’s character and actions. Nicolaus (c. –?) lived the life of a courtier, serving as a close advisor to Herod of Judaea for at least a decade before Herod’s death in . Trusted with handling delicate matters between Herod and Augustus, he gained a personal knowledge of his subject. The Caesar does not survive intact, but only in passages extracted for the Constantinian Excerpts in the tenth century that have to be reassembled in modern editions. There is no conclusive evidence for when it was written or when Nicolaus died.6 Nepos and Nicolaus spent their lives writing. Nicolaus wrote a universal history in books (longer than Livy!) as well as an autobiography, an ethnography, some drama, and several treatises and commentaries on Peripatetic philosophy. Nepos’ largest work was Illustrious Men, a biographical compendium of over short Lives, and he is also known to have written a Chronica, an Exempla, biographies of Cicero and Cato the Elder, and some poetry.7 Very little from each man’s corpus has survived. Both men, being scholarly writers across many genres, must have read widely in both Greek and Latin (though Nicolaus writes exclusively in Greek and Nepos exclusively in Latin) and been familiar with the interplay of Roman and Greek culture in the Augustan period. Nicolaus was also For a discussion of Plutarch’s programmatic passages, see T.E. Duff (: ), and note also how he finds Nepos a much simpler moralizer than Plutarch (ibid.: ). For a bibliography on the possible influence of Nepos upon Plutarch, see Stem (: ). 5 Hägg (a: ), for example, discusses Nepos and Nicolaus in succession, and thus compar ison between the two is implicit. I have not found any explicit and extended comparison of the two authors as biographers. 6 The fundamental study of the Atticus is Horsfall (). For the cultural context of the Atticus, see also Millar () and Stem (: ). The best introduction to Nicolaus’ Caesar is Toher (: ), supported by Toher () and (). For further perspectives on Nicolaus himself, see Wacholder () and Yarrow (: , ). 7 Parmentier and Barone (: xx xxxv) offer a concise survey of Nicolaus’ corpus; Geiger (: ) thoroughly examines Nepos’. 4
actively involved in politics, whereas Nepos seems to have stayed in his study, hence it is perhaps not surprising that Nicolaus lauds Augustus for his political power whereas Nepos praises Atticus for his principled abstention from political partisanship. On the surface, the Atticus and the Caesar present a study in contrasts. One is a Latin text written during the final collapse of the Roman Republic that explains why its subject stayed out of politics, the other is a Greek text written in celebration of the new Augustan regime that explains the rise of its subject to supreme political power. All that seems to unite them is the apparent accident that their authors are the earliest two political biographers, in Greek or Latin, whose work is extant. Yet this accident functions as an advantage for this chapter, since what we are looking for are the features of political biography that define it as such and distinguish it from history. Do the Atticus and Caesar share a sufficient number of generically distinctive features that we can isolate political biography as a discrete and recognized form of historical writing in the Augustan period?
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.................................................................................................................................. The Atticus is structured into four main sections. The first (Chapters –) presents his youth and early life. The second (Chapters –) treats his political attitudes and connections, featuring his privileging of duties to friends over partisanship (officia amicis praestanda sine factione, .). This section has its own internal structure, with Chapter providing an introductory overview and Chapters – presenting an anecdotal narrative of Atticus’ political survival in the s that climaxes in Chapters and . Chapter also looks forward by noting the betrothal of Atticus’ daughter to Agrippa and thus to the circle of Augustus. The third section of the biography (Chapters –) shifts from a narrative structure to a thematic structure, describing Atticus’ virtues under various rubrics (e.g., sincerity in Chapter , humanitas in Chapter , pietas in Chapter ). Chapter discusses Atticus’ activities as a historical writer, and thus formed the conclusion to the first edition of the work, since this biography appeared in Nepos’ book On Latin Historians. Technically, therefore, this Life was published as a literary biography, not a political one, yet its contents are almost entirely focused on Atticus’ immersion within Rome’s political class and its attitudes form a revealing political comment on the triumviral period. The final section of the biography (Chapters –) was the portion added for the second edition after Atticus’ death. It addresses only two topics: his relationships with Augustus and Antony in the final years of his life (Chapters and ) and the illness that led to his death (Chapters and ).8 Nicolaus’ Caesar, as we have it, is also structured in four sections, but this is due to the circumstances by which these sections were preserved. The Constantinian excerptors abridged their historical libraries to explore certain themes, thus passages were selected not for how they demonstrated the integrity of the excerpted work, but for how they fit the On the structure of the Atticus, see Horsfall (: ) and, more broadly, Lindsay () and Stem (). 8
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excerptors’ purposes.9 Their collection of excerpts on virtue and vice contains five passages from Nicolaus—fragments – in Felix Jacoby’s authoritative edition of the fragmentary Greek historians (FGrHist II A –)—that describe, after some introductory remarks, events in Augustus’ youth down to (which Jacoby subdivided into Chapters –). Gaps between fragments make clear that our text is not complete, yet what we do have is thematically coherent and forms the work’s first major unit. The Constantinian collection of excerpts on conspiracies contains one extended passage from Nicolaus (F in FGrHist II A –), over three times as long as the other excerpts combined, that narrates events of in three episodes: Augustus’ initial response to Julius Caesar’s assassination (Chapters –), an account of the assassination (Chapters –), and Augustus’ interactions with Antony in the months after the assassination (Chapters –). Because each of these episodes is roughly as long as the initial section on Augustus’ youth (Chapters –), the Caesar as we have it consists of four major units. What survives of the Caesar may well be only a small proportion of the whole work, and may or may not be representative. We do not know if the Caesar covered Augustus’ whole life or stopped at some major event (e.g. in or ), but if Nicolaus continued at anything like this pace, it would have stretched for several books at least, and thus was very different in perspective from the brief portraits that Nepos’ biographies provide. Even in the disjointed form in which we have the Caesar, it is several times longer than the Atticus.10 It is fortunate that the opening of our extant text seems to reflect (at least portions of) Nicolaus’ introduction to the Caesar, including some programmatic statements. At the beginning of Chapter , Nicolaus sets himself the task of showing the strength of Augustus’ prudence and virtue (ϕρονήσεώς τε καὶ ἀρετῆς ἰσχὺν δεῖξαι), both in his governance at Rome and in his military campaigns (already praised in Chapter ). Nicolaus then positions himself among those writers who seek to win a good reputation through their work (εὐδοκιμοῖεν ἐν καλοῖς ἔργοις) by claiming that he will relate Augustus’ deeds (τὰ πεπραγμένα) so that it will be possible for all to know the truth (ἀλήθειαν). The rhetoric of this passage— the emphasis on a truthful understanding of deeds and the contrast between the contest for reputation and the achievement of presenting what actually matters—invokes the task of history (compare Thucydides ..).11 But to the degree that the purpose falls more on the virtues of Augustus’ conduct (‘the strength of his prudence and virtue’) than the deeds themselves, the passage suggests a biographical perspective more than a historical one. The great deeds of Augustus will thus form the body of Nicolaus’ Caesar, just as Nepos will teach his readers by examples of Atticus’ deeds (rerum exemplis, .), yet the focus will be on the virtues and so a biographical basis for the comparison of the two works emerges. In the Caesar, moreover, the presentation of deeds is to be deferred until matters of Toher (: ) provides a useful summary of the manuscript details of Nicolaus’ Caesar in the Constantinian Excerpts. Note also the apt methodological comments of Brunt (: ). 10 The complete text of the Atticus spans twelve Teubner pages (Marshall a: ) while the extant fragments of the Caesar fill forty two modern pages (Toher : , including facing English translation). 11 For conceptual and linguistic links between Nicolaus and Thucydides (as well as to Herodotus and other Greek historians), see Toher (: , ). 9
character have been introduced. ‘First’ (πρότερον), says Nicolaus, he will set out the lineage of his subject, his nature (ϕύσιν), his parents, his upbringing (τροϕήν), and his education (παίδευσιν), by the use of which he became so great (τοσόσδε, Vit. Caes. ; compare quantus in Nepos, Pelop. ). These themes of family, character, and education, which dominate Chapters –, are the themes of biography more than history, for they are the means by which the great man behind the great deeds is formed. Appropriately, these themes closely and repeatedly overlap with the emphases of the Atticus. Since both Atticus (Att. .) and Augustus (Vit. Caes. ) lost their fathers as children, their mothers play a greater role in their upbringing and earn particular respect from their sons. Nepos offers the personal biographic touch when he notes that he actually heard Atticus, when burying his mother at the age of , claim never to have been reconciled with her, for they had never argued: he could not be angry at those he ought to love (.–). Augustus is also depicted as a dutiful son. Even after he had donned the toga virilis and so legally entered adulthood, his mother kept him at home in the same bedroom and the same way of life (), apparently without complaint. Augustus wished to accompany Caesar on his campaign to Africa in , but he dropped the request when he learned that his mother disapproved (). The biographical purpose seems the same in both cases: to idealize the mother’s guidance (Vit. Caes. –) and the son’s propriety in respecting it. Filial piety is just one of the virtues of character attributed to Atticus and Augustus. Both are quick learners and successful in school (Att. ., Vit. Caes. ). Both are attentive and thorough in completing a task assigned to them (Att. ., Vit. Caes. ). Both display sexual restraint and resist immoderate desires (Att. ., Vit. Caes. , ). Both are said to show affection for their friends (Att. ., Vit. Caes. ). Neither developed a taste for excessive eating or drinking, but maintained the temperate habits with which they grew up (Att. –, Vit. Caes. , ). These positive qualities were so apparent that Augustus is said to have appeared honourable to all of the noblest boys (). Atticus, likewise, shone brighter than some of his high-born peers could bear with equanimity (.–). One significant result of these appealing character virtues is the ability to secure the affectionate respect of more senior men. When Sulla, for example, passed through Athens after the Mithridatic War, he was so taken (captus) by the learning and humanitas of young Atticus that he would not let him leave his side (nusquam ab se dimitteret, .–). Likewise, when Augustus joined Julius Caesar after his Spanish campaign, Caesar did not let him leave his side (οὐδαμῆ μεθίει), seeking his judgement on many things, and became exceedingly fond of him (ὑπερησπάζετο, ). In historical terms, these were defining moments that demanded inclusion. Sulla’s consequent forgiveness of Atticus’ neutrality in the civil wars of the s set him on the quietist path that saw him through the upheavals of the s. Caesar’s imminent adoption of Augustus as his heir set him on the path to be Caesar. Nevertheless, these are biographical descriptions of these events because they both paradigmatically display how the good character of a young man sparks the relationships with the greater and older men that determine the future path of the youth’s life. The path is not accidental, in other words, but the appropriate manifestation of the subject’s character. How one uses one’s access to great men is also a measure of character, and it becomes a predominant theme in both texts. Nicolaus carefully describes the first occasion when Augustus asked a favour from Caesar (Chapter ). When Caesar was not well disposed towards his captives from his African campaign, given that they had not been chastened by
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their previous wars against him, Augustus nevertheless overcame his modesty and secured Caesar’s pardon for the brother of his friend Agrippa, who had been close with Cato himself during the war. Nicolaus describes him not only as very happy at having saved his friend’s brother, but also as praised by others for having employed his power of intercession (ἔντευξιν) for nothing other than the salvation of a friend (ϕίλου σωτηρίαν). Soon thereafter, emboldened by Caesar’s sustained attentions, he more regularly and always opportunely interceded with Caesar on behalf of the many friends and citizens who asked him (). In doing so, says Nicolaus as he rounds off the story, ‘he showed not a few flashes of humanity, together with innate judgement’ (καὶ ὁ μὲν οὐκ ὀλίγα ζώπυρα καὶ ϕιλανθρωπίας ἅμα καὶ ϕρονήσεως ϕυσικῆς ἀπεδείκνυτο). Nepos tells similar stories about Atticus. At the outbreak of civil war between Caesar and Pompey, Atticus did not take sides, though he aided his friends when they set out for Pompey, yet after the war he successfully asked Caesar to pardon his nephew and his brother-in-law, Quintus Cicero, the brother of his great friend Marcus Cicero (). The most elaborate of Nepos’ anecdotes on this theme soon follows, which describes Atticus’ conduct during and after the Mutina campaign (–). When Antony’s fortunes turned and he returned to Rome, Atticus went into hiding due to his close association with Cicero. But Antony removed him from the proscription lists at the same time as—at Atticus’ request— one of Atticus’ close friends. Nepos then explains that this anecdote exemplifies how it was apparent that he sought the same protection for himself as for his friend (.–). When introducing the whole story, Nepos comments that to call Atticus prudent (prudentem) is to say too little, for what distinguishes his actions is his ‘innate ongoing goodness’ (perpetua naturalis bonitas, .). The common features of both stories are striking. Interceding for the life of a friend (or, by coincidence, the brother of a friend) from a victor at the height of his power is presented not only as the mark of a courageous and humane character but as an unquestionably admirable use of one’s influence. Even the vocabulary of virtue is the same: both men are praised for their prudence and judgement, as well as their humanity and goodness. Both Atticus and Augustus then go on to make a habit of such intercessions (Att. –, Vit. Caes. ), and their advocacy for others is rendered a defining theme of each biography. As has become apparent, both the Atticus and Caesar – are idealizing and exclusively positive about their subjects, and both proceed through an anecdotal structure, with only brief historical and chronological markers (e.g., Att. ., ., ., Vit. Caes. , , ). The fragmentary condition of the Caesar likely intensifies the choppiness of its narrative, but Chapters – derive from one continuous fragment ( in Jacoby) and they do not read any choppier than the Atticus. Moreover, both texts present a biographic structure in which a virtue of the subject is presented in general terms, then demonstrated through a specific anecdote. Atticus is said to avoid the fluctuations of politics (civilibus fluctibus, .), and this claim is soon followed by a detailed story in which Atticus refuses to contribute money to a war fund in the name of Caesar’s killers in the days after the assassination (.–). Augustus is presented as possessing a keen sense of respect (αἰδῶ, ), after which comes an elaborate story of how Augustus parried the public appeal of a man who claimed shared lineage by deferring to Caesar’s patriarchal role (–). Some thematic differences between Atticus and Caesar – also deserve mention. I pass over differences of fact that affect the events of each Life, such as the contrast between
Augustus’ sickliness (, –) and Atticus’ good health (.), in order to assess a couple of significant differences that result from the nature of each subject. One is that the Caesar charts Augustus’ rise to political power, documenting his successful early steps, while the Atticus explains why and how its subject formally withheld himself from political office and political partisanship. Nicolaus consistently notes Augustus’ participation in public activities and his holding of public offices (, –, , –, , ), and he usually includes an indication of the approbation Augustus received from the audience on each occasion. Augustus is a wonder to behold (θαῦμα, ) when he makes his first public oration and he is worthy of being seen (ἀξιοθέατος, ) as he first sits among the priests. Augustus’ public repute is thus employed to bolster the biographer’s credibility as he lauds Augustus’ activities and attitudes. Nepos can draw upon such repute only rarely, since Atticus’ business was usually conducted privately, but he does incorporate public reactions when he can. The entire citizenry of Athens, for example, is said to escort him to his ship as he returns to Rome after two decades in Greece (.). He took part in public life ‘such that he always both was and was thought to be (et esset et existimaretur) among the party of the optimates’ (.). At other times Nepos can only endorse Atticus’ virtues in his own authorial voice, and some of these endorsements can sound a bit defensive and not entirely credible, e.g., ‘we want this one thing to be understood, that [Atticus’] generosity was neither situational nor calculated’ (neque temporariam neque callidam, .; see also ., ., .). For that matter, however, not all of Nicolaus’ direct praise of Augustus is entirely convincing: did he really have to go to the temples at night in order to avoid undue female attention ()? Another significant difference between the Atticus and the Caesar is the political context. Atticus has many friends, and many opportunities to demonstrate his fidelity to them, for he thrives within an aristocratic republic, whereas Augustus has one friend who looms above all others. Julius Caesar enters the Caesar in Chapter and dominates the horizon. He soon comes to see Augustus as a son () and distinguishes him with various public and private honours (–). He sits by the bedside when Augustus becomes ill (). Augustus rushes to him as soon as he recovers and remains in his immediate company for a considerable time thereafter (–). The climax comes in Chapter , when Caesar determines that Augustus will be named in his will as his son and heir, but also that he will conceal this decision from Augustus lest the prospect of wealth and power corrupt his presently virtuous way of life (compare Att. .–, .). The structure of this whole first unit of the Caesar (i.e. Chapters –, as we have them) is designed around this relationship, for it was Augustus’ status as Caesar’s son and heir that made the remainder of his political life possible. Yet the predominance of one great friend in the Caesar is to a degree matched in the Atticus, but with the difference that the great friend changes with the times: Sulla (), Cicero and Hortensius (.–), Caesar and Pompey (), Brutus right after the Ides of March (), Antony (–, .–), and finally Agrippa (.) and Augustus (.–.). Atticus is said to have obtained the friendship of Augustus by the same elegance of life with which he had captured other leading men of the state (.), and the two men carried on a regular correspondence in which it was Augustus who sought to elicit longer letters from his friend (.). The pattern of Nepos’ depiction of Atticus’ friendships is comparable to Nicolaus’ depiction of Augustus’ friendship with Caesar. Thus there are thematic similarities even among the differences.
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The common themes and methods of presentation suggest that the principles of a shared genre are in play. Over the span of the twelve pages of the Atticus are so many striking parallels of content and emphasis with Caesar – that we seem to be justified in explaining the overlap through their generic form.12 Comparing these two texts has demonstrated what a political biography looks like, how it functions to reveal its subject, and how it operates in ways different from narrative history. Neither the political status of the subject, nor the political perspective of the biographer, determine the form of political biography, because the genre moulds the Life of an Augustus or an Atticus in the same way. If these first chapters were the entirety of the Caesar, then the common ground between the Atticus and the Caesar would provide the means to assert with some confidence that political biography, as defined by Nepos (whatever its origin or earlier tradition may have been), was a recognized form of historical writing, distinct from history yet partaking of many of its elements, in the Roman Empire of Augustus.
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.................................................................................................................................. Chapters – are not all that survives from the Caesar, however, and the remainder of the text (Chapters –) does not follow the form and method of the opening section. These chapters are predominantly narrative, with commentary on motive and significance, but without the focus on the demonstration of character. The reader is given material with which to judge Augustus and his conduct, but the judgements that were rendered explicitly in Chapters – are now left implicit for the reader. These chapters have a different manuscript history, for they are found in a different place in the Constantinian Excerpts from Chapters –, yet in terms of the chronology of Augustus’ life, they follow fairly closely from the earlier section. In Chapter we are told that Augustus was granted patrician status, which occurred late in , and in Chapters – we learn that he had been in Apollonia for over three months when he received a dispatch from his mother soon after the Ides of March in . It is conceivable that only a couple of pages of text have been omitted, yet the historiographical style changes significantly. Chapters – describe Augustus’ initial response to the news of Caesar’s assassination, his decision to return to Rome, and his journey there. The presentation of these events seems consciously shaped by Nicolaus, developing from the faint-heartedness of Atia’s freedman messenger () to the confidence of Augustus’ decision to accept his adoption and the name of Caesar, ‘which was the beginning of good things for himself and for all men, and especially for his country and the whole Roman race’ (). Yet the story unfolds as one narrative, not anecdotally, and these events are treated at much greater length than any prior sequence of events in Augustus’ life. The level of detail and the focus on events as much as on Augustus cause these chapters to read more like history than biography. For the possibility of a political significance to this overlap, see Lobur (: ), yet compare also the Augustan reading of the Atticus in Millar () and the republican reading of Nepos’ On Foreign Generals in Dionisotti (). Toher (: , ) well contextualizes the perspective of the Caesar within Nicolaus’ experience as a courtier of Herod and Augustus. 12
Because political history and political biography are overlapping genres, certain features of these chapters still fit with the more biographical earlier chapters. Augustus remains wondrous in the eyes of the Apollonians (θαυμαζόμενος, ) and they all escort him at his departure (, compare Att. .). The first news of Caesar’s death comes, appropriately, from his mother Atia, who tells him that it is now necessary for him to become a man (ἤδη ἄνδρα γίγνεσθαι, ), an apt thematic transition from his youth to the events of his political maturity. Augustus then seeks the advice of his friends and acts within the sphere of relationships established in his youth (–). But the narrative scale is different. After a paragraph to summarize Atia’s letter, another paragraph is devoted to the messenger’s news (–). When Augustus seeks advice, two paragraphs are devoted to an idea that he rejects (–, again at and ). That rejection does implicitly characterize him as deliberative more than impulsive (see also ), but these chapters read like they are explaining historical possibilities more than biographical insights. When Augustus arrives in Italy, three chapters are devoted to the news of events in Rome since Caesar’s death (–), none of which are essential biographically, and the terms of Caesar’s will are repeated from Chapter above. Then comes a further deliberation sequence, with another letter from Atia repeating her desire that he come to Rome (). But now there is also a letter from Augustus’ stepfather Philippus, urging him not to accept Caesar’s name because of the dangers it posed (). The rejection of that advice is elaborated at some length, then corroborated by the approval of Atia despite her divided mind regarding his future dangers (). From a biographical point of view, we can now see that Augustus is prepared to act independently of his mother and stepfather, that he has indeed become his own man. But this moment in the development of his subject is not explicitly marked by Nicolaus, whereas he soon intervenes authorially to remark, as quoted above, that it was good for all men that Augustus took up Caesar’s name (). Such a judgement resounds as that of a historian more than a biographer. Chapters – then present a flashback, describing the events to which Augustus responded in Chapters –. Nicolaus’ narrative of Caesar’s assassination, our earliest extant source for those events, is a fascinating and independent account,13 yet it makes no mention of Augustus within the story. In the introduction to this section, Nicolaus declares that he will explain the origins, events, and aftermath of the assassination, ‘and then,’ he continues, ‘with regard to the other Caesar, for the sake of whom this account was undertaken (οὗ ἕνεκα ὅδε ὁ λόγος ὥρμηται), [I will explain] both how he came to power and, when he was established in that man’s place, how many deeds of war and peace he accomplished’ (). Nicolaus announced in Chapter that the Caesar would contextualize its subject’s great deeds in politics and war, and he here reiterates that promise. Its continued deferment, however, suggests that he does not yet feel that he has recounted many of those deeds, and thus that the narrative up to this point has been effectively introductory, as is the immediately following account of Caesar’s assassination. This sense of scale provides a hint that the extant pages of the Caesar may be only a small slice of a lengthy work. Such a work, when focused on the deeds of peace and war, represents history, yet Nicolaus here claims
13 Toher () stresses the interpretive significance of Nicolaus’ presentation of events, as well as why the shaping of the account deserves to be attributed to Nicolaus himself. Toher (: ) provides a full historical commentary.
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that his logos was undertaken for the sake of Augustus, and such a focus on an individual within history suggests biography. But if the Caesar is rightly classified as biography, then it must be recognized as a biography laden with traditional historical narrative, for that is the best description of the account of Caesar’s assassination (Chapters –) and the narrative of the tension that followed between Augustus and Antony (–). The latter section seems to have been chosen for inclusion in the Constantinian Excerpts because it details Antony’s unsuccessful attempt to turn the Caesarians against Augustus, and thus also qualifies as a conspiracy narrative. The episode demonstrates how Augustus learned not to trust Antony and became resolved to take a stand against him, yet the importance of these events in biographical terms is not directly articulated. The perspective is clearly pro-Augustan, but the alleged knowledge of Antony’s thoughts is quite high (e.g. Chapters –) and the focus is as much on the malice of Antony’s character as it is on Augustus’ successful navigation of the dangers facing him. These chapters read as a biased account of events more than an endorsement of the character of their protagonist. The seemingly different generic character of Caesar – and Caesar – undermines the conclusion we would reach if we had only Caesar – to compare with Nepos’ Atticus. Yet it can also be argued that the reason Nicolaus’ Caesar displays two different kinds of historiographical writing is because its narrative portion has been improperly assigned to it. Chapters – and Chapters – derive from different portions of the Constantinian Excerpts, hence they do not necessarily derive from the same work, and the excerpts in the Constantinian compilation that precede what Jacoby labelled as Fragment (Chapters –) were taken from Nicolaus’ History. At books, his history was on a scale that a narrative of Caesar’s assassination spanning fifteen modern pages would seem entirely appropriate within it. We know that Sulla was mentioned in Book (F in Jacoby), Crassus in Book (F ), and the reign of Herod in Book and following (F ). The rise of Augustus surely merited inclusion along the way, and our extant narrative of that rise would fit his History better than it fits with the other chapters of his Caesar.14 Why Nicolaus would say, as part of his History, that his logos was undertaken for the sake of Augustus (Vit. Caes. ) is mysterious, but one might guess that he had identified the explication of Augustus’ achievement as the focal point of a series of books, or even that he had dedicated a part of the History to him. Such speculation is just that, but the point remains that our evidence for the unity of Nicolaus’ Caesar is more precarious than the appearance of modern editions would cause one to realize.
See further Hägg (a: ), who discusses different possibilities and concludes that it is ‘perhaps most likely’ that the narrative of Julius Caesar’s assassination was excerpted from Nicolaus’ History but inserted into his Caesar. Parmentier and Barone (: xxxiii, n.) suggest that the whole of Fragment has been wrongly attributed to the Caesar. Toher defends the traditional reconstruction of the text throughout, even as much of what he elucidates about the thematic development of Nicolaus’ narrative in Fragment (e.g. Toher : , , , ) would apply to a historical work just as well as to a biographical one. A similar complication pertains to the longest fragment of Nicolaus’ autobiography (excerpt ), which the superscription of the manuscript attributed to his History but Jacoby overruled: see Toher (ibid.: ). 14
Consider the subscriptions in the Constantinian manuscripts. At the end of Caesar , one finds: ‘End of the History (ἱστορίας) of Nicolaus of Damascus and the Life of Caesar the Younger (βίου Καίσαρος τοῦ νέου).’ At the end of Caesar , there appears: ‘End of the Life of Caesar (βίου Καίσαρος) and the narrative (συγγραϕῆς) of Nicolaus of Damascus.’ Why are there two works cited in each case? To combine Nicolaus’ historical writing and his biographical writing is to blur precisely the generic question we are investigating. To make matters even more uncertain, the excerptor apparently introduces the first fragment of the Caesar with the comment: ‘concerning the first education of Caesar’ (περὶ πρώτης Καίσαρος ἀγωγῆς). To use the term agōgē (ἀγωγή, here translated ‘education’) in this way, as if a title, invokes a subgenre of biography that describes the form and effect of a person’s early education on his or her subsequent way of life. The Suda refers to the work as the Agōgē of the Life of Caesar (τοῦ βίου Καίσαρος ἀγωγήν).15 These variations make it impossible to assert the work’s original title with much confidence, though they do confirm that a biographical work describing the life and education of Augustus existed independently of Nicolaus’ History. If that biographical work rightfully includes what we now call Chapters –, then the scale of Nicolaus’ Caesar appears to include narrative that, on the terms of Nepos’ Pelopidas, reads more like historia than a vita. If one reassigns Chapters – to the History, then the comparison of the remaining chapters (–) to Nepos’ Atticus reveals enough matching elements to argue that the overlap establishes and defines the genre of political biography. While I find the latter possibility more sensible and more attractive, I cannot disprove the weight of the tradition behind the former.
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.................................................................................................................................. The prudent thing to do is to acknowledge that we cannot define political biography in the Augustan period very specifically, nor can we measure Nepos’ originality very decisively. As so often in the study of ancient biography, we do not have the evidence to defend firm conclusions. That is not to say that the generic distinction between political biography and political history in the age of Augustus did not exist or could not be felt, for Nepos’ Atticus shows well enough how the craft of biography is distinct from the craft of history. But it is to admit that we cannot delineate how that craft was transmitted from Nepos and Nicolaus to Suetonius and Plutarch, from the earliest to the greatest extant writers of ancient political biography.
15 See further Bellemore (: xviii xxi) and Toher (: , , , ). The reference in the Suda can be found at Jacoby (FGrHist II A , T ). For discussion of the agōgē tradition and the possible significance of Nicolaus’ work within it, see Pausch (). Toher (: ; : ) plausibly suggests that Nicolaus’ Caesar might have been specifically inspired by Xenophon’s Cyropae dia, with its praiseworthy focus on key moments in the education and early life of its subject, and the tradition of biographical encomium that it engendered.
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F R Hägg (a: ) offers discerning assessments of the Atticus and the Caesar within the larger context of Roman biography and is also a good source for further reading ( ). On Nepos’ Atticus, the commentary and translation of Horsfall () form the fundamental starting point, while Millar () deftly puts the Atticus into its cultural context. Stem () advocates that friendship is the defining theme of the Atticus. Marshall (a) is the best Latin text. Geiger () revived scholarly interest in Nepos, especially in his originality, while Stem () offers an interpretation of Nepos’ exemplary purpose. On Nicolaus’ Caesar, Toher () offers a comprehensive edition, translation, and commentary. Its interpretive stance was developed over a series of earlier articles, in particular Toher (), revealing how Nicolaus can be valuable as a historical writer, and Toher (), challenging unwarranted but long standing scholarly assumptions about Nicolaus’ dependence on Augustus’ Autobiography. Jacoby (FGrHist II A) has remained the standard Greek text, which has been translated and annotated in Italian by Scardigli (), in English by Bellemore (), in German by Malitz (), and in French by Parmentier and Barone (). Yarrow () studies Nicolaus from his position as a Greek critic of Roman culture, while Pausch () reads the Caesar within a Greek tradition of agōgē literature.
A For helpful advice regarding this chapter, I am grateful to Koen De Temmerman, David Phillips, and especially Mark Toher, who supports the attribution of Fragment to Nicolaus’ Caesar yet kindly engaged with my argument to the contrary.
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Tacitus’ Agricola and Pliny’s Panegyricus ......................................................................................................................
A first glance, Tacitus’ Agricola and Pliny the Younger’s Panegyricus have little in common. Both written early in Trajan’s principate, one is a short biography of Tacitus’ father-in-law, the other a long speech of thanks addressed to the emperor. And, if the Agricola demands inclusion in this volume as a rare Latin biography of a Roman imperial subject, the place of the Panegyricus here is perhaps less obvious. But Pliny’s oration, this chapter aims to show, makes a rewarding object of consideration alongside Tacitus’ work. While the Agricola is a biography defined by encomium at several levels, the Panegyricus is an encomium which features striking biographical emplotment—and which also constitutes, as we shall see, a remarkable contemporary response to the Agricola. In a world where yesterday’s private citizen could be today’s princeps, the politics of memorialization took a new turn. How do Tacitus and Pliny respond to the challenges, and the opportunities, of biography and praise in this new age?
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.................................................................................................................................. Publius Cornelius Tacitus—senator, advocate and (later) celebrated historian—made his literary début in with a dazzling short book entitled De vita Iuli Agricolae (The Life of Julius Agricola).1 It is a work of broad literary horizons, incorporating elements of history, I gloss over three moot points, real or apparent: some believe that Tacitus’ first work was his Dialogus (see Murgia ; , with the reply of Brink ); , the usually accepted date, might be better called a terminus a quo (Agr. . guarantees a date after Jan. ); the title is sometimes given as De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae, ‘On the life and manners of Julius Agricola’ (surely a fifteenth century elaboration: the short version appears in our oldest manuscript and is in line with contemporary 1
ethnography, funeral oratory, and more. First and foremost, though, the Agricola is an encomiastic biography, tracing—and idealizing—his subject’s life from cradle to grave. A dense and sombre prologue (Agr. –) dramatizes the writer’s intervention as biographer and encomiast and establishes the all-important imperial scene: Domitian’s fifteenyear tyranny, – (a menacing backdrop for Agricola’s life) and Rome’s ‘convalescence’ under Nerva and Trajan since (the radiant, or at least brighter, context for Tacitus’ Life). Agricola’s parentage, childhood, and teenage years are swiftly covered (), his public career up to the consulate more fully (–). But it is his seven years as proconsular governor of Britannia ( –) that dominate. The stage is set with a substantial account of Britain’s geography and ethnography, its Roman conquest, and the varying fortunes of Agricola’s predecessors as governor (–). Then comes an annalistic narrative of Agricola’s tenure, with far the most coverage reserved for his final Caledonian campaign and victory at Mons Graupius (–), a moment of triumph which supplies the acme of his British command, and of his vita. Scene and focus now shift abruptly to Rome and the paranoid emperor Domitian: Agricola’s last winter in Britain, his return to the capital and the last nine years of his life pass in just a few, pregnant paragraphs (–). His death—a natural one, but laced with implications of foul play ()—prompts the miniature epitaphios (funeral speech) that closes the work (–). From understated beginnings these lines wax highly emotive, with a politically charged makarismos (‘calling blessed’) on the timely death that spared Agricola the worst years of Domitian’s reign and a consolatory call to his surviving family: the man may be gone, but his fame will live for ever—thanks not least, we may infer, to Tacitus’ work. The Agricola is a biography, then, tuned primarily—like most ancient Lives (cf. Hägg a: )—to administrative and military achievements, but distinctly—and more idiosyncratically—accompanied by the menacing thud of the Domitianic context (set off in turn by the lighter tones of Tacitus’ professedly happier present). The personal finds its place, to be sure: the violent deaths of Agricola’s parents (., .), his marriage (.), the birth of a daughter and deaths of two sons (., .), and indeed his daughter’s marriage to Tacitus himself (.), are all integrated into the narrative. But the dominant focus is on the public sphere: Agricola appears above as all the canny (but oppressed) senator at home and exemplary governor abroad. And exemplary he is: this work is unashamedly encomiastic. Even without its selfdefinition as a ‘book intended to honour my father-in-law Agricola’ (.), or the closing undertaking to keep his name alive ‘through admiration and praise’ (.), Tacitus’ panegyrical thrust is unmissable.2 This hardly surprises, and not just because of the family connection. Absent from Rome when Agricola died in (.–), Tacitus could not deliver a eulogy at his funeral; at one level, his book thus serves as a belated substitute. The closing epitaphios nods in this direction, though we hardly need explain the form of the whole work in terms of a funeral oration (e.g. Mann and Penman : ): substitute does not have to be pastiche, and at another (related) level, the Agricola also looks to the inheritance of the Hellenistic basilikos logos (‘king-speech’). Again, this is not to say we can account for
references to other biographies, e.g. Tac. Dial. .; Pliny Ep. .., ..). On Tacitus’ public career, see Birley (a). 2
Translations are my own.
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it wholly or primarily in those terms (as Gudeman : – proposed)—even if the idea of Agricola as a monarch-figure is not entirely inept. Still, it is worth emphasizing that Tacitus’ work takes its place in a long, intertwined tradition of eulogy and encomiastic biography stretching back in prose to Isocrates’ Evagoras and Xenophon’s Agesilaus (see Chapters and respectively in this volume, with Chapter for the earlier tradition). True to his austerely Roman persona, Tacitus situates the Agricola in a native tradition of praise (Agr. ), ignoring the Greek heritage entirely. Yet the Evagoras in particular is a significant forebear, as even a brief structural comparison might suggest. After a prologue on the magnitude of the biographer’s undertaking (–), Isocrates builds through Evagoras’ genealogy, birth, childhood and early career (–) to the climactic treatment of his reign (–) and the wars he fought (–); following the final summary of his virtues (–) and makarismos (–), he concludes on a twin note of legacy (achieved through his own words) and honour through emulation (by Evagoras’ son). The obvious similarities with the Agricola hardly prove direct influence, of course; but more specific reflexes are audible too (Stuart : n.). Perhaps the closest comes in the respective makarismoi, where Isocrates asks τί γὰρ ἀπέλιπεν εὐδαιμονίας . . . ; (‘what felicity did he lack . . . ?’, Evag. ) and Tacitus quid aliud fortuna adstruere poterat? (‘what else could Fortune have given him?’, Agr. .). But other framing elements also look Isocratean: the opening contrast between the generous praise of olden days and the niggardly envy of the present (Agr. ), for all its sturdy Romanitas, levels the same claim as Isocrates (Evag. –), to audacity in the face of resentful readers. Similarly, Tacitus’ elaborate apologia for his ‘rough and untried voice’, attributed to fifteen years of tyranny in which ‘we’ passed in silence from youth to old age, from old age to the very threshold of death (Agr. .), may find a germ in Isocrates’ closing apology for his inadequacies: ‘for I am past my prime of life . . . ’ (Evag. ). Certainly that same passage seems foundational to Tacitus’ epilogue. In just a few lines (Agr. .) we meet Isocrates’ claim that words surpass statues as agents of fame (Evag. ), the further antithesis of physical looks and inner wisdom (Evag. ), and the crucial assertion that only character (τρόποι, mores) can be truly imitated—all addressed to Evagoras’ son, as Tacitus’ epilogue is addressed to Agricola’s daughter and to himself as son-in-law. All of these were doubtless consolatory commonplaces by Tacitus’ day; but their combination in such close proximity suggests that Isocrates was not so distant an ancestor as modern readers have tended to think. If the Evagoras is both a generic and a specific model for the Agricola, Xenophon’s Agesilaus plays at best a more restricted part. The arrangement of this Life by rubric (‘deeds’ followed by ‘virtues’) is quite different, and, though Xenophon too includes a makarismos, his is followed by a long recapitulation unlike Tacitus’ (or Isocrates’) close. The closest reflex comes when Tacitus calls Agricola ‘blessed not only in the distinction of your life (vitae . . . claritate), but also in the timeliness of your death (opportunitate mortis)’ (Agr. .): compare Xenophon’s question, ‘what could be less worthy of lament than a distinguished life (βίος . . . εὐκλεής) and a timely death (θάνατος ὡραῖος)?’ (Ages. .). But even this comes at one remove. In a celebrated passage of his dialogue On the Orator, Cicero recalls the death of the protagonist, Licinius Crassus, counting him blessed cum vitae flore tum mortis opportunitate (‘both in the lustre of your life and in the timeliness of your death’, .). Crassus’ death in had been ‘timely’ in anticipating a bloody sequence of treason trials in the senate soon afterwards—as Agricola’s death in
saved him from a devastating glut of senatorial trials, again for treason. Exploiting this situational analogy, Tacitus makes Cicero’s consolation resonate loudly in his own (Reitzenstein : –; Bews : –). That Xenophon was also in mind, then, remains possible, but we can hardly be sure, making it hard to agree with Münscher (: –) that we can ‘see clearly the close dependence of Tacitus on Xenophon in detail’ (quoted by Woodman and Kraus : ). At all events, the more immediate presence of Cicero is a useful reminder that Tacitus by no means confined himself to our biographical ‘canon’ in assembling his text. The broadest legacy of Isocrates and Xenophon to the Agricola, though, lies in the syncritical (comparative) mode central to their works and the prose tradition they inaugurate. Both the Evagoras (–) and the Agesilaus (.–) proclaim their honorands superior to kings of Persia (the ultimate yardstick, for them, of mortal power). Tacitus, writing a single Life, avoids any such overt comparison, but he deploys syncrisis widely, and on several different levels (McGing ). Most immediately, Agricola is contrasted with his commanders and subordinates: as quaestor in Asia he serves a corrupt governor but remains incorruptible (Agr. .); in the Caledonian campaign his officers are timid, Agricola bold (.). There is diachronic comparison too, in Agricola’s implied superiority to his predecessors. On one occasion Tacitus is explicit, referring to the ‘carelessness or intolerance of previous governors’ (.); elsewhere he is more indirect (–), but takes care to pick out such failings as leave room for Agricolan improvement (McGing : –, nuanced by R.H. Martin : –). A more subtle sort of syncrisis lies in intertextual invitations to compare Agricola with shining figures of the past. Tacitus has many points of literary reference, Greek and Latin, prose and verse, and it might be rash to assume that each one can be pressed for ‘allusive’ meaning—as ‘invitations’, as I just called them, to reflect on the echo. (Many of these points of reference can be traced through the index to Woodman and Kraus .) Nevertheless, some recurrent parallels provoke reflection. If, for instance, Tacitus’ account of Mons Graupius echoes Alexander’s victory at Gaugamela as narrated by Curtius Rufus, Agricola is touched with the lustre of the ultimate general, but can also be seen to surpass him in combining grand achievement (conquest at the world’s edge) with the restraint that Alexander notoriously lacked (Bosworth : –). Julius Caesar’s Gallic War and Civil War are frequently in view, inviting us to measure Agricola’s taming of Britain against Caesar’s definitive subjugation of Gaul (Lausberg ). But Agricola can combine Caesar’s military might with the moral supremacy of his celebrated political adversary Cato the Younger, or so echoes of Sallust seem to imply: like Cato in the Catilinarian War (., .), Agricola earns fame not least by his shunning of it (Agr. .–). Sallust famously holds Caesar and Cato up together as exemplars of two different sorts of virtus; Tacitus’ Agricola unites the two in one, collapsing Sallust’s dichotomy and so embodying a still higher ideal. At a different level again—and here we may think again of the kings of Persia—is the politically charged comparison of Agricola as commander (imperator) with the emperor (imperator) himself. Domitian’s (allegedly) iniquitous rule is a preoccupation of the monograph, binding honorand, author, and an entire senatorial generation as fellow victims of a tyrant. The princeps is absent from the body of Agricola’s Life, with even his accession in passing unremarked: in remote Britain the stage is left clear for Agricola’s res gestae (K. Clarke : –). But Domitian looms darkly over the preface, and enters
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the narrative explicitly towards the end, when Agricola’s narrative role shifts abruptly from dominant general abroad to dominated senator at home. His demeaning entry to Rome, received in the palace ‘by night’ (tendentious language, surely, for ‘in the evening’) and immediately ‘mixed in with the crowd of slaves’ (Agr. .), powerfully dramatizes the fall from conquering hero to oppressed subject. The disparity between Agricola and Domitian as generals becomes explicit only when we enter the emperor’s paranoid mind and hear him contrast his own supposedly ‘false triumph’ (falsum . . . triumphum) over Germania with Agricola’s ‘great and true victory’ in Caledonia (veram magnamque victoriam, Agr. .). It is a remarkable moment, the clearest example in the Agricola of that staple biographical device, the (creative) reconstruction of a person’s thoughts (Hägg a: –)—with Domitian, not Agricola, as the object of conjecture. But these alleged inadequacies on his part colour the entire British narrative, and Tacitus’ entire project: how can the governing, conquering Agricola not be compared with his imperial master? If Agricola is compared with Domitian, Domitian is compared in turn with other principes. Like Tacitus’ Dialogus de oratoribus, the Agricola straddles two ages, Flavian and post-Flavian. But, while the Dialogus is notoriously oblique in its contrast of past and present, the Agricola puts intense and explicit pressure on the assertion that these were two radically different times. The proem is most explicit on this score, contrasting the ‘ultimate in slavery’ that Rome had endured in Domitian’s last years with the ‘most blessed age’ (beatissimum saeculum) instantiated by Nerva and Trajan (Agr. .–.)—an encomium tightly bound into Tacitus’ own project, since it is precisely the change of regime, he claims, that has empowered him to write. Yet fifteen years of suppression and silence have left him, like his entire generation, traumatized and hoarse (.–; see Haynes ; Whitmarsh ): that Isocratean focus on the authorial voice is thus turned by Tacitus to acute political effect. The ‘blessed age’ motif returns towards the end, as Tacitus balances Agricola’s misfortune in not living to see ‘this light of the most blessed age, and Trajan as emperor’ against his good fortune in being spared Domitian’s most savage excesses (.). It is only a brief flash of light on a dark canvas, recalling without labouring the prefatorial panegyric, but more than suffices to keep this imperial comparison resonating throughout the whole work. The Agricola thus sketches two sides of a syncritical triangle, comparing Agricola to Domitian, on one hand, Domitian to Trajan, on another. Can we resist the temptation to complete the third? Consciously or not, Tacitus steers safely clear of the ‘what if ’ questions that could be asked: if Agricola had outlived Domitian, might he, rather than Nerva, have replaced the tyrant? If so, might his son-in-law Tacitus, and not Trajan, have been the anointed heir (Tanner ; : , –)? Nor (for obvious reasons) does he draw an invidious comparison between Agricola’s military prowess and Trajan’s less distinguished career—though he does not scotch it either. Most readers, at all events, have preferred to think in terms of common ground. If Tacitus’ celebration of Agricola doubles as a defence of his father-in-law, loyal servant of the now damned Domitian, that advocacy extends to Trajan too (as it does to Tacitus, Nerva, and many other senators alive and reading in ). One contemporary reader, indeed, would find in the Agricola a reading as complimentary to Trajan as to Agricola—as we shall see shortly. On multiple levels, then, syncrisis is fundamental to the Agricola. But I have not yet mentioned its most explosive manifestation. Other subjects of Domitian had opted for
political intransigence and glorious death, and other writers had earned credit by commemorating it. How could Agricola’s quietism, and Tacitus’ celebration of it, be made to measure up against such paradigms of heroic refusal?
D L?
.................................................................................................................................. There can be little doubt that biography at Rome, like every form of literature and art, was profoundly shaped by the advent of monarchy. Indeed, the towering fame (for us) of Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars might give the impression that imperial biography was by and large the preserve of principes, leaving Tacitus’ choice of honorand in the Agricola looking like an inevitably politicized, even provocative step. That is an impression Tacitus only encourages, at least with reference to Domitian. But it requires some modification. For one thing, Suetonius also wrote capsule Lives of Illustrious Men. But already in the first century biographies of privati (i.e. individuals outside the imperial family) were evidently a flourishing genre in Latin prose.3 As chance would have it, we have nothing extant between Nepos’ Life of Atticus (s ) and the Agricola; but we hear for instance of a Life of the orator Julius Africanus written by Tacitus’ mentor Julius Secundus (Tac. Dial. .), and another of Annius Bassus (consul in ) by Claudius Pollio (Plin. Ep. ..). Pliny the Younger mentions his own celebratory vitae of Cottius (.), son of a senior consular, and of one Pompeius Quintianus (..). Pliny’s commentator Sherwin-White (: , ) plays down such honorands as ‘minor figures’, but ‘minor’ is a relative term and Annius Bassus, for one, had, like Agricola, a consular career to his name. So had Pomponius Secundus, governor of Germania Superior and subject of a Life by Pliny the Elder (Plin. Ep. ..). In any case it is a fair guess that these titles represent only a fraction of comparable productions. Tacitus’ work, then, is just one—no doubt remarkable—survivor. Autobiography too was less rare than it might seem. The opening lines of the Agricola situate that genre in a remote past. After a possible touch of the Elder Cato’s Origines (Ogilvie and Richmond : ; Powell : ; Cornell : iii.–), Tacitus mentions two authors who had been dead for nearly two hundred years: Publius Rutilius Rufus and Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, both prominent senators of the late second/early first century and each the author of a work On His Own Life. They make an interesting choice. Whether or not Tacitus had read them for himself,4 he may have thought of them as the first Latin autobiographies: reason perhaps for mentioning them rather than, for instance, the larger-scale autobiography written by Sulla a few years later, or Cicero’s apologetic works. But the pairing is peculiarly evocative given the parallel that we noticed between the close of the Agricola and Cicero’s consolatio for Licinius Crassus in On the Orator. Rutilius and Scaurus, contemporaries of Crassus, were prominent victims of the trials that convulsed Rome in the late s . Rutilius had been condemned (wrongly, in Cicero’s view) and exiled 3
In verse we have the Laus Pisonis (Encomium of Piso) and several of Martial’s Epigrams and Statius’ Silvae. 4 Scaurus’ Life was known to authors including Pliny (H.N. .) and Frontinus (Strat. ..), and Rutilius’ to Appian (Hisp. ) perhaps at first hand. Testimonia are gathered in Cornell (: ii. , ); on both works, see R.G. Lewis (: ).
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for extortion in ; Scaurus was condemned (again unjustly, at least for Cicero) in the treason trials of , the same trials from which Crassus’ timely death had spared him. Beginning and end of the Agricola are thus overlaid with echoes of another period of turmoil and trauma: a cardinal moment in the accelerating end of the senatorial republic, which makes a stimulating foil to Tacitus’ theme of dysfunctional high politics in the s. Within the argument of the preface, though, Rutilius and Scaurus stand for a former age (Agr. . apud priores) when self-praise was not just acceptable but admirable. Tacitus draws a sharp, double contrast with his own time, ‘savage and hostile to virtue’ (.): for him, now, even to narrate the life of another man was so controversial an undertaking that he had to defer it.5 His expression is powerful, and we can hardly refute the claim; but we might observe that at least one significant form of autobiography is being elided. The genre of commentarii (‘notes’ or reports) on military campaigns is best known now from Julius Caesar’s Gallic War and Civil War, but it lived on in the principate, and not as the preserve of emperors: we hear, for instance, of commentarii composed by the Neronian generals Domitius Corbulo and Suetonius Paulinus (a predecessor of Agricola in Britain). Caesar’s, as we have seen, are a significant point of reference for Tacitus, and features of Agricola that are often called ‘historical’—geographical descriptions, accounts of a commander’s predecessors and the situation he inherited, annalistic structure, set-piece battle scenes (including speeches), and more—might equally be contextualized in terms of such memoirs. Does the Agricola in fact supply the commentarii that Agricola could not publish for himself (Rankov )? Perhaps so, at least in its British narrative. In the preface, however, any thoughts of commentarii, as well as of the lively biographical tradition in Flavian Rome, are distant— inconvenient as they are to Tacitus’ grand opposition of glorious past and niggardly present. In fact, Tacitus stakes a bolder claim still: that commemoration in his day is, or was, a matter of life and death. A few lines after mentioning Rutilius and Scaurus, he names two recent biographers whose own writings—identified as encomia (cf. Agr. . laudati)—had entailed fatal consequences. Herennius Senecio had written a Life of Helvidius Priscus, the intransigent senator put to death by Vespasian. Arulenus Rusticus had ‘praised’ Priscus’ father-in-law, the outspoken Neronian senator Thrasea Paetus, perhaps likewise in a biography (although Dio .. might imply otherwise) and probably including a glorious death scene (Marx : –). In / both authors were executed for treason along with Priscus’ son, and four family members were exiled; the offending books were publicly burned (Agr. ., Plin. Ep. .., ..; Syme ). These traumatic events, which fell not long after Agricola’s death (Whitton : –), powerfully justify Tacitus’ decision to defer his intended Life—provided, that is, we accept the implied premise that all biography had become dangerous. For even if we conspire to ignore Josephus, who produced not just a biography but an autobiography precisely in or ,6 there is an important point of 5 Exactly when Tacitus locates this ‘savage’ time (the verb for ‘is/was’ is omitted) is a moot point: under Domitian (when Agricola died), under Trajan (when Tacitus is writing), or both? I follow Woodman and Kraus (: ) in taking venia opus fuit to mean that Tacitus felt obliged (in c. ) to defer his planned biography, but observe with Sailor (: ) and Lavan (: xliii xliv) that he stops some way short of making clear that all ‘hostility to virtue’ has subsided since then. 6 Cf. Villalba Varneda (: ). Josephus was closely and publicly allied to the Flavian dynasty with the further advantage of not being a senator. This, and the fact he wrote in Greek, ‘justifies’ his absence from the Romanocentric remarks on clari viri in Agr. .
difference. Arulenus and Senecio had written about notorious thorns in the sides of emperors; Tacitus (claims to have) planned a biography of a loyal general—which, if he had actually written it, would hardly have resembled the Agricola as it ended up in . Shrewd orator that he was, Tacitus has it both ways: his celebration of Agricola may be enabled by the ‘good’ new emperors (Agr. ); but his project retains a glamorous association with the fatal undertakings of Arulenus and Rusticus. That association is revived, and complicated, near the end of the book. In a striking aside, Tacitus commends Agricola’s prudence in avoiding conflict with Domitian (Agr. .): Let those who are prone to admire illegal acts understand that it is possible for great men to exist even under bad emperors, and that obedience and modesty (obsequium . . . ac modestiam), if paired with industry and vigour, can rise to the same degree of praise as many men who won renown by a precipitous route, but one bringing no benefit to the state ostentatious death (ambitiosa morte).
Here is that powerful syncrisis which I adumbrated, insistently distinguishing Agricolan quietism from the spectacular paradigms of oppositionalism instantiated by men like Thrasea and Helvidius. It has been much pored over by modern readers attracted by what looks like a direct statement of belief, but puzzled by apparent contradictions. Tacitus’ later works (certainly the Annals, and probably lost parts of the Histories too; cf. Hist. ..) included iconic scenes of what he dismisses here as ‘ostentatious death’. And the path of ‘obedience and modesty’ trodden by Agricola is precisely the course that the Caledonian leader Calgacus rejects in his heroic last stand at Mons Graupius (Agr. . obsequium ac modestiam)—shortly before being butchered by Agricola’s men. This unusually precise echo poses a crucial question or supplies a crucial answer, depending on whether you see the Agricola as an ambivalent text which interrogates the very ideologies it affirms (Whitmarsh ; Lavan ), or think that such anxieties are out of place in an encomium (Woodman and Kraus : –). We will not pursue that debate in detail here. But we should pause for a moment on an important, closely related question broached in these lines: the status in Trajanic Rome of ‘martyrs’ and their encomiasts. Heroizing accounts of ‘Stoic’ deaths were by Tacitus’ time a well-established tradition, known today as ‘exitus literature’ (Ronconi ). Stretching back to Socrates in the Phaedo, it acquired strong associations in the early principate with oppositional figures, above all Cato the Younger, the archetypal anti-Caesarean suicide: he gets a stirring deathscene in Plutarch’s Life, as he surely did in the Life that Thrasea Paetus had written (Geiger : –). Another contemporary of Tacitus, Gaius Fannius, wrote a collection of exitus of people killed or exiled by Nero, while Titinius Capito did the same for Flavian, probably Domitianic, victims (Plin. Ep. .., ..); when Pliny describes this last collection as a substitute for the funeral orations that could not be delivered at the time (a remark that need not imply that they resembled such eulogies), the functional similarity with the Agricola is clear. The celebrated scenes of the Annals, such as the deaths of Seneca and Thrasea Paetus (Ann. .– and .–), exemplify the integration of this tradition into history-writing (Marx ), as do Pliny’s variations on the theme in his pseudo-private Epistles.7
Notably Ep. . on Corellius Rufus (a suicide postponed until after Domitian’s death) and . on Arria. 7
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All this suggests that Tacitus faced a particular challenge in celebrating Agricola’s life: martyrs and their exitus were in fashion, and the celebration of a loyal general required apology.8 In response, he adopts a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, he attacks—that favourite form of defence—the martyrs and their admirers in Agricola ., appropriating a share of the kudos that attaches to them (and their biographers) for a man who actually made a material contribution to the empire (and for his biographer); on the other, he sustains precisely that kudos, not least in his powerful evocations of Arulenus and Senecio (., .), claiming a share in it by association for Agricola, and for himself (Sailor : –, –; Whitton : –). With these two complementary, one might say contradictory, approaches, Tacitus simultaneously neutralizes and appropriates the exitus tradition for his own very particular rhetorical requirements. So too with Agricola’s death: here again, Tacitus has it both ways. On the one hand, it is a natural end, with no suicide, no scene of demonstratively calm acceptance, and no ultima vox (‘last words’): the dutiful servant of the state dies a plain, ‘unambitious’ death—as Agricola apparently did, the victim of a slow, mundane disease. Yet Tacitus turns this unpromising material to rhetorical advantage, first reporting a rumour that the real cause was poison administered on the orders of a jealous emperor, then focalizing the progress of the death through an anxious populace (.–). Instead of an intimate scene in the cubiculum, we see Agricola’s demise projected onto the city-stage, further enhanced by continued calumny against Domitian. For all his lack of demonstration, Agricola is thus at least touched with the cachet that accrues, in a post- world, from a tense relationship with the ‘tyrant’. Particularly interesting here is his lack of an ultima vox. A voiceless death is pregnant in itself, given the power with which Tacitus’ preface (.–) invests silence as the ultimate signifier of submission, culpable or not, to tyranny. There again, we might also detect substitutes earlier in the text. Agricola’s voice is audible in two different ways: indirectly when Tacitus records comments his father-in-law made to him (., ., .), and directly in his speech at Mons Graupius (). But the real swansong of this book is the much longer, more impassioned and frankly more memorable oration given to his opponent Calgacus (–). That the Caledonian chief and his men, faced with a choice (as he puts it) between death and slavery, stand somehow in parallel to the ‘enslaved’ senate at Rome, is well observed (Lavan ). It is a complex and multivalent parallelism, to be sure, not least because Calgacus’ splendid act of resistance—his rejection of obsequium ac modestia—sets him precisely in the role that Agricola does not fill, that of glorious but futile martyr. Now, from an imperialist point of view, Calgacus’ defeat is doubtless right and proper; and the ‘problem’ that Agricola is compromised by being both subject (in Rome) and agent (in Britain) of imperial tyranny is one that exists only for a reader willing to credit Domitian not just with the (perverse) subjection of senators in Rome, but also with the (rightful) subjection of provincials in Britain. Deny Domitian legitimacy (as the Agricola surely does), and his metonymy with empire collapses. Tacitus certainly blends pathos with triumphalism in these pages; but Agricola’s personal achievement is not—in my view—called into question. Yet, for all that, the splendour and sheer length of Calgacus’ speech speak
8
He was presumably not alone: however glamorous the martyrs, any senatorial survivor had an interest in representing the intransigence of a Thrasea as a step too far (cf. Brunt : ).
volumes: this futile but glorious last cry, surely, supplies the ultima vox that Agricola could not. Among all the biographies, commentarii and exitus-writings celebrating privati in the early principate, only the Agricola has survived: for us, Tacitus has delivered on his closing promise of fame through literature (.). How this work looked to contemporaries is harder to measure. One reader, however, provided a response which is prompt, clear, and idiosyncratic.
W D T: B A P
.................................................................................................................................. Pliny the Younger served as suffect consul for September and October , almost three years after his slightly older contemporary Tacitus.9 Perhaps his first duty in those months was to offer a vote of thanks in the senate to Trajan, the emperor to whom he owed his office. That was routine; what is remarkable is that Pliny subsequently revised and published his oration (as he advertises in Epistles . and .). The product is for us the first extant Latin speech since the death of Cicero in , and an extraordinary sample of praise in the early Roman principate. It is also, in more than one way, a fascinating successor and counterpart to the Agricola. The standard modern title Panegyricus misleads: Pliny probably called his speech Gratiarum Actio (‘Thanksgiving’). Still, the comparison it invites with Isocrates’ Panegyricus may not be wholly out of place.10 As Isocrates plays Athens off against Sparta, so Pliny adopts a particularly sharp mode of syncrisis, making intense and persistent vilification of the ‘worst’ emperor Domitian integral to his encomium of the ‘best’ Trajan; and where Isocrates uses praise to drive public policy, so Pliny’s celebration of Trajan is open to reading as a (senatorial) manifesto for constitutional monarchy.11 In aesthetic terms, too, Isocrates’ intensely mannered style and his championing of published orations as an art form make him a significant forebear. As the sustained eulogy of an individual, however, Pliny’s speech perhaps finds a more direct Isocratean ancestor in the Evagoras, that foundational exemplar of prose encomium. At one level, it has an obvious pertinence to
9 On Pliny’s life and career, see Sherwin White (: ), Birley (b: = ), and Whitton (). Tacitus was consul in Nov. Dec. (Whitton : ). 10 For Quintilian, writing in the s, the word panegyricus (originally a speech at a public assembly) retained strong Greek associations, and evoked first and foremost Isocrates’ speech of that name (Inst. .., .., ..). On its later naturalization (often, however, with a distancing overtone of (excessive) Greek adulation), see Rees (a: ). Pliny’s book is first referred to as a panegyricus by Sidonius Apollinaris (Ep. .., c. ), and is entitled Panegyricus in a sixth century manuscript (cf. Mynors : ix). On the original title, cf. Durry (: ). 11 As recent scholars rehabilitating a work long condemned as tedious flattery have been at pains to stress, e.g. S.M. Braund (); Seelentag (: ; ); Roche (: ); for scepticism, see Innes (: ). Pliny subscribes to it insofar as he calls his verbalized Trajan a ‘beacon’ for future emperors (Ep. .. ). In other remarks (Ep. ., .. ), he emphasizes his aesthetic concerns, at least for the published speech as a parade of elegant ingenuity.
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Pliny, more so indeed than to the Agricola: Evagoras, like Trajan, was a monarch. At another, though, there is a fundamental difference: Isocrates (like Tacitus) was praising the dead; Trajan was alive, well, and less than three years in office when he sat through Pliny’s speech. How does the Panegyricus respond to this rhetorical and biographical situation? Pliny’s teacher Quintilian (Inst. ..) had recommended that encomia be ordered either chronologically or by virtue (courage, justice, and so on). Pliny (like Isocrates) adopts a blend of the two, with the former dominating: the bulk of the speech (Pan. –) advances sequentially from Trajan’s adoption by Nerva in , through his accession in and his arrival at Rome in , to his third consulate in , with praise of personal qualities woven into and around it.12 It is a loose sequence, to be sure, partly because Pliny may have juggled some material in his search for smooth joins between topics, partly because—taking advantage of the fact that Trajan spent his first twenty-odd months on campaign—he combines his chronological arrangement with another favoured structural principle (Pernot : ), by which a monarch is praised first for his warlike, then for his pacific virtues: accordingly, we see Trajan first as military imperator in the provinces (Pan. .–), then as civilian princeps at Rome (Pan. to the end). Chronology is thus the primary framework, but a malleable one. As a dynamic narrative portrait, the speech is in a significant sense biographical (Hägg a: –). The coverage, however, is extremely selective: except for two chapters recalling earlier military exploits (Pan. , ) and another, isolated reference (.), Pliny wholly disregards Trajan’s life prior to his imperial adoption. This procedure is remarkable, given the extremely slow, not to say laboured, pace at which he develops his chosen material: three long paragraphs on a drought in Egypt (–), a full twenty-five devoted to Trajan’s brief stint as consul in January and February (–). It is also striking by comparison with other ruler-panegyrics. Theocritus’ Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus may be an extreme case in devoting half its length to Ptolemy’s parents and birth (Idyll .–, with not a word of his deeds as ruler; Hunter ), but origins, family, and youth were a common point of departure in encomium and biography alike.13 Even Tacitus, faced with Agricola’s equestrian parentage and provincial upbringing, gives his best shot at idealizing it (Agr. ., .). Why does Pliny have so little to say about Trajan’s youth, or indeed any of his life up to ? Answers to that question will be literally ex silentio; but they take us, I think, to the ideological core of the speech. It is a fair guess that Trajan’s senatorial career, especially his first consulate in , was more easily omitted than tackled, given the inevitable associations with the emperor (Domitian) who had promoted him.14 Besides, the military part of that 12 Pliny took pains over the arrangement and ‘transitions’ of his speech (Ep. ..; cf. Gierig : ), crafting a largely seamless progression which resists definitive structural analysis; for three different schematic accounts, see Picone (: ), Kühn (: ), and Moreno Soldevila (: ). The sense of ‘experienced’ narrative is clearest at moments like Pan. . (describing early/ mid ) ‘now the desires of the citizens were calling you back (to Rome) . . . ’, . (later in ) ‘but now it is time for you to bestow yourself on the consulship . . . ’. On narrative in Latin panegyric, see Rees (b). 13 From Evagoras and Agesilaus on, and codified in the fourth century prescriptions of Menander Rhetor, On Epideictic ; so too, for instance, the Lives of Plutarch and Suetonius. 14 Of course, other strategies of dissociation were available, as Pliny’s remarks on his own cursus attest (Pan. . ; Whitton : , ) though he had the advantage of not having reached the consulate.
career seems to have been undistinguished: Pliny would surely not have worked such scanty and awkward material so hard (Pan. , ) if more and better had been available (Eck : –, especially n.). Even since his accession, it appears, Trajan had produced no martial achievement worth celebrating: to be sure, Pliny expands what little there was to fill several pages (.– and –), and the heavy concentration on home affairs in the Panegyricus may be to some extent politically motivated, but sheer force of circumstances must play a large part. As for Trajan’s father, he is granted a significant if secondary role. He may have started out an equestrian, but his impressive career allows Pliny to describe Trajan as son ‘of a patrician, a consular, and a triumphal father’ (.; cf. ., .): a precise account, even if Pliny takes a liberty in claiming that the ‘triumph’ in question had really been owed to the young Trajan himself (., .).15 That career is also grounds enough to mention claritas generis (‘family distinction’, .)—albeit a distinction naturally surpassed by Trajan himself (.). And by the end of the speech Trajan pater can be allowed an extended appearance, basking alongside Trajan’s adoptive father Nerva in paternal pride (.–). In the oration as a whole it is Nerva who takes the lead, assuring Trajan’s legitimacy as his imperial ‘parent’; but his natural father retains a place beside (and behind) him on the podium. What, next, of geographical origins and childhood? Pliny’s failure to mention Trajan’s Hispanic roots may reveal a certain sensitivity surrounding the first provincial to become emperor (Innes : ), and/or show that Baetican heritage was not something to be paraded in a still Italocentric elite discourse—as Menander Rhetor suggests (‘If neither his city nor his nation is conspicuously famous, you should omit this topic . . . ’, On Epideictic ; trans. Russell and Wilson : ). But we can hardly be sure about that: for one thing, Trajan may in fact have been born in Italy;16 for another, there are signs elsewhere that he positively encouraged Baetican associations in his official representation (S.M. Braund : ). Besides, it is not only Spain that is left out of account, but the whole of Trajan’s upbringing. Was it unedifying? We can only guess. But, given what Pliny achieves with the most unpromising material elsewhere in the speech, we might hesitate to conclude that his hand was forced on this point. Besides, there is another important factor to consider. However valuable origins and youth may be in Greek panegyric and in some of the later antique ‘Latin Panegyrics’, they barely register in Roman encomia in this (still) early phase of the principate. When Cicero praises the proto-emperors Pompey and Caesar in On the Command of Gnaeus Pompey and For Marcellus, he deals only with their achievements as grown men, as does Messalla’s encomiast in the verse Panegyric to Messalla; Seneca’s flattering portraits of the young Nero depict him only from the time of his accession (Clem. and Apocol. ). The Res Gestae makes another enlightening comparandum: this 15 Trajan’s father apparently earned his triumphal ornaments for a diplomatic settlement with Vologeses, king of Parthia (Syme : ). According to Pliny, young Trajan ‘contained’ the enemy with ‘great terror’ when they heard he was nearby (Pan. .): that is, he happened to be somewhere in Asia at the time Vologeses failed to invade. 16 Late antique writers (e.g. Eutr. ., Aur. Vict. Caes. .) place Trajan’s origins in Baetica (a province later governed by his father), but it may be rather that his family originated there (so Eck, BNP ‘Traianus ()’). Champlin (: ) also warns against overstating any dichotomy of ‘Italian vs provincial’ in our period.
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lapidary summation of ‘The Achievements of the Divine Augustus’ opens with a vision of him as precocious but fully-formed saviour of the state, annos undeviginti natus (‘at the age of eighteen’, RG .). By happy chance, the Tiberian historian Velleius Paterculus could begin a climactic segment on Tiberius—the most biographical as well as most panegyrical part of his narrative—with the future emperor ‘entering public life’ (capessere coepit rem publicam) at exactly the same age (Hist. Rom. .).17 A whole series of very different textual portraits, then, is united by a preference for action and governance over any hymnic celebration of origins. We should not be surprised, then, when Trajan springs Athena-like out of Pliny’s preface: a vivid image of the grown emperor, manly, mature, and even middle-aged (.). But the Panegyricus also marks an important break from earlier practice, in dedicating its first, substantial, narrative panel to Trajan’s adoption and accession (–).18 This constitutes a powerful political statement. Trajan was the first man to become emperor through extra-familial adoption; though Pliny hedges his bets on how the next succession will play out (.), the prominence of the adoption theme, fronting the speech, and providing the emperor with a real-life myth of origins, must speak volumes. Trajan’s princely status begins not (as Nero’s did) with a palace childhood or (like Domitian’s) in his teenage years: it coincides wholly and precisely with his constitutional establishment as princeps-elect. The mature Trajan thus acquires the double credit of having reached the principate through self-propelling worth (by which he earned his adoption) and—here invoking a crucial theme of Pliny’s speech—in having started out an ordinary senator, as ‘one of us’. At the same time, however, this substitute origin elevates Trajan above mere mortals.19 Trajan’s ‘family’ is Nerva, his ‘origin’ the Capitol itself, where his elevation was both presaged (.–) and pronounced (.) to the delight of gods and men alike (., .–, .). Human considerations give way to a far grander tale of origins, and history is elevated to the status of myth. Even Trajan’s adoptive parent Nerva—like his natural father—is unambiguously cast as an inferior superior (Kienast ; Roche : –; Méthy ). His qualities as ‘good emperor’ validate Trajan as chosen successor; but Nerva himself is validated in turn by his choice of a still better man to follow him. More than that, the praetorian revolt of is dramatized as a crisis from which only Trajan’s adoption could save him (.–, .–, .–). By this logic, Trajan did Nerva a greater service by being adopted than Nerva did Trajan by adopting him: Trajan thus steps into the all-important role, enshrined in imperial panegyric since Octavian/Augustus, of the only man who can shield Rome from internecine self-destruction.20 No biographical legitimacy is needed
17 Whether, or rather how far, to call Velleius’ work history, biography or panegyric is much discussed: see (contrastingly) Woodman (: ) and Pelling (b). 18 Pliny’s is the fullest ancient account of these poorly documented events, but the panegyrical mode makes it a historical source to be used cautiously. Among modern reconstructions, see first Eck (). 19 Equivocation between ‘civil’ and remote, human and divine, is the most magnificent instance of Pliny’s ‘having it both ways’ (Maguiness ) in the Panegyricus; cf. Levene (: , ), S. M. Braund (: ), Rees (: ), and J.G. Henderson (: ). 20 For example, Verg. Geor. . , Hor. Od. ., and for a straight talking spin, Tac. Hist. .. ‘after it proved to be in the interest of peace for all power to be concentrated in one man . . . ’. Where Augustus had to win a war, Pliny’s Trajan saves Rome from catastrophe simply by being adopted (as Tiberius did by his accession in Vell. Hist. Rom. .).
from his family, native or adoptive (for all that he gets both): Trajan is the self-born (and/or god-sent) saviour whose glory is owed to none but himself. Pliny’s biographical scheme, then, at once traditional and innovative, itself performs important ideological work in raising up this most human (and divine) of emperors. We have come a long way from the Agricola. And yet Tacitus’ encomium for his father-in-law proves to play a special part in Pliny’s for the emperor. Reworkings of the Agricola feature several times in the Epistles (König and Whitton b: –; Whitton : –). In the Panegyricus, however, Pliny returns to it again and again.21 At one level, it serves as one resource among many for neat verbal and conceptual touches, as when Tacitus’ makarismos for Agricola (quid aliud adstruere Fortuna poterat?, Agr. .) becomes ‘nothing more can be given to her [i.e. Rome’s] felicity’ (nihil felicitati suae . . . adstrui posse, Pan. .). But recurrent patterns of allusion suggest a more sustained transformation too. Pliny’s tireless polarity of ‘bad’ Domitian and ‘good’ Trajan is a syncrisis which, as we saw, is also fundamental (if less insistently pressed) in the Agricola; it is no coincidence that Pliny’s statements of it frequently incorporate Agricolan echoes. Tacitus described Domitianic Rome as fifteen years of enforced, slavish silence, ended only by Nerva and Trajan (Agr. –); Pliny proclaims that, thanks to Trajan, ‘we open our mouths that were barred by long servitude and release our tongues that were bridled by so much evil’ (Pan. .). In the same lines, Tacitus congratulated Nerva on combining ‘two things long immiscible (res olim dissociabiles), the principate and freedom’ (Agr. .); Pliny makes a different claim in similar words: Trajan, ‘you combined and mixed most diverse things (res diversissimas), the confidence of a man long (olim) in power and the modesty of one new to it’ (Agr. .; cf. .). Tacitus’ Domitian glowers, ‘sated in his own solitude’ (Agr. . secreto suo satiatus), Pliny’s Domitian was ‘always keeping to the shadows and solitude’ (Pan. . tenebras semper secretumque captantem). And so on: time and again Tacitus’ tyrant provides the core of motifs (many of them, of course, topical attributes) worked out by Pliny, just as the Trajan of the Panegyricus resembles the Tacitean Trajan (and Nerva) as restorer of Rome’s health. More interesting still is the role of Agricola himself. As one of a long line of model generals in ancient literature (Streng ), he naturally enough resembles Pliny’s model commander Trajan. But the two figures have more specific points in common. Serving on a financial commission, for instance, the young Agricola ‘brought it about that the state had suffered sacrilege from no one other than Nero’ (Agr. .); adjusting tax regulations retrospectively, Trajan did something only the gods can do: ‘you brought it about that we had not had bad emperors’ (Pan. .): Pliny’s epigram abbreviates and sharpens Tacitus’ conceit, the idea that intervention by a good reformer can have past-time imperial consequences.22 Or take the lustre accruing to both men through Domitian’s hatred of them. Such hatred is as unprovable (not to say unlikely) in Trajan’s case as it is in Agricola’s, but that is no bar to proficient orators (Whitton : ). So, when Trajan 21 The case was first made in extenso by Mesk (: ); see also Durry (: ), Bruère (: ), and Whitton (: ). Fedeli (: ) is sceptical, diagnosing the similarities as early Trajanic ‘slogans’, but they are far too numerous and detailed for that. 22 Together with the equivalence of the (mannered) idea, the formal similarity of the epigrams (Agr. fecit ne . . . sensisset ~ Pan. effecisti ne . . . habuissemus), with their pluperfect subjunctives (rare in result clauses), rules out coincidence.
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journeys to quash Saturninus’ revolt in , Pliny palliates this service with speculation that ‘the emperor, jealous then too of other men’s virtues’ (Pan. . alienis . . . virtutibus tunc quoque invidus imperator) was less reassured than terrified by this miraculous intervention—just as Tacitus’ paranoid Domitian, that ‘emperor hostile to virtues’ (Agr. . infensus virtutibus princeps), reacted to news of Agricola’s British conquests (a topos elsewhere applied to Verginius Rufus, Ep. .., and to Pliny himself, Pan. .–). We have already seen how, in the same passage, Tacitus makes Domitian compare his own ‘false triumph over Germania’ (falsum e Germania triumphum) with Agricola’s ‘great and true victory’ (veram magnamque victoriam) in Caledonia (Agr. .). Just so, Pliny can swear that the Capitol will one day witness ‘not imitation chariots and the empty images of a false victory (falsae . . . victoriae), but a commander bringing back true and solid glory (veram ac solidam gloriam)’—with the added, sententious twist that Trajan’s glory will be a pacific one: to conquer the enemy without battle is more glorious than any triumph (Pan. .–; cf. Isoc. Pan. ). One last example will illustrate, too, a crucial difference in mode. We saw how Tacitus gives powerful voice to Agricola’s doomed antagonist Calgacus. One of the chieftain’s bitter remarks—all too easily applicable to senators under Domitian— concerned ‘fear and terror (metus ac terror), feeble bonds of affection’ (Agr. .).23 Pliny celebrates Trajan’s effect in cowing unruly provincials: ‘but now fear and terror (terror et metus) and a desire to obey our orders have returned’ (Pan. .): in the confident tones of the panegyrist, any Tacitean ambivalence about the value of terrorizing one’s subjects—and Pliny keeps those subjects firmly provincial—is emphatically struck out.24 Tacitus, I suggested above, sketches two sides of a syncritic triangle, with Agricola, Domitian and Trajan at the vertices. In the Panegyricus, Pliny fills in a third, revealing ‘how easily Agricola might slot into the role of emperor’ (Hardie : ) and, conversely, underlining in one more way Trajan’s very special claim as the man who rose from the ranks of the senate (‘one of us’) and took the principate in a peaceful transition. What Tacitus made of this creative response we can only speculate, though he appears to have returned the favour by integrating—not without some cynicism—occasional flourishes from the Panegyricus in his own later works (Bruère : –). At all events, Pliny’s adaptations give us a unique insight into how the Agricola could be read—and how Tacitean encomium could be drawn into the very heart of imperial ideology.
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.................................................................................................................................. The Agricola and the Panegyricus are two very different literary creations. But they are also, we have seen, a complementary, contemporary, and directly connected pair of literary artworks. Tacitus marshals the resources of a long biographical tradition (and much more besides) in his brilliant apology for the career of a quietist. Pliny, for his part, produces a striking account, at once humanizing and mythologizing, of an emperor whose life all but
For this translation, and the text it assumes, see Woodman and Kraus (: ). Metus and terror are a common pair, but these are its first two appearances in prose since Cicero. Pliny’s sentence, as has been noticed, also looks to Agr. . ‘but now . . . has returned’ (Bruère : ). 23 24
begins with an imperial adoption—and whose scripted life also finds significant origins in the pages of Tacitus. Between privatus and princeps, across biography and encomium, Agricola and Panegyricus together offer striking illumination of the possibilities for textualizing lives in Trajanic Rome.
F R The Agricola enjoys an extensive bibliography, in which the text and commentary of Woodman and Kraus (), both authoritative and provocative in its interpretations, takes pride of place (super seding the literary/archaeological collaboration of Ogilvie and Richmond ); two other significant recent interventions are Whitmarsh () and Sailor (: ). Sailor () is a masterful introduction; see also the helpful pages of Birley () and several of the contributions in Devillers (). Fuller bibliographies can be found in Soverini (: ) and Woodman and Kraus (: ). For a convenient overview of recent work on the Panegyricus, see Rees (b: ), adding Seelentag (: ) and Geisthardt (: ); the articles collected in Roche () and Rees (a) make a very good point of departure. The only English translation of the speech is in Radice (), not always reliable (Kühn is a much better German version). A commentary in English is promised by Bruce Gibson; until then the choice lies between Durry (, in French), dated but still valuable, and the useful brief notes of Moreno Soldevila (, in Spanish) though the Latin commentaries of Schwarz () and Gierig () still make instructive reading.
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P’ biographical corpus aptly exemplifies ancient biography’s plasticity as a genre. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives is a collection of biographies structured according to the organizing principles of parallelism or ‘sameness’ (determined by the fact that men engaged in similar activities): each pair of Greek and Roman Lives forms a volume (a book unit), while together the pairs constitute a series. Other examples of this literary configuration are Nepos’ and Suetonius’ Illustrious Men (on which see Chapters and in this volume), Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists and Eunapius’ Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists (Chapter ). Plutarch’s Lives of the Caesars (Chapter ), on the other hand, are set together on the basis of a successional system, the so-called diadochē in a similar fashion as Suetonius’ Caesars and Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Chapter ), in which the philosophers-biographees are cast in terms of their master–student relationship.1 The length and scope of Plutarch’s Lives also vary substantially. Some biographies are lengthy (e.g. Pompey and Caesar), others briefer. While biography, broadly and minimally defined, may indicate an account of a life from cradle to grave, some of Plutarch’s biographies (e.g. Numa, Publicola, or Pelopidas) dwell on certain key moments in the heroes’ existence rather than on its totality. For this reason, they may be called ‘limited’ biographies, similar to Nepos’ Pausanias, Conon, and Pelopidas, or Nicolaus of Damascus’ Life of Caesar (Augustus) (Momigliano : –; C. Cooper : ). As we have seen in Chapter in this volume, in Antiquity, the term bios (in Latin vita) could refer to different concepts. In Plutarch, it refers to the character and the career of a man as much as to the work of literature written on his behalf (T.E. Duff : , ). In the Parallel Lives, it also denotes a type of life, as Plutarch indicated writing about ‘observing and modelling our lives on the lives of the (more) virtuous men’ (Demetr. .).2 The fluidity of the ancient On diadochai, see D.L. ., ., ., . and Ath. .e. On the Hellenistic fragments of diadochai, see Giannattasio Andria (). 2 For other meanings of the term, see LSJ, s.v. ‘βίος’: ‘property’ (IIb), ‘the world’ (III), ‘abode’ (IV). For a recent survey of the term, see Desideri (: ). 1
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term and the expansion of its scope with respect to content, form, and techniques aid our understanding of its broad use today and the liberal stance which recent theories take on the notion of biography.3 Indeed, it also helps us explain Plutarch’s choice of moving from single biographies and successive Lives to the grand project of the Parallel Lives, where he experimented with the idea of pairing characters and examining the parallels between them.
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.................................................................................................................................. By the time Plutarch launched into the composition of his Lives, biographical material had already displayed a wide diversity. Plutarch’s biographical corpus, one of the biggest in the ancient world, displays this variety, as it comprises three different types of biography: individual Lives, the Lives of the Caesars, and the Parallel Lives. The first and second groups are dealt with in Chapter in this volume. The present chapter concerns only the Parallel Lives. This work comprises twenty-three pairs of Lives, of which twenty-two are now extant. (In his Epaminondas and Scipio (Africanus the Elder or the Younger), Plutarch may have explained the reason for using a format of syncrisis.) In this work, considered the most ambitious literary plan of a long and fertile career (Russell : ), Plutarch set a Greek and a Roman biography side by side, with each pair forming a single moral and literary unit (T.E. Duff : , –; Geiger a; Pelling b; a; ). A startling deviation from this pattern is represented by the double pair Agis and Cleomenes–Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, in which the Greek and the Roman Lives are intertwined with one another because of their chronological propinquity and the frequent cross-references, so that all four biographies are bound together in one book unit. The idea of drawing parallels between Roman and non-Roman achievements is not unique to Plutarch.4 It is present in Nepos’ Illustrious Men (it probably comprised sixteen books, of which the only one to survive is entitled On Foreign Generals), where Nepos paired Romans and non-Romans (Greeks and others) in specific areas of expertise (Stem : ; Chapter in this volume), most likely in order to foster comparison between them (cf. Hann. ., where Nepos states his comparative scheme). Plutarch uses Nepos as a source in some of his Lives (e.g. Marc. ., Luc. .) and must have been influenced in his undertaking by his comparative approach. Some of Cicero’s comparisons and the later collection of Valerius Maximus’ exempla could have also inspired his parallels (Geiger : –, –; Scardigli : –; Stem : –). The loss of the book on eminent Roman leaders (which was paired with the extant on non-Roman leaders), however, does not allow us to estimate Nepos’ use of this parallel structure nor the extent of its (potential) impact on Plutarch’s syncritical (comparative) scheme. Nonetheless, the large-scale, binary arrangement of Greek and Roman political and military figures, and the sophistication with which comparison is used as the paramount structural principle in the Parallel Lives are 3
On unusual subjects of modern biography, see McGing and Mossman (b: ix). On theories that validate the transferability of the biographical form from persons to inanimate objects, such as the ‘actor network theory’ expounded by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, see Latour (). 4 For a recent survey of studies on paired biographies, see Humble ().
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surely Plutarch’s own ground-breaking contribution to the art of biography. His method of parallelism may have in fact inspired Amyntianus, a second-century biographer, who, according to Photius (Bibl. , a), composed several parallel Lives. We know that the protagonists of two of these pairs were Dionysius (probably Dionsyius I) and Domitian, and Philip II and Augustus (FGrHistCont IV A, , ). Where two Lives are set side by side, they are often preceded by a common prologue (the so-called formal proem) and followed by a concluding comparison (syncrisis).5 These structural features mark each pair of Lives as a book—and they were probably to be read as such. Modern critics have drawn special attention to the importance of reading the two Lives as a unit, demonstrating how the pairing affects our understanding of the individual within it (Pelling b; a; H. Beck ; T.E. Duff ). They rightly observe, for instance, that the first Life sets a pattern that is subsequently exploited and varied in the second (Stadter ; ; Pelling b; a: –; T.E. Duff : –). They also point out that the syncritical structure is essential for our appreciation of the rationale behind Plutarch’s selection, exclusion, and deployment of his source material, and for unlocking and understanding the moral questions raised across paired Lives (T.E. Duff : ). The process of comparison and parallelism underlies each pair of Lives in various ways. In the prologues, Plutarch states both the purpose and the method of his work, names the two protagonists, and offers an outline of the similarities between the characters of the two men. In the formal syncrisis, he sums up the points of contact and, especially, the differences between the two protagonists.6 The syncrises, intimately connected with agonistic forms of argumentative rhetoric, literary contests, and philosophical debate (Focke : –; T.E. Duff : –), were regarded by Michel de Montaigne as the most admirable parts of the Plutarchan corpus (Essais . in Buchon : ). In modern times, conversely, they have been often viewed as superficial, pedantic, ineffective, and shallow in the evaluation of the two subjects’ character and moral status (Hirzel : –; Ziegler : –). Indeed, Erbse’s seminal study of the syncrises () constituted the tipping-point for their less controversial and more balanced appraisal, which triggered a variety of treatments (Bucher-Isler : –; Russell : –; Stadter ; ). Following his example, many critics now draw interesting conclusions about the syncrisis. They point to the varying ways in which Plutarch exploits his comparative epilogues to enhance our understanding of the heroes. At times, scholars still express negative judgements of the artificiality of the syncrisis. More often, however, they argue about the formal comparisons’ destabilizing effect on the moral content of the paired Lives (T.E. Duff : –). Overall, they regard the syncrisis as an essential part of Plutarch’s scheme of parallelism,
5 In general, the Greek Life comes first and is followed by the Roman Life. The order is reversed in Aemilius Paullus Timoleon, Sertorius Eumenes, and Coriolanus Alcibiades. On the reversal, see T.E. Duff (: n. ; : n. , ), Pelling (b; a: ). On the question of Plutarch’s choice and pairing of subjects, see Geiger (), Frazier (), and Desideri (). 6 The formal syncrises are not present in Cato the Younger Phocion, Themistocles Camillus, Pyrrhus Marius, and Alexander Caesar. On views about their absence, see Erbse (: ), Swain (: ), T.E. Duff (: ; : ), and Pelling (a: ). On the purposes underlying Plutarch’s Lives, see now Jacobs ().
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something that is very noticeable in other works of the Plutarchan corpus and is central to his moral and cultural programme.7 The paired structure, therefore, constitutes the defining organizing principle of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. But there is more. The Lives are not simply conceived as pairs; they are also crafted to complement one another in more nuanced ways (Pelling : ). While the pairs are unified by both the similarities drawn in the proems (which are distinct from the opening sections of the Lives; cf. T.E. Duff : ) and the differences articulated in the comparative epilogues, elements of parallelism can be observed throughout each pair, even when the opening and closure sections are missing (Erbse ; Pelling b; a; T.E. Duff ). Detailed analyses of the Lives have pointed out Plutarch’s use of internal syncrisis (that is, cross-references to other individuals within a Life, outside the formal parallelism of the Greek and Roman Lives; H. Beck ), as much as of notable thematic and circumstantial parallels between the two subjects’ lives. Points of comparison can be also detected across pairs, something that may indicate how the various pairs of Lives were meant to be read as larger clusters, and not exclusively as autonomous book units (Stadter ).8 Finally, as we will see in the next section, in the last scenes of the Lives we often find parallels, which offer excellent examples of how tightly themed the pairing is.
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.................................................................................................................................. The final chapters of the Lives usually deal with the protagonist’s death and the posthumous events related to him (burial, funeral honours, revenge, successors, and occasionally a synoptic characterization of the subject). The natural termination point of a subject’s life, that is, does not always coincide with the end of the biography. More importantly, the Lives’ ending chapters provide additional intertextual play and thematic balance within the pairs, thus inviting the readers to reflect on the further ways in which the biographies ‘converse’ with one another and the protagonists are compared and evaluated. For instance, both Theseus and Romulus end with the protagonists’ apparition (Thes. .; Rom. .–) and with a discussion on their tombs and temples, and the sacrifices and cults established in their honour by the Athenians and the Romans respectively (Thes. .; Rom. .–). These themes enhance the two subjects’ pairing and justify their status as founders of their cities (T.E. Duff : –). In the Life of Lycurgus, too, we are informed about the longevity of Lycurgus’ polity (.), the insufficient posthumous honours paid to him at Sparta, and his tomb, which was struck by lightning (.). These points are revisited with some variations in the Life of Numa (. and .–). In the pair Coriolanus-Alcibiades, the thematic parity between the two protagonists is highlighted by the fact that the funeral honours are bestowed by women (Cor. .; Alc. .). Similarly, betrayal and the punishment of the traitors connect the deaths of Demosthenes and Cicero, creating an appropriate thematic symmetry between the two Lives (Dem. .; Cic. .–).
7 Russell (: ), Wardman (: ), Geiger (), Pelling (b; a; ), Swain (), T.E. Duff (: ), Desideri (), and Larmour (). 8 See the section ‘Source Material, Composition and Narrative Technique’ in this chapter for details.
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In the Lives of Aristides and Cato the Elder, a similar balance is unexpectedly created by an array of philosophical figures that parades throughout the pair, including the final chapters.9 In the death scene of Aristides, Plutarch narrates that Aristides’ granddaughter Myrto lived in wedlock with Socrates (.). Correspondingly, in Cato the Elder ., he notes that Cato was the great-grandfather of Cato the Younger, the most illustrious philosopher and protagonist of a pair of Lives together with Phocion.10 Indeed, the association of the ‘unphilosophical’ Aristides with Cato, who knew well and approved of Pythagoreanism (.) despite being openly hostile to Hellenic culture and the Greek philosophers (, .), is problematic. Yet it does give us an idea of Plutarch’s tendency to create symmetries across the Lives (however contrived they may be) and carry them on until the end. Unsurprisingly, the theme of philosophy also runs through the Lives of Phocion and Cato the Younger11 and establishes a significant link between them, especially between the death scenes. Both the protagonists had a great interest in philosophy and committed suicide. In both cases, Socrates constitutes a very important term of comparison. For, as in Socrates’ case, Phocion died drinking hemlock (Phoc. .–), while Cato died by his own sword (Cat. Mi. .–) after holding a philosophical conversation on the evening before his death just as Socrates did in the Phaedo (Cat. Mi. ). A further connection is represented by the account of the heroes’ sons’ similar vices and unsuccessful careers in the last chapter of the Lives (Phoc. .–; Cat. Mi. .–). This theme does not seem to fit well with the overall philosophical thrust of the preceding narrative, but strengthens the tie between the two Lives. In the pair Themistocles-Camillus, which lacks both the proem and the concluding syncrisis, the symmetry between the death scenes is particularly notable. Plutarch accepts the suicide version of Themistocles’ death (.–) and silences that recorded by Thucydides, according to which Themistocles died of natural causes (..). The Thucydidean account, on the one hand, could have made a perfect match for Camillus’ own natural death (Cam. ). On the other hand, however, it would have also aroused less sympathy and admiration for the Greek subject, not comparable to the great grief of the Romans at the death of Camillus (Cam. .). Thus we may reasonably assume that, in order to maintain the balance between the two subjects’ death, Plutarch offers a reputable explanation for Themistocles’ suicide (Them. .)—more convincing here than in Cimon . (T.E. Duff a: )—by adding that ‘the cause and the manner of Themistocles’ death were admired by the Persian king’ (Them. .). The Great King’s respect for Themistocles’ end, then, places the two men’s posthumous reputation on an equal footing. One last example is the pair Nicias-Crassus, where tragedy (in particular Euripides’ Bacchae) binds together the death scenes. The spectacle (theama) of the bodies of Demosthenes and Nicias cast out before the gates (Nic. .) and the pivotal role played by Euripides’ poetry among the Athenians and the Syracusans (Nic. .–) anticipate the dramatic features of Crassus’ death. For in the Life of Crassus, we read about the parodic See Plu. Arist. ., . (Plato), . (Ariston of Ceos), ., . (Socrates); Ca. Ma. . (the Pythagoreans), ., . (Plato), ., ., . (Socrates), . (Ariston of Ceos); cf. Arist./Ca. Ma. () . (Aristotle). 10 On Plutarch’s confusion of the line of Cato the Elder’s descendants, see Sansone (: ). 11 For an insightful analysis of these two Lives, see T.E. Duff (: ). 9
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procession formed after the hero’s death, with his doppelgänger dressed like a woman, just as Pentheus (E. Ba. –), and the re-enactment of the end of the Bacchae, in which the head of the dead Crassus is used as a prop on stage (Crass. .–). Plutarch explicitly admits that the details of Crassus’ decease were not known, but only conjectured (Crass. .), as there were no Roman witnesses at Carrhae (.–). We can reasonably surmise, then, that in the pursuit of symmetry Plutarch fabricated or simply favoured a version of Crassus’ fate with a strong Euripidean flavour to match that of Nicias (D. Braund ; C. Cooper : –).12
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.................................................................................................................................. Such an extensive employment of parallelism and comparison in the proems, the final syncrisis, and in the narration invites us to explore other distinctive features of the Lives, which concern Plutarch’s use of source material as much as his compositional techniques and narrative strategies. Although deciding which heroes to pair must have been one of the first choices that Plutarch made as he gradually conceived the series, the writing process did not merely concentrate on this.13 In fact, Plutarch seems to have prepared simultaneously the biographies of characters who lived in the same period and took part in the same historical events, even if with different roles. The most emblematic case is represented by the Lives of the protagonists of the last phase of the Roman Republic (Antony, Brutus, Caesar, Cato Minor, Cicero, Crassus, Lucullus, and Pompey, with Cicero and Lucullus being written earlier than the other Lives of this group; Pelling ; ; a: –; Beneker ). Other interesting examples are the Lives of the Spartan characters (Lycurgus, Lysander, Agesilaus, and Agis and Cleomenes) and those of the Persian Wars heroes (Aristides, Cimon, and Themistocles), which present strong thematic and historical interconnections (Marincola ). It is plausible to suppose that Plutarch collected historical and literary sources, and used the same range of material for the Lives belonging to the same group, possibly supplementing for each biography the primary source, which he must have constantly kept in his view, with many items of various sort. Plutarch’s reading materials were very diverse: biographical and historical works, memoires, the protagonist’s own writings, letters, speeches, collections of sayings, excerpts of earlier historical works, Plutarch’s own works, and so forth. Plutarch also gave great importance to oral traditions, myths, and legends as much as to artistic objects, monuments, temples, historic sites and landscapes, which he visited during his many journeys abroad (Buckler ). As he had recourse to so many sources, Plutarch inevitably needed to select what to draw on from the results of his research. Furthermore, he was forced to rely primarily on his memory when combining different 12
Another pair whose death scenes are characterized by theatrical imagery is Demetrius Antony (Demetr. ., .; Ant. .); see Pelling (a: , ; a: ) and Stadter (: ). 13 On Plutarch’s way of working, see Pelling (; a: ; a: ), Stadter (b) and Van der Stockt ().
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historical accounts, as it was highly impractical to reread and consult again systematically multiple scrolls or codices in the writing phase. Memory, however, could sometimes fail and mislead Plutarch: this explains his occasional mistakes and inaccuracies, which can be noticed especially when comparing the various versions of the same episodes present in different Lives. In addition to memory recollection, Plutarch must have taken notes too, perhaps in the form of aide-mémoire, when he conducted his preliminary research in libraries (Pelling ). It is also likely that at a later stage Plutarch prepared drafts (hypomnēmata).14 Since we cannot establish with certainty how refined and close to the final version these hypomnēmata were, we should only assume that this intermediate phase followed the research stage and certainly preceded the refining process. We may reasonably think that in the draft stage Plutarch determined (even if without absolute precision and leaving room for later improvement) his interpretation of the various protagonists, their characterization, the specific emphasis to give to the events in which they were involved, the interplay between the Lives of each pair, and the narrative strategies within and between the Lives (Pelling ; Stadter b: –). Finally, we cannot prove conclusively whether Plutarch prepared a single hypomnēma for all the Lives that dealt with the same historical period or whether a single hypomnēma was behind each Life. In any case, we should not consider Plutarch’s method of composition rigidly nor can we believe that an unyielding model applies to all the biographies and pairs. In particular, we cannot forget that Plutarch had greater familiarity with Greek history than with the Roman past. The Greek Lives, therefore, probably did not require as much or the same kind of preparation as the Roman Lives (Pelling ; a: ; Stadter b: –). The last step was writing up the Lives. If selectivity was the main criterion adopted by Plutarch for preparing the various notes and drafts for the pairs, indeed, it was also the guiding principle in shaping the definitive form of the biographies. Plutarch neither narrated all the events and facts concerning the protagonists nor simply followed their chronological sequence from birth to death. In order to reveal the character and the nature of the heroes, keeping them interesting without losing the readers’ attention, he gave the Lives a non-linear narrative structure. Undoubtedly, Russell () had the merit of having shown first how Plutarch either inserted in the narration speculative expansions and amplifying embellishments, or, conversely, abridged and compressed his account. In addition to this, Plutarch often reinterpreted through transpositions the version of the facts, which he could find in his sources, so as to make the hero’s ēthos, passions, natural disposition, and education emerge more distinctly. Pelling, too, has made a major contribution to our understanding of Plutarch’s narrative technique (Pelling ; a: –). He has demonstrated that Plutarch often conflated 14 Plutarch’s hypomnēmata for the Moralia have been extensively studied by Van der Stockt (a; b; ; ; : ) and Van Meirvenne (), who have imagined the drafts as contain ing trains of thought, clusters of sentences, anecdotes, and ideas, which were later rearranged and adapted to different works and contexts. Pelling (d: ) has argued that Plutarch might have used similar hypomnēmata for the Lives, although it remains unclear whether anecdote drafts or collections were drawn up along with narrative drafts. On Plutarch’s anecdote collection and use of hypomnēmata in relation to the Apophthegmata laconica and the Apophthegmata regum et impera torum, see M. Beck (), Pelling (d), and Stadter ().
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similar historical details, compressed chronology by linking together events distant in time, reordered the chronological sequence of the facts by displacing and grouping episodes, and transferred items between characters. In Pelling’s view, Plutarch was also able to expand his source material by fabricating circumstantial details or even a context. These narrative choices aimed to make the readers concentrate their attention on the main topics, especially the protagonists’ virtues and vices, and the inner motivation for their actions and behaviour, rendering the interpretation of life stories more convincing and captivating. The analysis of Plutarch’s method of composition and narrative organization confirms that the Lives do not simply deal with chronology and history (T.E. Duff b; : –). As we saw earlier, Plutarch focused on the motivation of the protagonists’ conduct and its moral, political, and historical implications. We can add that for this purpose Plutarch sought to reconstruct the complex dynamics between the protagonist and the other characters (e.g. family members, friends, lovers, masters, political competitors, enemies, or emulators): direct interaction, reciprocal influence, power relations, support, opposition, and so forth. In this sense, particularly important is the relationship between the protagonist and the masses, which very often tends to determine the hero’s success or failure as much as the success or the failure of his city or state, depending on whether the statesman leads and rules the masses rather than following and catering to them (cf. Agis –; Phoc. .–).15 This entails that in the Lives the narrative presents not only the protagonist’s viewpoint but also the secondary characters’ perspectives. A brief example, among many, from the Life of Agesilaus can explain this aspect. At the beginning of the Spartan expedition in Asia ( ), Agesilaus and Lysander had a serious quarrel at Ephesus. Plutarch analyses in detail the reasons for their disagreement (Ages. .–): When he [Agesilaus] came to Ephesus, soon the great reputation and the power surrounding Lysander became grievous and burdensome. For, on each occasion, a crowd waited at the doors and everyone followed and courted Lysander, as if by law (διὰ τὸν νόμον) Agesilaus had the nominal title and the role of commander (στρατηγία), but, in actual fact (ἔργῳ), Lysander had authority on everything (κύριον ἁπάντων), had real power (δυνάμενον), and managed all the affairs (πράττοντα πάντα). For none of the generals sent out to Asia was ever more powerful and fearful, no other man conferred greater favours on his friends and inflicted such great injuries upon his enemies. The men, remembering these things as they were still fresh and, besides, seeing that Agesilaus was simple, frugal in the relationship with other people, and affable (ἀϕελῆ καὶ λιτὸν ἐν ταῖς ὁμιλίαις καὶ δημοτικὸν), while the other one [Lysander] still had exactly the same vehemence, harshness, and brevity of speech (σϕοδρότητα καὶ τραχύτητα καὶ βραχυλογίαν) as before, fawned over the latter [Lysander] completely and paid court to him alone.16
Plutarch highlights the confusion and the overlap between official command (stratēgia) and effective power (dynamis), which are reflected in the multiple focalization of the
15 On Plutarch’s representation of the masses, see Prandi () and Saïd (). See also Pelling (a), De Blois (), and Mazza (). 16 Translation by Perrin () with some adaptations.
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narrative. At the beginning, Plutarch presents Agesilaus’ viewpoint and his growing resentment against Lysander, but soon he moves to focalize through the people of Ephesus (Shipley : ). In particular, we can notice that everyone saw Lysander as the man who could exercise full discretion as to how to guide Sparta. Away from Sparta, Agesilaus felt himself to be subject to Lysander’s power, the contrary of what his role as king and commander entailed. With the subsequent authorial comment, which again focalizes through the Greeks of Asia Minor, Plutarch corroborates Agesilaus’ concern about his leadership by mentioning Lysander’s well-established reputation and awe in the eyes of Asian people, and the policy of benefiting friends and harming enemies, which Lysander carried out as navarch more than any other Spartan commander (Ages. .). Furthermore, still from the perspective of the people in Asia Minor, Plutarch presents the comparison between Agesilaus’ presumed un-Spartan qualities and Lysander’s traditionally Spartan traits (Ages. .). To sum up, by shifting the point of view of the narration, Plutarch examines the complex relationship between Agesilaus, Lysander, and the Greeks, the difference between constitutional power and actual power, the clash between the images that the two Spartan leaders projected, and their effect on the Greek people. This is the key to understanding why Agesilaus eventually dismissed Lysander, assuming full control of the Greek forces (Ages. .–). The method of composition and the narrative strategies of the Parallel Lives, therefore, reveal Plutarch’s ability to reinterpret both the data recorded by the sources and the historical events, usually already narrated by previous authors, focusing the attention on the various characters involved. By adopting multiple perspectives and by shifting the narrative viewpoint whenever necessary, Plutarch makes history become the stage where great individuals, playing the starring role in the ‘play of life’, act together with second leads and extras. Indeed, not rarely do Plutarch’s biographies assume a certain theatricality and are their protagonists portrayed as epic heroes (e.g. Agesilaus compared to Agamemnon in Ages. ., .–, and .), tragic characters (cf. Lysander in Lys. ), or even buffoons of comedies (e.g. Sulla in Sull. .–) (cf. Papadi ). The employment of dramatization and theatrical texture, nonetheless, especially in the crucial moments of the narrative (for instance, in death scenes, see section ‘Death Scenes’ in this chapter) cannot be viewed as only a stylistic feature. Rather, it corresponds to the aim of displaying the characters’ virtues and vices. In this sense, as we shall see, all of Plutarch’s stylistic and narrative choices are closely connected to the ultimate goal of the Lives: the moral improvement of the readers.
M, C, R
.................................................................................................................................. Plutarch was a middle-Platonic philosopher, who believed that moral good and bad can be identified in history. This conception is developed in the Moralia, especially in the On the Delay of Divine Vengeance, a dialogue where Plutarch discusses how divine providence intervenes in the human world and regulates the course of the events, rewarding virtue and good actions as much as punishing vices and bad behaviour, even if in ways and with a
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timing that are often incomprehensible to men.17 History, then, can teach moral lessons as long as readers engage in understanding not only what happened in the past but also why it happened and whether it was right or wrong, by looking at lesser-known facts and reconstructing the personal motivations (derived, for instance, from natural qualities, education, child or adult experiences, and so forth) behind actions. In this respect, Plutarch’s view on the moral purpose and the utility of history (in general) and biography (more specifically) is no different from that of other ancient historians such as Thucydides, Livy, or Tacitus.18 In the Lives, too, Plutarch expresses analogous ideas. In particular, as T.E. Duff (: –) has thoughtfully argued, in several programmatic statements, inserted in the proems of the Lives, Plutarch clarifies that his biographies aim to offer examples of virtue or vice (cf. the prologues to the pairs Alexander-Caesar, Aemilius Paullus-Timoleon, Pericles-Fabius Maximus, Demetrius-Antony; see Wolman and Schneeweiss ). T.E. Duff (: –), nonetheless, convincingly has shown that, except for the final syncrisis, Plutarch usually neither explicitly defines moral standards nor openly and simply values the heroes’ actions as good or bad. In the body of the Lives, that is, expressions of praise or blame, which may serve as clear educational indications to the readers, are very rare. Avoiding direct criticism, Plutarch prefers to leave it to the readers to form their own judgement and to infer moral teaching from the narration.19 The Lives, moreover, do not portray entirely negative or positive characters: both right and wrong, virtue and vice, tend to be present in the heroes’ lives and their boundaries may occasionally blur. Indeed, some degree of moral ambivalence or uncertainty can be found in both the biographies of overall positive heroes, such as Pericles, Fabius, or Aemilius, and in the more ‘negative’ Lives, that is, the biographies whose protagonists may appear to be examples of vice, which Plutarch wrote late in the series (e.g. the pairs Nicias-Crassus, Demetrius-Antony, Pyrrhus-Marius, or Coriolanus-Alcibiades; T.E. Duff : –; –: –). We are led to infer that, in general, the outstanding military and political leaders of Plutarch’s biographies, despite their great natures, could (and sometimes did) act immorally, being driven by passions rather than reason, so that their successes cannot be assessed separately from their ethical weaknesses and flaws (Stadter ; ; ). Doubtless, the task of distinguishing the good and the evil in the Lives is not an easy one. This may explain why Plutarch appears to encourage the readers to be cautious in drawing conclusions, just as in On the Delay of Divine Vengeance he invites his interlocutors to adopt a prudent approach when judging well-known figures of the past, since their role in history may be more complicated than what one believes, forcing one to question widely held assumptions (e.g. the judgement on Dionysius the Elder in On the Delay of Divine Vengeance D–F).
17
Regarding On the Delay of Divine Vengeance, see Soury (), Baldassarri (), Del Cerro Calderón (), and Opsomer (). In general, on Plutarch’s idea of divine providence, see Babut (: , ), J.M. Dillon (: ), Valgiglio (: ), and Vernière and Frazier (: ix xxix). 18 On the moral ends of historiography, see Fornara (: ), Brunt (: ), Pownall (: ), and Mehl (: ). 19 See Stadter (: ; : ). Sometimes, secondary characters (‘onlookers’), whose perspective coincides with that of the narrator, express a moral evaluation on the protagonist’s behaviour; see Pelling (a: index s.v. ‘characterization by reaction’) and T.E. Duff (: index s.v. ‘Onlookers as mouthpiece for author’).
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Plutarch’s moralism, then, is more ‘descriptive’ than ‘protreptic’, as Pelling has defined it in a seminal essay (Pelling ). It suggests the need to scrutinize the heroes’ behaviour together with its causes and effects instead of proposing explicit rules of conduct. It stimulates a complex process in which the readers are called to review great individuals putting into practice virtues and vices while exerting their power. Often, however, one can find it extremely difficult to establish where virtue and vice lie.20 For instance, war, political conflicts, the clash between private and public interests, or a poor educational background reduce the heroes’ possibilities of achieving or applying rigorously moral standards and force the readers to rethink their own values. We should not assume, nonetheless, that moral improvement becomes impossible in this way. In fact, examples of ethically good behaviour, narrated in life stories, can reinforce the readers’ moral convictions on the basis that human nature and its basic moral categories are timeless. Similarly, evil actions, which the readers should not want to imitate, may constitute a deterrent against vices and crimes, or may at least give a warning about human fragility, something that, again, binds together men of different historical periods through a sense of common humanity (T.E. Duff : –; Pelling a: –; Stadter a: –). Modern scholarship has been discussing whether Plutarch’s readers shared the same value system of the Lives and to what extent they could identify with the protagonists or the secondary characters. The general consensus is that the implied readership, as it emerges from the text of various biographies, is no stranger to Plutarch’s ethical and philosophical views. This idea is strengthened by the way in which Plutarch usually addresses the readers, especially in prologues and epilogues, employing first-person plural verbs, or first and second singular verbs, or inserting ‘actualizing’ formulas (i.e. references to the situation of Plutarch’s time, such as ἔτι καὶ νῦν or ἔτι παρ᾿ ἡμῖν). These narrative devices convey a sense of communality between the narrator and the narratees, which suggests that they believe in the same ethical categories, have the same approach to the past, and join their forces in a common analysis effort (Stadter : –; M. Beck ; Pelling c; T.E. Duff –: –). This entails that expository didacticism and explicit moral exhortations are not normally required in the Lives. For the supposed readership does not need to be convinced about good and bad as Plutarch/the narrator presents them. It is much more difficult, conversely, to understand who the historical readers of the Lives were. Two main hypotheses have been presented in the last decades. According to the first one, Plutarch’s audience was formed by important Greek and Roman members of the imperial elite, whom he tried to reconcile, showing, on the one hand, that in Greek history there were virtuous heroes and glorious enterprises equal to those of the Romans, while, on the other hand, the Romans were as skilled in fine arts as the Greeks. The Lives, that is, would constitute one of the highest expressions of the unified Graeco-Roman culture, embraced by the Graeco-Roman ruling class of the Roman Empire.21 Other critics, on the contrary, have thought that Plutarch primarily wrote the Lives for Greek readers, who 20 For a survey of the values and the vices attributed by Plutarch to the protagonists of the Lives, see Bucher Isler (), Frazier (; ), and Wardman (: ). 21 Homeyer (: ), Russell (: ), Bucher Isler (: ), Valgiglio (a: ), Boulogne (: ), and Desideri (; ). This thesis has been refined and nuanced by Stadter (; a; b), who has conjectured that the Lives could respond to the ideology of Emperor Trajan and high officials.
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belonged to elite circles of sophisticated and powerful men, in order to urge them to become more involved in local politics. The Lives, then, would be a product of the imperial Hellenic culture, which only corresponded in part to the movement of the so-called Second Sophistic. They would bear testimony to the attempt of the Greek pepaideumenoi, who lived under the Roman rule, to resist a situation of political and military submission, while reaffirming the superiority of Greek culture (Jones : –; Wardman : –; Swain : –, –; T.E. Duff : –, –). Both these theories highlight some important aspects of the Lives. One can hardly deny that Plutarch’s powerful and influential friends (both Greeks and Romans), who held prominent political roles under the reigns of Nerva and Trajan, constituted the Lives’ immediate audience (Puech ). It is not unreasonable to think that, by looking at the trajectories of the Plutarchan heroes as case studies, no matter whether morally good or bad, they could find useful suggestions for their own conduct in politics, comparing and contrasting their own dilemmas, choices, attempts, failures, or successes as high officials of the Roman Empire with those of the protagonists (Stadter ; a; b; Desideri ). Similarly, one cannot fail to notice that Plutarch’s approach to the historical facts narrated in the Lives remains that of a Greek intellectual, who saw the Roman institutions, laws, mentality, society, and history through the lens of Greek culture and moral categories. This can be regarded as a form of cultural resistance and may even represent ‘an attempt to “appropriate” Roman history for Greek readers’ (T.E. Duff : –; –: ). Yet, the contrast between a ‘culturally and politically unified’ audience and Greek-only readers may not help us grasp the overall sense of Plutarch’s biographical and moral project. As we have repeatedly emphasized in this chapter, Plutarch’s way of analysing history and its Greek and Roman protagonists was that of a moral philosopher. His main aim was to examine the character of the great men of the past and their behaviour in difficult, historically crucial, and ethically challenging moments as much as in ‘off-duty’, yet revealing situations (Frazier ). Plutarch constructed ‘integrated’ characters, that is, characters whose traits ‘cluster readily together’, so that childhood qualities naturally develop in adult age and are complemented by those acquired later in life, all being brought ‘into some sort of relationship with one another’ (Pelling b: ; cf. also Pelling e: –). This characterization of the heroes, which should not be taken for a complete lack of psychological analysis nor for a sense of character ‘stasis’ or ‘one-sidedness’, presents the protagonists as exemplary types of persons. For a certain set of character traits displayed by a Life’s protagonist, driving him to act in a certain way, might be also found in another person. Such exemplarity is closely connected with moralism. For the character’s qualities, as very often in ancient literature, are constituted by moral virtues and vices. This, on the one hand, implies Plutarch’s (indirect) judgement of the characters and, on the other hand, naturally invites the readers of the Lives to express their evaluation of the protagonists, using ethical categories (good and bad, right and wrong).22 Even when the ethical judgement of the characters is not explicit, the readers are called to employ their critical faculties to examine the narration so as to make their own moral appraisal. The Lives, then, require attentive readers, willing to get involved in a serious historical and cultural learning process, questioning their preconceptions, and being open to accept 22
On this question, see Gill (; : ; : ). See, however, Pelling (e: ).
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moral and philosophical teachings (T.E. Duff –: –). It is difficult to imagine that such an attitude, which Plutarch attributed to his implied readership as he constructed it in the narrative of the biographies, could not be found in real Roman readers as much as in a Greek audience. The ethical standards, which Plutarch adopted to interpret the lives of his characters and history in general, are presented as the key to understanding humanity without temporal or geographical limits. They constitute a code that, if accepted, allows the readers to compare and contrast the Greek and Roman great individuals, abstracting from their concrete vicissitudes—successes, failures, mistakes, challenges, decisions, uncertainties, virtues, and vices—moral lessons to apply in a different time and cultural context from the original. There was a price for Plutarch to pay. He had to renounce the detailed exploration of cultural, historical, or political points, typical of a specific period or society, even without falling into anachronistic analyses (Pelling ). Yet, without this common moral and philosophical ground, no serious critical engagement and no ethical improvement would be possible for the readers as much as no credible parallel between Greek and Roman Lives could have been made by Plutarch. The Lives would merely narrate interesting stories of illustrious people. Plutarch, however, offers more than this; his readers, too, probably wanted to achieve more than this very basic level of reading. Indeed, in many respects, Plutarch’s moral concepts are the same as those promoted by the Greek paideia. More importantly, they are Platonic concepts, which often contrast with those of other philosophical schools. Plutarch’s philosophical (moral) analysis of his characters, then, reflects a specific world-view, which the readers had to confront before forming their own judgement. This made reading the Lives challenging, since, as we commented earlier, the readers were expected to have a sufficient historical and philosophical knowledge, or the will to study and fill in the gaps in their knowledge after engaging the text with intellectual curiosity. Doubtless, Plutarch set the bar high. The readers, however, both Greeks and Romans, must have been aware of the degree of commitment that the Lives might take. Similarly, they certainly knew that Plutarch did not have the same comprehension of the Greek and the Roman world, nor could he imagine a generic or irenic conciliation between Greece and Rome. Yet in Plutarch’s time, the readers probably found in the Lives what they were looking for, that is, biographies with a very rich and deep philosophical and historical content, which could inspire them even if they did not examine issues or topics immediately relevant to the current political situation. The great benefit derived from finding in Plutarch’s text examples of ethical ideals, dilemmas, or violations, which could make them improve their personal and public life, was worth the effort.
C
.................................................................................................................................. As illustrated in this chapter, a reading of the Parallel Lives against its antecedents and the tradition of biography shows that Plutarch retains some features present in earlier authors and texts, while, with regard to others, he introduces significant innovations. Indeed, such a complex dynamic between continuity and change has always characterized so ‘fluid’ a genre as life-writing. In addition, Plutarch’s Lives soon became an unavoidable model (perhaps even the standard model) for political biography. Already in Late Antiquity and
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later, from the Renaissance onwards (see Chapter in this volume), they were considered a classic, which should be read, imitated, and emulated. Especially in Europe, the Parallel Lives was most widely translated and studied, so that it was one of the most popular Greek texts in the modern era, extremely useful not only for learning ancient Greek but also for understanding the ancient world and its protagonists.23 This, nonetheless, does not imply that every aspect of the Parallel Lives and all of Plutarch’s literary, cultural, philosophical, and historiographical intentions were equally understood and appreciated. In fact, modern readers have often overlooked how Plutarch developed the relationship between life-writing and historiography through the large-scale project of the Lives or how elegant and, at the same time, innovative were the solutions he found for characterizing the Greek and Roman heroes and for strengthening their parallelism. On the other hand, the idea that through biographies one could investigate the virtues and vices of famous historical figures so as to educate the readers has constantly been viewed as Plutarch’s most important contribution to biography. Plutarch, that is, inextricably linked together biography, moralism, and the analysis of the protagonists’ nature and character, something that was seen as the quintessential purpose of writing Lives.
F R Penetrating discussions of Plutarch’s narrative technique and moralism in his biographical writings can be found in Pelling (; ; b; c), Geiger (; a); Frazier (; ), Stadter (; a), and T E. Duff (; ). For a treatment of different aspects of parallelism and comparison, the reader will find helpful the articles and the case studies included in ANRW () .., and in the collected volumes of Pelling (a), Humble (), and M. Beck ().
A Our thanks go to Koen De Temmerman and Katerina Oikonomopoulou for their valuable sugges tions on early drafts of this chapter.
23
On the reception of Plutarch and further bibliography, see Xenophontos and Oikonomopoulou ().
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Lives of the Caesars (Galba, Otho) and Lives of Aratus and Artaxerxes ......................................................................................................................
P’ Lives of Galba and Otho, the only ones of the eight Lives of the Caesars that came down to us, are closely knit together and were, together with the lost Life of Vitellius, probably part of one book. The Galba and the Otho are thus part of a continuous series. By contrast, and like some other lost Lives, the Lives of Aratus and Artaxerxes are truly isolated. But the Lives of Galba, Otho, Aratus, and Artaxerxes all stand apart from the series of twenty-three pairs of Parallel Lives (Chapter in this volume); they are ‘single’ Lives in the sense that they are not written within the framework of parallelism. It is tempting to regard these ‘single’ Lives as a finger exercise for the great enterprise of the Parallel Lives (and in doing so, to imply a relative chronology). In that hypothesis, the ‘single’ Lives would be somewhat different from (and inferior to?) the Parallel Lives concerning biographical technique and/or theme and goal. Testing this hypothesis through an analysis of the ‘single’ Lives should eventually bring out their specific characteristics against the background of Plutarch’s biographical activity in the Parallel Lives.
T R A: C, S, S
.................................................................................................................................. It is not difficult to accumulate puzzling questions about Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes, nor to list the divergent answers scholarship has put forth in an attempt to solve its riddle.1 To start with, there is the question of the absolute and relative chronology of this Life. Some hold that it is a ‘Frühwerk . . . , eine Art von Übung’, written before the Parallel Lives (C. Binder : ), others that the work is composed in the same period as the Parallel Lives, namely, after (Almagor : , n. , with ample bibliography on the 1
See Almagor (: ) for a recent discussion of this text.
chronology of the work). This issue is important also because it touches on Plutarch’s way of working: we would want to know if he collected and consulted sources specifically in view of the redaction of this Life, or if he was already familiar with those sources from his work on other Lives, such as the Agesilaus or the Alexander, or if he was invited to read Ctesias when composing the Lives of ‘(for instance) Alcibiades and Lysander’ (von Wilamowitz )?2 The next question is why Plutarch had decided to write the Life of Artaxerxes anyway. As far as we know, he wrote Lives of individual Greeks, and of Greeks and Romans paralleled, but no Life of any individual or ‘paralleled’ barbarian. What, then, could have aroused his interest in this Persian king? Was it fascination with the (cruel) world of the Persian court (T.S. Schmidt : ), or a ‘boufflée d’orientalisme’ (Sirinelli : ), or rather historical interest in an important part of the history of Greece’s relations with Persia (C. Binder : )? Or was this Life one of a (never completed) series of Lives of Persian Kings (Stadter : )? Finally, there is the question of Plutarch’s intention. Given that he wrote the Parallel Lives for the purpose of educating his readers, it is surprising that Plutarch, imbued as he was with the Greek sense of superiority over barbarians (Nikolaidis ; T.S. Schmidt ), would present a barbarian as a model. Nevertheless, some hold that Artaxerxes is indeed presented as a model of praotēs (Manfredini, Orsi, and Antelami : xxvii), while others regarded him rather as a negative moral example (Hood : –) or as a stereotypical tyrant (Mossman : ). Or is he bad in the end, but initially good? And if so, are we dealing with the portrayal of a gradual revelation of Artaxerxes’ character, or rather of its radical change?3 Or does the appreciation of his character depend on the viewpoint of the Greeks, respectively of the Persians (T.S. Schmidt : –)? Concerning all these questions there is no communis opinio. It will come as no surprise, then, that in the literature the overall appreciation of the Life of Artaxerxes varies from ‘inferior to the Parallel Lives’ (C. Binder : ), ‘a failure’ when it comes to individual characterization, yet an ‘interesting experiment’ (Mossman : , ), ‘disappointing’ and ‘not one of Plutarch’s best Lives’ (Flacelière and Chambry : ) to ‘perhaps one of his most sophisticated works’ (Almagor : ). This divergence of the interpretations invites the articulation of some methodological reflections. I suggest that the most secure approach to the text is offered by the philological method.4 In this chapter, I will try and interpret the ‘isolated’ Lives in that spirit, starting with the Life of Artaxerxes. In accordance with Plutarch’s own rhetorical education and culture, the analysis of the ‘isolated Lives’, regarded as rhetorically tinged literature, will pay attention to () points of invention; () points of composition; and () points of diction—but not always in this order. It is most ‘natural’ to narrate the events of a life in a chronological order. The Life of Artaxerxes displays that natural order, and that was Plutarch’s conscious plan. Indeed, in ., he postpones the narration of the murder of Statira by Parysatis to a later moment in the Life: the remark shows that he wanted his narrative to follow the chronological order of See Pelling (: Chapter ), who raises similar questions when dealing with the problem of Plutarch’s sources in Roman Lives. 3 On characterization in Plutarch, see Gill (), Swain (), and Pelling (b). 4 A systematic exposition of the philological method can be found in Babilas (). 2
: ,
the events. There are, however, some exceptions to this chronological order. In – (on foreign policy), the escape of Cyrus’ Greek mercenaries seamlessly leads to the narration of the war against Sparta, the victory over the Lacedaemonians at Cnidus in , and the shameful peace of Antalcidas in . Plutarch, indignant at ‘the mockery and betrayal of Greece’, looks into the future—a flash-forward—and refers to Sparta’s loss of its supremacy after its defeat at Leuctra in . At the occasion of the conference in Susa in , Artaxerxes bribes also the Athenian Timagoras. All this was shameful to the Greeks, but they were delighted at the execution of Tissaphernes, brought about also at the instigation of Parysatis. This execution took place in : Plutarch obviously neglects the chronology, displacing (in the terminology of Pelling : ) the event in order to create a sharp contrast with the foregoing distressing griefs of the Greeks, and at the same time a fluent transition to the story of Artaxerxes’ marriage with his daughter Atossa, again at the instigation of Parysatis. It would seem that Plutarch, in a section on foreign policy, again indulges in narrating ‘domestic affairs’. He abruptly returns to the theme of foreign policy by mentioning the war against Egypt in , and then the war against the Cadusians in : the chronological inversion gave Plutarch the opportunity to embroider on Artaxerxes’ personal responsibility for the initial disaster of the latter campaign, but also on the king’s courage. Within this chronological framework, Plutarch brings up the topics that one expects to turn up in a Life,5 such as ‘family and descent’, ‘character as a child’, ‘education’, ‘appearance’, ‘entry into public life’, ‘achievements’, ‘death’ (Russell : ; Soares ; : ). Plutarch, however, does not deal with Artaxerxes’ education. But one can infer what kind of education that must have been from the traditional education his brother Cyrus received: ‘ . . . a certain priest who had conducted Cyrus through the customary discipline for boys, had taught him the wisdom of the Magi’ (.). Still, it is remarkable that we get this information only in connection with Cyrus. Plutarch may well have had no specific information about the education of Artaxerxes, but he could have easily copied it from what he knew about Cyrus’ education. In short, the Life of Artaxerxes displays a ‘classical’ composition: after an informal proem (Stadter : ) and apart from the topic of ‘education’, it treats the topics one expects to appear in a biography, and, apart from a couple of conscious procedures, they are brought up in a chronological order. There is, however, a remarkable procedure of ‘echoing’ in the structure of this Life (C.F. Smith : ): a specific theme, event or comment is repeated later in the narrative. Thus, ‘succession to the throne’ is the subject in the beginning of the Life (–) and at the end (–): a kind of ring composition. The dilatoriness in the nature of the king in seems to be illustrated by his hesitation to actually give combat to Cyrus in . An anecdote about Artaxerxes’ generosity occurs in . and ., and is repeated in .– and .; the repetition confirms Artaxerxes’ proneness to kind gratitude when receiving even the smallest gift. And last but not least, there is a second ring composition: the theme of gentleness, brought up in and again in and , is repeated in . The ring composition about ‘succession to the throne’ might suggest that the Life is about ‘problems of succession in the Achaemenid kingdom’ (Manfredini, Orsi, and
On Plutarch’s relative freedom to ‘invent’ the genre of biography, see Russell (: ) and Van der Stockt (: ). 5
Antelami : xxxvii). But it should be noted that Plutarch intended this Life to be the Life of Artaxerxes: ‘he is the subject of this Life’ (.). Consequently, Artaxerxes is immediately situated in a familial context, for his character will be brought out through the interaction with members of his family and with others.6 This explains the ‘variation’ on Xenophon’s opening line of the Anabasis, Plutarch mentioning four children of Darius and Parysatis, not just two. Xenophon’s focus had been on the Greeks after the end of the war between the two brothers Artaxerxes and Cyrus; Plutarch’s focus is on Artaxerxes (Franco : ). The analysis of the composition of the Life shows that Plutarch’s focus is indeed on Artaxerxes: he is characterized through explicit authorial comments (, , , , , ) and internal syncrisis (; Russell : –; Bucher-Isler :, –; H. Beck ), but also through anecdotes (, –, ; H. Beck ) and the comments of his friends and opponents (, , ). It is striking that there is extremely little characterization of whatever kind in the very long section about the war between the two brothers, and it is reasonable to argue that this has to do, on the one hand, with Plutarch’s main sources for this section, namely, Ctesias (C.F. Smith : ; Flacelière and Chambry : ; T.E. Duff : ), whose interest was in the history of the Achaemenid Empire, and Xenophon, whose subject was the escape of the Greeks after the defeat of Cyrus, and, on the other hand, with the subject in this section itself, being the war waged by Cyrus, where Plutarch indulges even in a critique of the arrangement of the troops of Clearchus. But equally noticeable is the fact that, counted by the lines in the Loeb edition, the narration of the war between Cyrus and Artaxerxes and its aftermath, a story that covers the period – , covers about per cent of the whole Life. This disproportionate amount poses a problem insofar as it runs counter to Plutarch’s intention. The war itself is narrated in –. Plutarch signals that he will report only what Xenophon passed over and is worth mentioning (one may compare this choice with the introduction of the Life of Nicias .: Wardman : ; T.E. Duff : ). In a way, the very opening line of the Life suggests that Plutarch’s interest was in moral character. For when roughly and succinctly sketching the descent of Artaxerxes II, he refers to his older namesake and grandfather Artaxerxes I as ‘preeminent among the kings of Persia for gentleness and magnanimity’,7 while it was perhaps more obvious to refer to this king as the host of Themistocles8 or as the king who was forced to accept the so-called Peace of Callias.9 And indeed, a little further, in , Plutarch characterizes Artaxerxes II as— seemingly!—‘gentler in everything’ than his brother Cyrus, thus hinting at character rather than at the fact that this Artaxerxes imposed the so-called Peace of Antalcidas on the Greeks (on which see in the Life). Nevertheless, it is only fair to acknowledge (with C. Binder : –) that the disproportionate attention to the war between Artaxerxes and Cyrus, and to historical details in general, constitutes a flaw in the composition of the narrative and that the turn of attention is to be explained as reflecting Plutarch’s sources. 6
It is normal that Artaxerxes is characterized through his interaction with his opponent Cyrus, and, somewhat more surprisingly, with his mother Parysatis. Her gruesome impact, however, on the events (, ) can serve as a contrast to Artaxerxes’ ‘gentleness’. 7 All translations are from the Loeb Classical Library. Plutarch does not mention the murders on the occasion of the accession of Artaxerxes I, who killed his father and brother (Wiesehöfer : ). 8 See Flacelière (: ), Frost (: ), and Marr (: ). 9 Plutarch mentions the Peace of Callias in Cim. .
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Another vexed problem is the very characterization of Artaxerxes in this Life. Concerning the king’s mildness Plutarch keeps his options open (and leaves the reader in doubt). Artaxerxes seemed to display gentleness (πρᾳότης) and mildness (μαλακία) (only?) more than his brother Cyrus (.). He (only?) seemed (ἔδοξε) to imitate the gentleness (πρᾳότης) of his grandfather, and to have done so (only?) in the beginning of his reign (.). And concerning the dilatoriness (μέλλησις) in the king’s nature: that was taken for (ϕαινομένη) reasonableness (ἐπιείκεια; in Per. . this positive quality is paired with πρᾳότης) by most people (.). His reputation of mildness (δόξας δὲ πρᾷος εἶναι) and popularity (ϕιλυπήκοος) was greatly due ‘to his son Ochus, who surpassed all men in cruelty and blood-guiltiness’ (.). Concerning the report according to which Artaxerxes would personally have killed his son Darius in anger—a report that suggests cruel brutality on the part of the king—Plutarch again takes no firm stand: he simply qualifies the report as an alternative story (.–: ἔνιοι δέ ϕασι). In a number of anecdotes, however, the sketch of the king’s character is positive without any qualification: he is agreeable in intercourse, generously bestowing honours and favours, humane when punishing, gracious, and kind (εὔχαρις καὶ ϕιλάνθρωπος) in his acceptance and bestowal of favours (.–). He is not rash in punishing, and kind and averse to ceremonial in a familial context. His wife Statira as well was approachable und (thus) beloved by the common folk (). Some character depictions are very positive. Thus, the king shows determination and courage when attacking Cyrus in Cunaxa (.–), and on his return from the battle against the Cadusians, he showed ‘ardor and vigor’ (.: τὴν . . . προθυμίαν καὶ ῥώμην), thereby apparently demonstrating that he had no ‘base and ignoble nature under the sway of evil doctrines’ (ἐπιδεικνυομένου πᾶσαν τὴν δειλίαν καὶ τὴν μαλακίαν οὐ τρυϕῆς καὶ πολυτελείας, . . . , ἔκγονον οὖσαν, ἀλλὰ μοχθηρᾶς ϕύσεως καὶ ἀγεννοῦς καὶ δόξαις πονηραῖς ἑπομένης). The characterization by Cyrus (), claiming that his brother ‘was too cowardly and weak (ὑπὸ δειλίας καὶ μαλακίας) either to sit horse in a hunt, or his throne in a time of peril’, may suggest that the gentleness of Artaxerxes could be negatively interpreted (Mossman : ). But one must keep in mind that Cyrus is Artaxerxes’ enemy, and that Plutarch calls Cyrus’ speech big talking (μεγαληγορῶν). More outspokenly hostile is the comment of Clearchus, another enemy of the king. When taken captive by Artaxerxes, he was afraid of being killed because of ‘the cruelty of the king’ (τῇ βασιλέως ὠμότητι, .). Plutarch neither denies nor confirms this characterization explicitly. Teribazus (.–)—out of grief— maliciously speaks of the king’s ‘capricious and insecure character’ (ἔμπληκτον ἦθος καὶ ἀβέβαιον), and of his violation of the inviolable custom of the Persians to give to the heir to the throne the gift he asks for, in this case Aspasia. This time Plutarch even seems to excuse the king: the king, after he had given Aspasia to Darius, took her away again, and thought he was thereby ‘inflicting a punishment on his son which was not grievous, but actually quite within bounds and tinctured with pleasantry (οὐ χαλεπήν, ἀλλὰ καὶ μετρίαν τινὰ καὶ παιδιᾷ μεμιγμένην . . . δίκην, .)’. There are two instances where Plutarch is flatly negative about Artaxerxes’ behaviour. In . he is indignant about Artaxerxes’ marriage with his daughter Atossa: ‘the king ignored the opinions and laws of the Greeks (χαίρειν ἐάσαντα δόξας Ἑλλήνων καὶ νόμους) and regarded himself as appointed by the god to be a law unto the Persians and an arbitrator of good and evil’. It would seem that Plutarch has no knowledge of the practice of endogamy
in the Achaemenid royal family. Moreover, even if he grasps the tight link between the king and the law, he seems to misunderstand that link and suggest that this law was capricious (Manfredini, Orsi, and Antelami : –). Even more surprising is the outspoken Greek point of view10 (C. Binder : –, –); it is unclear if this is Plutarch’s own position or that of his source. In ., immediately after having described the generosity of the king who took care of his soldiers when returning from the campaign against the Cadusians, Plutarch says that the king ‘thinking that he was despised because of the disastrous failure of his expedition, was suspicious of his chief men; many of these he put to death in anger, and more out of fear. For it is cowardly fear in a tyrant that leads to most bloodshed; . . . So also among wild beasts . . . ’. Thus there seems to occur a certain inconsistency in Plutarch’s portrayal of the king’s character. His humanity in punishing (.; .) is contradicted by the cowardly and tyrannical fear that made him put to death many of his chief men after the failure of the Cardusian expedition (.), and by cruel punishments after the battle in Cunaxa (–), even if the cruelty of the punishment of the Carian who claimed to have killed Cyrus was due to Parysatis, who was also responsible for the cruelty of the death of the eunuch Masabates (). Parysatis, for that matter, has great influence on Artaxerxes throughout the Life11 (.; .; .; .; ; .–; ., –; see also the influence of Teribazus on Artaxerxes’ hesitation and despair: .; .–). This might suggest that Artaxerxes was highly impressionable, and in that sense rather weak. That would, however, be at odds with his firm and angry determination when resisting Cyrus in battle (.), with his angry determination to punish the Carian (.) and Mithridates (.), and with his ‘ardor and vigor’ during the retreat from the campaign against the Cadusians (.). And Artaxerxes’ initial mildness (.) contrasts with the suggestion that at the end of his life he was increasingly bloodthirsty (Mossman : ). The inconsistency, however, should not be exaggerated. On the one hand, inasmuch as the portrait of Artaxerxes is that of a moral character and not so much of a personality, one should keep in mind that Plutarch’s heroes are seldom solid blocks of virtue, and Plutarch does not refrain from mentioning their flaws (Swain : ; Nikolaidis : ). On the other hand, the king, however much he seems of a passive and impressionable nature, is firm, courageous, determined and sometimes even harsh when his honour as a king, or his throne and life are in danger. Thus, as a king, he cannot allow people to downplay his role in the death of Cyrus and to make him look like a liar (Orsi : ), and it is a matter of justice to put conspirators to death. Looked at in that light, his character can be described as ‘passive-reactive’ (C. Binder : ). Finally, inasmuch as the king’s harsh punishments towards the end of his life are understandable, the contrast with his gentle character as a youth, namely, when compared with Cyrus (.), and ‘in the beginning’ (.), should not be overplayed. But then again, there remain disturbing signals that make it impossible to regard Artaxerxes as a moral model. If the primary medium of excellence in adult life is logos (Gill : ), and if Plutarch considers excellence as resulting from ‘the interplay of
10 In . the marriage between Artaxerxes and Atossa is mentioned again, but this time the marriage is only παρὰ τὸν νόμον: the interpretatio graeca is omitted. 11 C. Binder (: ) goes so far as to call Parysatis the protagonist in paragraphs .
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nature and education or outside influences’ (ibid.: ), then one cannot but recall that Plutarch offers no information about the king’s education, that the king punished in rage (.; .; .; .), that he was strongly influenced by Parysatis, a woman ‘naturally of a harsh temper and savage in her wrath and resentment’ (.), that Teribazus maliciously says that the king ‘was of a nature so fickle and insecure’ (.). In short, the king has no harmonized and stable character able to control passions. The conclusion must be that the portrait of Artaxerxes remains diffuse and vague. Finally, the style of the Life of Artaxerxes. It took but little trouble to add literary embellishment to the narrative. Of the three comparisons (., ., .), only the last one, comparing a tyrant with a wild animal, is successful. But Plutarch finds his form near the end of the Life, when he deals with the machinations of Teribazus (; Flacelière and Chambry : –): a quote from a lost tragedy of Sophocles is combined with an allusion to a line of Hesiod, a reminder of Socrates’ intellectualistic ethics, and part of a hexameter from an unknown source. It is as if the sinister atmosphere at the Persian court appealed to Plutarch’s rhetorical armament. To sum up: in the composition of the Life of Artaxerxes there is a proportionally too long section dedicated to the war between the king and his brother Cyrus. It is plausible that this is due to the sources Plutarch had at his disposal (the praised Xenophon, Deinon, and the much-criticized Ctesias; see Marasco a), and that these sources made him think of writing a Life of the king that would inevitably sketch also the life at the Achaemenid court; that would catch the attention of his Greek readers who were ‘eager to learn more about the most prestigious barbarians of the ancient world’ (Flacelière and Chambry : ). Apparently such a Life would, to Plutarch’s mind, deal with character, and thus he imposed a portrayal of the king’s character on the material at hand. Yet it cannot be denied that the characterization of Artaxerxes is not completely successful. True, the king is a barbarian and, as such, he cannot be a moral model, but there is a degree of inconsistency in the characterization; this implies that the Life is not pedagogic. All in all, the Life can be appreciated as ‘an interesting experiment’ (Mossman : ), inspired by a ‘boufflée d’orientalisme’ (Sirinelli : ) of the younger Plutarch.
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.................................................................................................................................. Scholars are in relative agreement about the relative chronology of Plutarch’s Life of this famous Sicyonian statesman from the third century : it must have been written before the early Life of Philopoemen (Koster : xviii; Stadter : n. ), since Phil. . refers to it; and it was probably written after the Agis-Cleomenes, since Plutarch seems to have composed it with the material collected for this pair of Lives (Porter : xiii; Jones : ; Almagor : ). Plutarch’s main sources for the Life of Aratus were Aratus’ own memoirs, the proAchaean Polybius, and the pro-Cleomenean Phylarchus. Plutarch compares these sources with each other, and this is sometimes considered a sound method (Flacelière and Chambry : ); some scholars, however, are inclined to point to Plutarch’s dependence
on his sources, and to his inability to harmonize their opinions (Theunissen : ; Almagor ; ) or to proceed methodically when selecting the material (Porter : xix). The disagreement has to do with different interpretations of the portrait Plutarch made of Aratus, more specifically with the question whether it contains problematic incoherence or not (Almagor : – vs. Pelling b). The proem () clearly explains Plutarch’s intention: this Life will, on the one hand, be a eulogy on Aratus, an ancestor of the dedicatee Polycrates. This Polycrates already ‘patterns his life after the fairest examples in his family line’. On the other hand, it also intends to be an instrument in the rearing of Polycrates’ sons: in it, they can read about ‘examples which it well becomes them to imitate’. The Life has also a pedagogic aim. But there is more to it: the succession of the generations links past and present to the future (Almagor : ), and implies the question addressed to a broader audience, the contemporary Greeks: will they stand up to the moral (and political) merits of Aratus (Stadter : )? The Life is organized chronologically, five sections being clearly discernible (Stadter : –; see also, with minor variations, Koster : xxviii–xxix; Porter : xviii–xix; Manfredini, Orsi, and Antelami : xvi–xxv; Almagor : –): Aratus’ youth and the capture of Sicyon (–), the capture of Acrocorinth (–), the defeat of tyrants (–), the war against Cleomenes (–), and the last years of Aratus (–). Of these sections only the first two are chronologically organized; in the other sections, chronology is ‘subordinated to thematic considerations’ (Stadter : ; Manfredini, Orsi, and Antelami : xx; Flacelière and Chambry : ),12 bringing out four themes: ‘Aratus’ hatred of tyranny, his relation to the king of Macedonia, concord among the Achaean cities, and the contrast in Aratus’ character’ (Stadter : ). Certain sections of the text can be regarded as digressions: . – on the art of painting, on Antigonus’ praise of Aratus, on Aristippus’ fear and safety measures; the last digression, however, can be read as an internal syncrisis with Aratus. The epilogue (–) narrates the death of Aratus, and contains an implicit syncrisis between him and Philip V. An elegant reference to the contemporary descendants of Aratus creates a ring composition and thus implicitly reinforces the appeal to imitation of the example of Aratus. Unlike in the case of the Life of Artaxerxes, there can be no doubt about the focus created by the composition of this Life: as the proem announces, its focus is on Aratus. ‘More than a third of the whole consists of lively narratives of Aratus’ achievements’ (Porter : ), the first thirty-five chapters are nothing but an illustration of his hatred of tyranny (Manfredini, Orsi, and Antelami : xvi), and the selection of his material in – is a function of the biographer’s focus on him (Manfredini, Orsi, and Antelami : xxv; Flacelière and Chambry : –). Moreover, authorial comments on his character are scattered throughout the Life (; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ). How does Plutarch depict his biographee in this Life? The character of Aratus, as presented by Plutarch, is less difficult to understand than that of Artaxerxes. In conformity with the laudatory and pedagogic purpose of the Life, Plutarch ascribes a series of virtues 12
The chronological displacements are not a lapsus of a garrulous narrator nor a mistake of an historian; in . , Plutarch’s inclusion of a story of a sacrifice and prophecy was meant to illustrate the relation between Antigonus and Aratus, although, as he knew very well, ‘this “story” took place at a later time’.
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and qualities to Aratus: he has an earnest spirit and firm insight as a young man; he is preeminent for virtue, high-minded, devoted to the bonum commune, and a lover of concord; he shows moderation in the exercise of power, and integrity; he has an exalted spirit and love of noble deeds; he shows magnanimity and wisdom. The driving passion behind his political activity is a ‘vehement and glowing hatred of tyrants’ (.; .; .; . .; Manfredini, Orsi, and Antelami : xvi). Nevertheless, Plutarch also criticizes Aratus: he suggests that he has gone to war against the tyrant Aristippus in time of peace (.); by showing mistrust and fear when fighting an open battle against him, he committed a failure (διαμαρτία); he was not convincing when trying to hold Erginus responsible for the attack on Piraeus in time of peace (.–); he was to be blamed because he had appealed to Antigonus in order to ward off Cleomenes; and Plutarch, referring to Polybius (.) does not accept Aratus’ excuse of being under the ‘necessity that was upon him’ (). Aratus also allowed Aristomachus to be lawlessly put to death (.), and his treatment of Mantinea ‘was neither necessary nor honourable, and cannot be excused’ (.–). As we saw, Artaxerxes could be kind and accessible in private circumstances, but firm and revengeful when his life or throne or reputation as king was at stake. In somewhat the same way an ‘unevenness’ (ἀνωμαλία) or lack of equanimity occurs in the behaviour of Aratus. Plutarch refers to this ‘unevenness’ in .–: ‘it was manifest that he resorted to open warfare and strife without courage and with little confidence, but that in stealing advantages and secretly managing cities and tyrants he was most proficient . . . Such an unevenness a lack of philosophy may cause in men of good natural parts; they produce virtue without scientific knowledge . . . ’. Scholars have searched for an explanation of the mixture of praise and blame of Aratus, on the one hand, and of the ‘unevenness’ in his character, on the other, in Plutarch’s handling of his sources. Whereas some praise Plutarch for his sound method of consulting various sources (Flacelière and Chambry : ), others claim that he was unable to harmonize the information he took from them (Porter : xix; Almagor : –), and that this resulted in the sketch of a compound, if not inconsistent character of Aratus. It seems, however, that Aratus is an ‘integrated character’ (Pelling b; a: –): ‘there is now a particular “sort of cleverness and understanding” which explains his apparent inconsistencies, and is represented as a regular feature of human nature (Arat. .–)’ (Pelling a: ). A striking aspect of the characterization of Aratus (and others) in this Life is the recurrent reference to ‘Greekness’ as a criterion of critique and praise: the Sicyonians are praised for their Greek prowess and panhellenic patriotism (.–), and Aratus for his determination to free ‘all Hellas’ from the Macedonians (.); Aratus equals Philopoemen, ‘the last of the Greeks’ (.) for having captured Acrocorinth. But he is criticized for having appealed to Antigonus, a barbarian, and not rather having yielded to Cleomenes, a man of ‘Greek nobility and birth’ (.); and he punished Mantinea ‘not in accord with the Greek spirit’ (.). This recurrent reference to ‘Greekness’ makes it probable that the message of this Life, apart from its pedagogic goal, will also have to do with ‘Greece’: Plutarch’s contemporary Greeks should promote concord within their own cities, and concord between their cities, so as to not provoke Roman intervention (Stadter : ).
It would seem that Plutarch wrote this Life with enthusiasm. A symptom of that is the abundant show of literary culture, not only in the proem (reference to a proverb as quoted by Chrysippus and ‘corrected’ by Dionysodorus; a quote from Pindar) but throughout the Life (comparisons in ., ., ., ., ., ., .; fables of Aesop in ., .; quote from Simonides in ., and from Homer in .). In particular, the liberation of Sicyon and the capture of Acrocorinth are narrated in the way of a thriller. Warm admiration for Aratus makes Plutarch voice outspoken praise, and his moving Greek pride charms the Greek reader. All this makes the Life of Aratus compelling and pleasant reading.
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.................................................................................................................................. From Plutarch’s major project (Stadter : –), which covered the Lives of the Roman emperors from Augustus to Vitellius, only the Lives of Galba and Otho, which, together with the Life of Vitellius, made one book (Flacelière and Chambry : ) have survived. In fact, the Lives of Galba and Otho are very closely knit together (Braun : ; Georgiadou : ), and most probably so was the Life of Vitellius with that of Otho (Pelling ). These Lives were written before the Parallel Lives (Scuderi : ; Giannattasio Andria : n. ). As to the absolute chronology, most scholars opt for a date between and , and more precisely just before, under or right after the reign of Domitian (Jones : –; Scuderi : ; Ash : ; Giannattasio Andria : n. ; Georgiadou : ). Flacelière, however, thinks that they may very well have been written after (Flacelière and Chambry : ), and Stadter (: –) argues for the period of the reign of Vespasian. The latter hypothesis is tempting because it tends to explain why Plutarch wrote his Lives of the Caesars: Plutarch would have saluted Vespasian as the new Augustus, after the vicissitudes of the Empire and its collapse in /. Be that as it may, the Lives of the Caesars is sometimes regarded as a finger exercise or a precursor to the Parallel Lives (Jones : ; Giannattasio Andria : ; Stadter : ). Plutarch probably used the same source for the Lives of the Caesars as Tacitus in his Histories and . This common source is supposed to be Cluvius Rufus (Flacelière and Chambry : ) or Plinius Maior (Georgiadou : –). But Plutarch could also rely on oral sources and on the testimony of eye-witnesses (Jones : ): he is not just epitomizing a Latin source. Finally, there is a strong consensus concerning the question of genre. These Lives are not biographies, or rather not biography tout court (Braun : n. ; Giannattasio Andria : , ); they look more like history, more specifically like a kind of continuous history of the early empire (Bowersock : –; De Blois : ; Georgiadou : ). The ‘memorable facts’ of the Lives of Galba and Otho cover the period from June to April , and they are narrated in a chronological order (with a mistake in Galba .: Livia cannot have had a hand in Galba’s appointment as consul, since Galba was consul for the first time in , while Livia had died in ; Flacelière and Chambry : ).
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This narrow time span may explain the absence of the usual topics of ‘youth’ and ‘education’ in both Lives (Braun : ; Giannattasio Andria : ): they are not about understanding entire lives (Ash : ), but about reflecting on a series of events brought about by and/or suffered by the emperors. The proem (Galba –) is an introduction to both Lives; it offers essential keys to their interpretation. First, after a maxim and before a comparison of the behaviour of the Greek army after Alexander’s death (including a comparison with the Cyclops) with the situation of the Roman Empire after the death of Nero (including a comparison with the Titans), reference is made to Plato’s view on the education of the ‘guardians’—Plutarch makes a synthesis of several relevant passages in Plato, among which probably R. e (LittleEhrhardt : ; Keitel : ; Giannattasio Andria : –). Second, after a preview of what will be narrated, Plutarch invites his readers not to expect an ‘accurate and circumstantial narration of the events’, because that ‘belongs to formal history (πραγματικῆς ἱστορίας)’. But he does not present these Lives as biographies either. It is notable that both Lives end in a kind of ‘informal epilogue’ (Galba and Otho .), where a short, retrospective evaluation of the protagonist is given (Georgiadou : ; : ). Moreover, each such epilogue contains a so-called internal syncrisis in which the protagonist is compared to Nero. Together with the application of the syncritical technique in the proem (and throughout the Lives; Georgiadou : ), this latter parallelism reminds one of the Parallel Lives. Finally, the story of the downfall of Galba occupies – of the Life, the one of Otho is narrated in Otho –. The fact that such a large portion of the Lives is devoted to the impending death of the emperors and to the detailed description of the actual murders (despite Plutarch’s own disclaimer; Ash : ), strongly suggests that Plutarch ‘concentrates on the reigns of the emperors’: how they came to power and, to use Plutarch’s own metaphor, how they left the stage (Stadter : ; Georgiadou : ). What are these Lives about? The first chapter of the Galba announces their common theme: they will be about the relation between soldiers and rulers, and about the moral criteria by which they will be judged (Keitel : )—that is: as Plato would judge the guardians of his ideal state. The soldiers are required to be amenable, loyal, and obedient; the ruler or general should be of a noble nature, gentle, and humane, and he should have a philosophical training so as to be able to create a harmony with the high courage and energy of the soldiers. It is perhaps alarming that we will hear nothing about the education of Galba and Otho, although from the beginning (Galba .) their ambition is held less responsible for the disasters than the greed and unruliness of the soldiery (Braun : ). Plutarch also positions his writing generically, but in a somewhat unclear way: ‘Now, the accurate and circumstantial narration of these events belongs to formal history; but it is my duty also not to omit (οὐδὲ ἐμοὶ προσήκει παρελθεῖν) such incidents as are worthy of mention in the deeds and fates of the Caesars’ (.). Plutarch seems to distance himself from ‘formal history’, although his phrasing suggests that (on top of that kind of history?) he also cannot omit such incidents, etc. (Georgiadou : ) The opposition is, however, between ‘circumstantial narration’ and his own selection of incidents, his focus on the deeds and fates of the Caesars that are worth mentioning. But neither does Plutarch claim explicitly to be writing biographies focusing on character, although we can reasonably expect that their deeds reflect their character, as well as their dealing with their fates; nor
does Plutarch explicitly mention that his purpose is pedagogic. All in all, we can find a mixture of history and biography (Pelling : –). But it is clear that the Otho contains more ‘history’ and far less characterization than the Galba. Whereas the army throughout both Lives does not meet the Platonic standard—in fact, the army commands without being able to control itself—the question is whether the emperors met the standards of humanity and kingly effectiveness. It will become clear that none of them is a model worthy of imitation: these Lives are not pedagogic (Giannattasio Andria : ). Concerning Galba, already the third paragraph gives a hint: Galba’s ‘simple and contented way of living, the sparing hand with which he dealt out money, always avoiding excess were counted unto him, when he became emperor, as parsimony’. He was thought to be of a gentle nature. But when Vindex was defeated by Verginius, he was afraid and regretted that he had involved himself in the revolt against Nero (). Galba was also afraid of Verginius (), and finally, despite his good repute, it became clear that the old man would be under the direction of Vinius, a most greedy person and ‘addicted to loose conduct with women’ (). Nymphidius also calls Galba ‘a well-meaning and moderate old man’ directed by Vinius and Laco (). If the image of Galba so far is that of a weak, old man, we also learn that he acts ‘illegally and despotically’ when ordering the fellow-conspirators of Nymphidius and Turpilianus, ‘a helpless old man’, to be put to death without a trial (.–). And he ordered his horsemen to charge upon the seamen (.–): whereas formerly many despised him as a weak old man, now he inspires fear. This is the turning point in the portrait of Galba. From now on he will become more and more hated, and, being ‘old and feeble’ (.) and ‘an aged emperor’ (.), he became more and more under the direction of the greedy Vinius (–). Yet, when the soldiers in Gaul were complaining, ‘he spoke out as became a great emperor’ (.), and he was a man who always ‘placed the public good before his private interests’ (.). But he postponed the decision concerning the adoption of an heir to the throne (.), and was hesitating and deliberating on the matter (.). But his last words testified to a noble spirit and devotion to the cause of the Roman people (.). In the end, Galba died as an emperor who lost all popularity because he put himself in the hands of Vinius and Laco; but ‘many were moved to pity at his death’ (.). Throughout the Life, Galba is portrayed as a gentle but weak, old man, giving in to wretched persons like Tigellinus, Vinius, and Laco—in this respect, he reminds us of Artaxerxes. He is a rather passive character who made the transition from being a liberator to acting like a tyrant under the influence of others (Braun : ; Keitel : ). He cannot be a good Platonic leader because of lack of effectiveness. In the Life of Otho, by contrast, there is very little characterization of the protagonist. In the beginning of his reign Otho showed kindness, took just measures, and was popular (–.): his was ‘a government which wore a face so smiling’. But soon the picture becomes darker: Plutarch blames him for ‘prodigality, effeminacy, inexperience in war, and multiplicity of debts’ (.). The charges return in .: he is effeminate and unused to command, and ‘worn out by his anxieties’ when taking the decision to attack Cremona; he also made the mistake of leaving his army and retreating to Brixillum (.). And later on, Otho is no longer in high repute, because of his gluttony and drunkenness (.). But, surprisingly, Otho shows great dignity and noble devotion to the Romans by offering up his life ‘to secure peace and concord’ (.), which were fundamental values. Plutarch feels no need to justify this unexpected
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change from the effeminate fear that characterized Otho throughout the Life (Keitel : ) to the resolute decision of suicide for a noble cause: a change worthy of a noble Platonic king. Plutarch finds it in his heart to salute Otho as one who, even if he lived not decently, died nobly (.). Finally, a word about the style of the Lives of Galba and Otho. These Lives may be largely historical narratives, Plutarch nevertheless put the stamp of his own philosophical and literary culture on it. Occasional references to Greek literature are to be found in Galba (.: Hes. Op. ; .: Hom. Il. .). Some allusions give coherence to that narrative. Allusions to tragedy are a case in point. In Galba ., Alexander of Pherae is called a tragedy-tyrant because of ‘the swiftness of the change’. In Galba ., Vinius’ influence on Galba is called ‘partly a cause and partly a pretext for tragic events and great calamities’. And most significantly, in Galba ., a clear allusion is made to Euripides’ Bacchae when Plutarch narrates how Fabius Fabulus ‘impaled on his spear and thrust on high the head of an aged man’. The same effect is created by the symbolism of the ‘body and head’, culminating in a series of barbarian decapitations (Galba .; .), and by that of the Platonic imagery of the guardians in the Republic (Galba .) and the chariot in the Phaedrus (Galba .) (on symbolism in the Lives of Galba and Otho, see especially Ash ). All these metaphors, together with the circumstantial description of the death of both emperors, create an atmosphere of calamity and drama such as could occur when armies gave in to irrational impulses and emperors were unable to control the soldiers through lack of philosophical education.
F R For a proper understanding of the Lives of the Caesars (Galba, Otho) and the Lives of Aratus and Artaxerxes, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives serves as an indispensable context. Two volumes are of vital importance: Frazier () and T.E. Duff (). Several contributions in Pelling (a) deal with Plutarch’s way of working, handling of sources, and moralizing. The same goes for Stadter (a) and M. Beck (). Muccioli () offers fruitful material for a comparison of Greek leaders with Artaxerxes, Galba, and Otho.
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C. S T (c. –after ) enjoyed not only a distinguished career in the service of the emperors during the first decades of the second century (as secretary of studies under Trajan, for example, and especially as Hadrian’s ab epistulis, a kind of secretary of correspondence), but was also a very prolific writer and author of a number of works about different topics. Today, he is appreciated as biographer of the first twelve Roman emperors (from Caesar to Domitian) first and foremost. This is not least a result of the manuscript transmission during the Middle Ages, since his Lives of the Caesars survived in good order (just losing—presumably—one folio right at the beginning of the text), whereas the remainder of his writings suffered a very reverse fate: all we have today consists of two sections of his presumably much larger Illustrious Men, namely, on famous teachers of grammar (De grammaticis) and of rhetoric (De oratoribus), on the one hand, and a couple of Lives of poets on the other (e.g. Terence, Horace, Virgil, Lucan). The latter can be traced back to the chapter De poetis of his Illustrious Men to a certain degree, but apparently underwent significant modifications in the course of time (see Naumann and now Stachon ), as they have been transmitted separately and not under his name (but usually together with the commentaries on the writings of the poets portrayed). If we take a look at the entry on Suetonius in the tenth-century Byzantine encyclopaedia called Suda, however, we encounter a much larger catalogue of writings among which the Caesars (συγγενικὸν Καισάρων) as well as the Illustrious Men (στέμμα Ῥωμαίων ἀνδρῶν ἐπισήμων) only seem to play a minor part, mentioned as number nine and ten respectively out of a total of ten (Adler : ). From most of the other works listed we have nothing more than the titles and a small number of later quotations, but they address topics like ‘Games and Spectacles in Rome’ or ‘Names and Types of Clothes’ and thus seem to have belonged to what we call antiquarian literature. I will come back to this part of his oeuvre and the question if it can be summarized as pratum de rebus variis in the last section of this
chapter. What is important for the moment is that Suetonius perhaps was not seen as a biographer of Roman emperors first and foremost by his contemporaries and did not consider himself primarily in this way. His biographical writings rather formed part of his much larger output which characterizes him as a scholar or polymath in the tradition of, for instance, Varro. Although this point has well been made some years ago by Wallace-Hadrill (), his works continue to be studied separately more often than not. Having said this, things have begun to change recently as is shown, not least, by an edited volume with the programmatic title Suetonius the Biographer. Studies in Roman Lives (Power and Gibson ), which deals with both parts of his biographical work and tries to put them into the wider context of his oeuvre as well (for a comprehensive view on Suetonius and his influence in later times, see also the papers assembled in Poignault ). Given the scope of this Handbook as well as the state of transmission of Suetonius’ texts, this is what the present chapter aims to do, too. I shall start by discussing some of the literary techniques employed by Suetonius in both of his works and by comparing his approach with the biographical tradition in Rome (first section). After that, I shall focus on the social and cultural context of his writings in the second century and try to reconstruct how they interact with the interests of his readers—as far as they can be conjectured (second section). The final section will come back to the questions touched upon above and bring his biographic works into line with the broader interests documented in his oeuvre. By an approach of this kind, I hope that not only our understanding of Suetonius as a prolific author in the context of his time can be improved, but also some insights into the shared stylistic and structural characteristics of his texts may be gained.
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.................................................................................................................................. In a highly influential study, Leo () distinguished rigorously between the Lives of ‘politicians’, on the one hand, and those of ‘intellectuals’, on the other. In doing so, he expounded the respective ‘rules’ that, according to him, had been strictly observed by all biographers before Suetonius, only to be blurred by him as he transferred the model of the Illustrious Men more or less unaltered to his Caesars. Even though his basic assumptions proved to be highly problematic (as he himself acknowledged later: Leo ), his verdict on Suetonius’ alleged lack of skill remained powerful and reduced the scholarly interest in his literary technique significantly. Under these circumstances, even Leo’s observation that the Caesars and the Illustrious Men indeed share a number of common characteristics (: –) had not been as fruitful for further studies as it could have been. Instead his harsh judgement fostered the usual approach to deal with the Caesars and the Illustrious Men separately. Instead of postulating two distinct ‘schools’ of biographical writing, the communis opinio nowadays tries to study both of Suetonius’ works against the backdrop of a shared tradition of biographical literature reaching back to Late Republican Rome (Varro, Nepos, etc.) and to the Hellenistic period (see e.g. Steidle ; Hägg a: –).
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In order to illustrate this general point, I shall discuss three of the literary techniques employed by Suetonius for his emperors as well as for the other protagonists and try to trace them back in the literary tradition: () his preference for a thematic structure (using what often is called rubrics) as opposed to a strictly chronological arrangement of his material; () his refusal of any stylistic or narrative embellishment for the most part of his narrative; and () his decision not to incorporate sources into his own narration in the way ancient historians use to do it, but to let them stand out explicitly as quotations and external ‘voices’. First, however, the unmistakable differences between the Lives of the Caesars and the Illustrious Men should be called to mind briefly. First, content: whereas the former work deals exclusively with the first twelve Roman emperors holding sway over the entire Mediterranean world from to , the latter originally comprised well over one hundred Lives of poets, historians, orators, philosophers, teachers of grammar and rhetoric (for an up-to-date reconstruction of the collection as a whole, see Wallace-Hadrill : –), but, remarkably, no kings, generals, or other politicians, though Nepos, for instance, had included them in his biographic compilation also named Illustrious Men. Second, size and proportions (which are, of course, closely related to the prominence of the persons portrayed): even the shortest of the Caesars, the Life of Titus (Galtier ; Tatum ), is slightly longer than the Life of Virgil (c., compared to c., words), although the latter has most likely been significantly augmented in Late Antiquity (Bayer ). Virgil, however, will have been an exception even among the poets. At the presumed other end of the spectrum, we come upon the Lives of the most famous grammarians told in nearly words (for Orbilius or for Palaemon, the rhetor Albucius Silus even gets c.), while Cornelius Epicadius must do with not more than words. It is quite obvious that these differences must have consequences also for the way the lives are represented. Nevertheless, the basic approach taken by Suetonius remains the same (as rightly observed by Leo : : ‘die litterarischen vitae . . . verhalten sich zu den Caesares wie das Excerpt zu einem Buche oder die Skizze zu einer Ausführung’). At first sight, most readers, if they are asked what is characteristic of Suetonius’ method of writing biographies, will point to his employment of a thematic structure and his habit of arranging his material in categories or rubrics per species instead of following the course of the particular life, as it were, from the cradle to the grave. This becomes obvious in the Caesars, since the details of their reigns are usually not laid out in a year-by-year account, but under headings like ‘warfare’, ‘administration of justice’, ‘production of munera’ or ‘promotion of the arts’. From a narratological point of view, such a structure generates a large number of prolepses and analepses. It is not aesthetics or delectatio, however, that Suetonius adduces as his motivation in one of his few methodological remarks (that is after the loss of the proem), but convenience to his readers or utilitas: ‘Having set forth, as it were, this summary of his life, I shall go through the details of it, not according to chronology (per tempora) but by topic (per species), so that they can be more clearly brought to light and understood (distinctius demonstrari cognoscique possint)’ (Suet. Aug. .; trans. Hurley : ). This superficial impression must be refined, however, in at least two directions. For one thing, chronology remains important nevertheless, not only in reference to the particular items within each rubric, but also with a view to the structure of each Life as a whole. As can
be seen in the remark quoted above, Suetonius usually begins by narrating the life of his protagonist per tempora (often up to the moment when he is ascending the throne) and returns to this method at the end (which allows him to give a lively account of the last hours, frequently followed by a number of post mortem-rubrics looking back at the life as a whole). The resulting build-up is aptly called a ‘sandwich structure’ by Hurley (: ). On the other hand, this layout is far from being employed in the same way for every emperor. On the contrary, a considerable amount of flexibility and adaption to the key aspects in question have been noticed (see e.g. Gugel ). If we take these qualifications into account, the same pattern can be found in the Illustrious Men, albeit on a smaller scale. Whereas this is uncontroversially true for the Poets (as far as they can be reduced to Suetonius, of course), it has been disputed for the Grammarians and Rhetoricians (Leo : against Kaster : xli). But even in most of these short notices the basic technique of alternation between per tempora and per species can be observed (Viljamaa : –). In both cases, the reason for his deviation from chronology is to be seen in what might be called user-friendliness. This becomes even more apparent, if we take a closer look at the typical outset of the Illustrious Men: instead of searching for variatio, the biography of every grammarian or rhetorician starts with his name given in the nominative case and (as a rule) some details of his descent. In the Caesars, Suetonius uses the same method not for the Lives as a whole, but many of the individual rubrics open up with an easily recognizable keyword in their first sentence (even if he refrains from using the nominative exclusively here). Such repetitive beginnings are not made with entertaining the reader in mind, but (perhaps enhanced by ekthesis or rubrication) they facilitate the reader’s orientation and thus enable him/her to choose between a reading from beginning to end or alternatively a consultation of the text aimed at specific information. This intratextual structure is to a certain degree ignored by the modern editions, since they usually follow the chapters introduced by Erasmus in , while the oldest manuscript extant, the ninth-century codex Memmianus often suggests other divisions (for further discussion, see Pausch : –). It seems that giving the reader both options, to use a biographic text in the way of a reference book or to read it like historiography (or an historical novel), was already part of the literary tradition at Rome. This is at least the impression created by comparison with the way in which Cornelius Nepos usually starts to tell a life in his Illustrious Men (on which see Chapter in this volume): he, too, begins by giving the name of his protagonist in the nominative case, often even without syntactical connection to what follows, and by summarizing some of the main points of the following account in the way of a divisio, as Suetonius does in many of the rubrics in his Caesars (e.g. Suet. Ner. .; see Townend : –; Power a: –). But despite these aids to orientation for a selective reader, his viri illustres—like their Suetonian counterparts—can be read continuously as well; in fact both on their own and as part of a larger series, as is shown by the cross-references interspersed from time to time (e.g. Timoth. .–). Utilitas, therefore, can be said to be at the heart of Suetonius’ decision to arrange his material primarily in rubrics and to use further aids to make the organization of his text, as it were, self-explanatory. The same applies to his stylistic decisions: as a rule, he keeps his syntax simple and employs usually not more than one subordinate clause, he refrains from most of the rhetorical devices (rather calling a spade a spade) and offers little variation in
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his narrative technique (using the third person of the protagonist as grammatical subject almost throughout the entire Life; on this, see Power a: –; on his reluctant use of the first person, G. Fry ). This has resulted not only in a famous verdict ‘Sueton schreibt farblos’ (Norden : n. ), but also added to Suetonius’ denigration as an author in general (Funaioli : : ‘ma un vero scrittore non è’). But again, some qualifications have to be made (see e.g. C. Fry ). Above all, two areas stand out for a significantly higher stylistic level: on the one side, lively scenes of mostly anecdotal character are described in a very artful way and with a keen eye for detail and the point of the story (this is obvious to every reader of the Caesars, but applies no less to the Illustrious Men: see e.g. Gram. .). On the other hand, Suetonius now and again slows down narrative time in order to give a more detailed account of an important episode in the life of his protagonist. This can be observed more likely in the per tempora passages (e.g. Suet. Caes. .–; Pausch : –), most notably, though, in connection to the death of the protagonist (see Power b, Ash , and Damon ). The best-known example is, of course, the end of Nero whose last hours are described in well over , words and with due regard not only to every available detail, but also with a notably elevated diction (cf. Suet. Ner. –; Townend : –; Lounsbury ; on his depiction of Nero in general, see Schulz ). Fuller accounts of the circumstances of death are largely missing both in the Grammarians and Rhetoricians (but cf. Rhet. . on the suicide of Albucius Silus) and in the Poets. The slightly fuller account in the Life of Virgil (cf. –), however, hints possibly that this may be attributed rather to a want of information rather than lack of interest. Although both anecdotes and dramatic deaths, needless to say, are present also in Nepos’ Illustrious Men, they seem not to be as relevant to him as much as they are to Suetonius. Both biographers share, however, the juxtaposition of a business-like diction, on the one hand, and several more pretentious passages, on the other, that can be described as a change from summary of facts to detailed scenes in more narratological terms as well. It is most likely not a coincidence that these very topics lend themselves to Suetonius for the alternation of narrative time and literary style (see the second section of this chapter). What is important to note at the moment is that these passages easily demonstrate that Suetonius has the skill to write in a more ambitious manner. As a consequence, his refusal to embellish his text throughout by stylistic and narrative means must be seen not as a sign of failure but as a deliberate decision to give preference to readability over literary adornment which is a common feature of ancient historiography (on Suetonius intentionally writing ‘not-history’, see Wallace-Hadrill : –; Gascou : –; but now also Duchêne , who argues for an historiographical narrator). This already leads on to the last point to be discussed briefly in this section. Since ancient historians considered their undertaking not least a literary one, they put great emphasis on the stylistic adaption of their sources into their own text with the effect that these are often indistinguishable for us today. In contrast, Suetonius in many instances decided against such an incorporation of his authorities and let them markedly stand out as external ‘voices’ different from his own (for a comparison of Suetonius’ text with the show of a ventriloquist, see Damon ). In other words, he does more or less what we would expect a historian or biographer to do in our time: he quotes his references unmodified (that is, as far as we can verify it: for a critical view on Suetonius’ use of sources, see Flach ; for a
more positive appraisal, see Kaster : xxix–xxxix) and often in direct speech. In this way, he makes ample use, for instance, of the letters written by Augustus to provide insight into his plans and motives, but also into his way of thinking and writing. This allows him, among other things, to utter different and even deviating opinions and to discuss problematic aspects from a number of angles (e.g. Suet. Claud. –). The resulting ‘polyphonic’ perspective is similar to the effect achieved by speeches in ancient historiography (on this, see Pausch ), but the presence of other ‘voices’ within the text is significantly enhanced by the fact that they retain their authentic wording. This is, of course, the standard practice throughout Antiquity for quotations from poetry, but it seems to be Suetonius’ innovation to expand this procedure also to citations from prose (on the quotations from poetry in his Illustrious Men, see Power ). This can be seen from a comparison with Nepos again: although the latter knows and even mentions the great value of the letters of Cicero for writing his Life of Atticus (Att. .–), he does not quote them verbatim; instead he lets his Atticus speak in the manner of historiography. Suetonius, on the other hand, in the comparatively short Life of the grammarian Curtius Nicia (Gram. ), cites even two of Cicero’s letters (Cic. Fam. .. and Att. ..) in their exact wording (thus amounting to almost two-thirds of the entire biography). One could also point out to the letters of Augustus being cited and playing an important part in the Life of Horace. To keep things in perspective, however, it has to be stated that verbatim quotations of non-metrical texts are not very frequent in his works except for the Caesars. Nevertheless, both types of citations contribute to the same effect: by rendering his sources in large numbers and often in the original, Suetonius underlines his scholarly (or antiquarian) approach und increases the readability by abstaining from stylistic reworking (though this may have applied more to native speakers than to us). But there is one more reason why our biographer is especially interested in the exact wording of the sayings of his protagonists, as the next section aims to show.
C, P, G: L-W L S-C R
.................................................................................................................................. In the previous section, I explained the way Suetonius writes his biographies and to this end had a look at their formal features while also bringing them into line (albeit briefly) with the work of Nepos as an example of his predecessors from the Late Republic onwards. That was the more traditional approach. What I aim to do now is to follow the change of perspective initiated by Wallace-Hadrill () and give more significance to the society Suetonius lives in and to the readers he originally must had have in mind. Here again, it proves to be useful to deal with the Caesars and the Illustrious Men jointly, as both works reflect in many ways the social and cultural context of their composition. I will start by looking at the key role played by literary education both in the society of the second century and as subject-matter in Suetonius’ oeuvre. Against this backdrop, I will try to show how many of his protagonists can serve as models for a successful application of education and how this effect may be
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reinforced by the rendering of pointed anecdotes and well-coined sayings of the portrayed persons. As has been described earlier, the so-called ‘Second Sophistic’ in the Greek-speaking parts of the Roman Empire can be paralleled with the similar (though not identical) development leading to a highly increased impact of knowledge and education on Roman society. Although this process begins as early as the principate, it reaches its greatest impact in the period of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty. That is reflected in Suetonius, for instance, not only by the regular assembling of a rubric that could be labelled as ‘Caesar x and the studia liberalia’, but also by his general interest in the topic of emperors and literature (ibid.: –). This involves indeed every aspect one could think of, ranging from the books they read during their studies to their literary likes and dislikes, to the way they promoted authors by patronage or encouraged research and, in the end, to their own productions in prose or poetry. If one reads these sections of the Caesars in a row, the resulting impression is not far from a history of literary education at Rome or at least at the Roman court from the Late Republic to the end of the first century . This overview, now, can be significantly enhanced, if we take into account the Illustrious Men, too, especially in their original scale including the now lost chapters on historians, orators, and philosophers. As far as the content of this work as a whole can be reconstructed, there might have been a greater focus on the Republic up to the early time of Augustus than on the period of the Julio-Claudians as it comes to fore in the Caesars, but nevertheless both writings display the same interests of content. With regard to the different temporal emphasis, they may even be read complementarily to a certain degree (ibid.: –). In this context, it is of particular interest that Suetonius included two chapters on teachers of grammar and rhetoric in his ‘Who’s Who in Literary Rome’. Unfortunately, it is not possible to say very much about the reception of these rubrics by his contemporaries or by later readers (but see Kaster : xlviii–liv), as only one manuscript survived that had not been ‘rediscovered’ before the fifteenth century (the famous—and now lost—ninth-century codex Hersfeldensis which also contained the minor works of Tacitus). It can be made plausible, however, that the insertion of important propagators of literary erudition into a work on Illustrious Men was an innovative move, at least in relation to his Roman predecessors (on Asclepiades of Myrlea as a potential forerunner in the Hellenistic period, see ibid.: xxiv–xxvi). In any case, his decision to place the teachers of grammar and rhetoric on the same level with the venerated authors of classical literature like Horace or Virgil demonstrates how closely Suetonius’ writings are referring to the second century as the heyday of Roman ‘Bildungskultur’ (as reflected also in his two preliminary ‘essays’ on the history of teaching at Rome; cf. – and ; see Viljamaa : –). This correlation can be further corroborated when we now turn from the content to the question of the way in which Suetonius offers not only data and information to be learned, but also models of a successful application of literary education to his readers. From a look at other works from the same period, especially the letters of the Younger Pliny or the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, it can be shown that it was of major importance in Roman society of the second century not only to have a profound knowledge of cultural and literary matters, but also to be able to display this learning in the right situations and in the right way (see Pausch : – with further references). Against
this backdrop, it can also be made plausible that this is one of the purposes Suetonius pursues in his biographical writing. At first sight, this might seem more obvious in the case of the Illustrious Men. And indeed, Suetonius’ depiction of the first twelve emperors comprises much more relevant topics than erudition alone. But apart from surveying almost years of Roman history in a very different way from Tacitus and from evaluating the emperors according to governmental criteria (as seems natural for an author experienced in bureaucracy himself), he uses his imperial protagonists time and again to provide his readers not only with the necessary knowledge about the pivotal figures of the more recent Roman history, but also with models of how such historical learning is brought to bear in real life. That he takes into consideration the presumed interests of his contemporary readers in such a way, offers an explanation not only for the elaborate treatment of topics of a more private nature such as physical appearance (see Vidén ), medical condition, or sex life—that surely are beneath the dignity of classical historiography but not of everyday conversation in ancient Rome—but also for the specific way in which this content is presented throughout his biographies. This applies already to fundamental decisions like the arrangement in rubrics which puts the reader in the position of being able easily to compare the attitudes of several emperors to, say, games and spectacles without having to make his way through their entire biographies. At the same time, this is an important reason for the variations in attention to detail mentioned above: characteristic anecdotes and other remarkable episodes from the lives of the protagonists make not only a contribution to the entertaining nature of the text, but they are highly useful both as information readily to memorize and as stories very suitable of retelling. Last but not least, several of the scenes emphasized in this way already imply a model of their successful application since the hero himself prevails within the story by making good use of his own learning and education (for an understanding of the rubrics mainly as exempla, see Schulz ). Of many passages throughout the Caesars, I will take one example: none other than Julius Caesar himself. According to Suetonius (Caes. .–), who refers to Cicero for this (Off. ..), the victor of Pharsalus defended himself against the reproaches that he killed too many of his fellow citizens on this occasion by repeatedly quoting the two lines of Euripides which basically say that you only should do wrong for a crown and otherwise obey the laws (E. Ph. –). Suetonius seems neither to be interested if this justification is acceptable in principle nor if it is historically plausible that it was used by Caesar in . On the contrary, the main reason why he includes this episode and puts certain emphasis on it will have been that Caesar here acts like the perfect man of culture who knows his literature and can use it for a quick-witted response if he needs to (for Demosthenes justifying himself after Chaironeia by quoting a line of Menander, see Gell. ..). Furthermore, the ability to act as a model in this regard is by no means limited to the bearer of the purple themselves, but can be displayed also by non-imperial protagonists (often even in conflict with the monarchs, see e.g. Gram. .). Many of the illustrious men, of course, must have been no less qualified for ready wit and humour, especially the rhetors and philosophers. But even in the remaining rubrics some rudiments can be made out (for Lucan effectively citing a line of Nero at the latrine, see the detailed discussion by Cowan ).
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In the light of these interests, the description of an emperor’s death with the rendering of his ultima verba proves to be particularly suitable for memorization and re-utilization in the social context of contemporary Rome. Hence the special care devoted by Suetonius to these parts of his work cannot be explained by pointing only to the rich tradition of death narratives in the first century (though the so-called exitus literature of course plays an important role: see most recently Power a: – with further references), but also by his intention to provide useful exempla to his readers. At the same time, the death scenes nicely illustrate that Suetonian models are not primarily designed for direct re-enactment in the way exempla are supposed to work in classical historiography or (to a certain degree) in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (for a more refined approach to exemplarity in the Caesars, see Gunderson ; Langlands ). More important than being the emperor oneself, so to speak, is to know about his living and dying and to be able to talk about it convincingly at all events. One situation that was very demanding in terms of learning and its successful performance surely must have been the symposium. Unsurprisingly, several works written in the second century promise to render assistance to their readers. Although Suetonius (unlike Plutarch) does not mention this intended purpose explicitly, both his Illustrious Men and his Caesars are highly suitable for a reader who wants to be prepared, for instance, for the next symposium and for the conversation that would expect an answer on a given topic from each guest in turn, as was typical at this social event. It is also against this backdrop that Suetonius’ criteria for historical reliability have to be seen. Given the fact that Tacitus shortly before had published his detailed and very thorough account of essentially the same period in the traditional form of historiography, Suetonius is perhaps particularly free to set his priorities in a different way and to give more weight to the impact of the past on the present as well as to the more imminent interests of his audience. This leads inescapably to the question of whether it is possible to say anything about the contemporary readers that Suetonius might have had in mind when he wrote his biographies. Although it is—as always in Antiquity—almost impossible to pin down actual readers, this aspect has raised some intense discussion. Broadly speaking, we have the assumption that Suetonius writes specifically for a non-senatorial audience, on the one side (reaching from the ‘man in the street’ to the ‘piccolo equestre’ brought into play by della Corte ) and the position that the elite should not be excluded, on the other side (see Wallace-Hadrill : –). In the light of the observations above, I tend to believe in the largest possible target audience. The way his texts were used by individual readers, however, might have differed quite a lot. From quickly checking some facta or dicta to an exhaustive reading in toto, everything should be taken into account. In any case, there is no need to assume that he is addressing an audience completely different from that of Tacitus (to a certain degree, he can be seen more as a complement to the great historian than a rival). Having said this, it is easy to imagine that those will have profited most from reading his Lives who had to fulfil the expectations in regard to literature and learning without being born into the higher echelons of Roman society. These homines novi surely will have noticed that a recurrent topic in his chapters On Grammarians and Rhetoricians is social advancement through knowledge (e.g. Gibson : –)—and that this holds true for the author himself no less.
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.................................................................................................................................. In this final section, I shall briefly discuss the relation between Suetonius’ biographic writings outlined in the sections above with his oeuvre as a whole with regard to content and intention, as well as to the relative time of their composition. According to what could be labelled as an ‘evolutionary’ model, it is often assumed that our author proceeded from smaller to larger works during his productive period and thus started with short antiquarian essays about rather trivial topics before going on to small scale biographies in the Illustrious Men, to arrive finally at the proper-sized Caesars for the really important people. Even if this perception shows an internal plausibility to a certain degree (Wallace-Hadrill : –), it must be borne in mind that we have almost no fixed dates and thus nothing should be taken for granted. In a letter that can be dated to /, Pliny the Younger encourages Suetonius no longer to withhold a publication and finally to come out with it (Ep. .). Yet no title nor any hint to its content are given (the communis opinio identifies it as the Illustrious Men; Power ; but his Games and Spectacles has also been suggested: Wallace-Hadrill : –). From later authors, we know that the Caesars (or at least the first part of it with the now lost preface) had been dedicated to C. Septicius Clarus, who was appointed praetorian prefect by Hadrian (cf. Lyd. Mag. .), but seems to have lost this office due to a court affair already in . Suetonius is said to have been dismissed as ab epistulis due to the same incident, but the whole episode is told by the notorious so-called Historia Augusta alone (SHA, Hadr. .) and thus should not be given too much credit. Nevertheless, has been taken as a key date to explain a curious feature of the Caesars, namely, their diminishing size (which poses a problem especially in light of the ‘evolutionary’ model). The theory that Suetonius because of his dismissal lost access to the imperial archives or his interest in Roman emperors or both (see especially Townend ), however, has not met with universal approval. The same applies to the idea that the order of composition of the two ‘hexades’ could have been reversed (see Pausch : – with further references). All we can say, therefore, with some certainty is that we have / as a terminus post quem when Suetonius was thinking about publishing (his first?) work and that the Caesars (or a part of it) may have appeared before . This state of affairs is, of course, rather disappointing whenever precise dates are needed. It opens up the chance, however, to highlight the shared characteristics of his writings even more if they are not seen as closed steps leading inevitably to the Caesars as the designated goal, but as parts of an organic whole on which Suetonius might have worked in any given order or simultaneously as well. A life’s work consisting both of biographic and antiquarian writings without any evident teleological hierarchy is, one should add, provided by his contemporary Plutarch. This does not necessarily entail, however, that all of Suetonius’ books must have been conceptualized as sections of a systematic and encyclopaedic ‘overoeuvre’, as has been suggested by analogy with Isidore of Seville (c. ) who is then
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supposed not only to have used many of the data but also to have copied the structure of Suetonius’ whole body of work for his own Etymologiae (Reifferscheid ; P.L. Schmidt ). If Suetonius’ work with the title Pratum or Prata (cf. Gell. Praef. ) indeed had a comprehensive character in this vein (and was not just one book among others), it might have been also something like his ‘collected works’ as a second edition at a later stage of his life or even posthumously. Although the precise shape of his oeuvre will most likely remain beyond not only the limits of our knowledge, but also of our reconstructive imagination, it is important to think of his individual writings as being also part of some kind of a larger relation at the same time. Even if this assumption neither implies the idea of an ‘over-oeuvre’ nor necessarily of an ‘evolutionary’ sequence, it helps us to see Suetonius as the varied writer he was.
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.................................................................................................................................. The usual approach of studying the surviving parts of Suetonius’ oeuvre separately from one another and instead of comparing them to the works of their predecessors within the respective generic tradition has often led to severe criticism (especially if his Caesars had been put in relation to Plutarch’s Parallel Lives). Many of the typical features of his biographies—such as their stylistic simplicity or thematic idiosyncrasy (though both are often exaggerated)—can be explained, however, and thus perhaps even seen in a more favourable light, if his writings are studied in close connection with each other. Viewed in this light, it is not at all surprising that he continues his antiquarian approach with regard to both style and content. At the same moment, he was fully aware of the tradition of biographical writing and thus adopted the qualities that seemed suitable to him in the Caesars as well as in the Illustrious Men. In the same way as the consideration of the relation of his writings among themselves, it proves to be very fruitful to take into account the broader context of the time and the society in which the author lived. This holds true, of course, for any literary text. But it is of particular importance in his case, as it can be shown that Suetonius was aware of the interests of his contemporary readers to a high degree and wrote with an eye to their needs and wishes. The utilitas and the readability that he aimed at have left their marks on the content as well as the style and structure of all the Lives he wrote, in the large-scale Caesars no less than in the, at times, rather brief Illustrious Men. All these differences notwithstanding, a more extensive analysis of the many shared characteristics of his various types of life-writing than could be attempted in the limited space of this chapter will, therefore, be a promising undertaking and perhaps another important step towards a fairer appraisal of Suetonius’ achievements as writer and biographer.
F R Suetonius still belongs to the number of relatively under studied authors. What is more, he makes for an entertaining read. Thus, starting with his own texts is a good idea: for the Caesars, the Teubner edition by Ihm (; reprinted several times) is now replaced by Kaster () but still provides the
basis for most publications, among others the up to date translation with notes by Hurley (). Beyond that, commentaries to all individual Lives are available. The text of the Grammarians and Rhetoricians along with translation and commentary is presented by Kaster (; ). The situation for the remainder of the Illustrious Men, though, was more complicated for a long time: they are part of the collection of Suetonius’ antiquarian writings by Reifferscheid () but the Poets have also been published by Rostagni () and Paratore () in a kind of editorial agōn. Markus Stachon (), however, is currently preparing a new edition with translation and commentary. A comprehensive overview of recent approaches is provided by the contributions in Poignault () and Power and Gibson () (though the collocation in ANRW II . from remains valuable). On the life of the author, Baldwin () and Wallace Hadrill () continue to be essential. For a fairer appreciation of his literary skill, several studies are important: see, for example, Steidle (), Mouchová (), Gugel (), Gascou () Lounsbury (), and Ramondetti ().
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I spite of its modern title, the Alexander Romance can hardly be classified as a romance; it is rather a fictionalized biography, combining echoes of historical events and invented episodes to create a rather imaginative story of Alexander the Great’s life. As a matter of fact, the development of Alexander’s individual existence forms the narrative backbone of the work, which has a biographical structure including birth, youth, achievements, and death. It even narrates the details of Alexander’s conception and also gives a description of his funeral. In the single Greek manuscript of the so-called alpha recension, which is the earliest version of the Alexander Romance, a work constantly rewritten and adapted throughout the Middle Ages,1 the biographical element is indeed foregrounded in the title, which presents the work as a Life of Alexander (Bios Alexandrou). To be sure, such an indication, interesting though it may seem, must not be overestimated (Hägg a: –), for it could be due to the copyist of the Parisinus gr. (manuscript A, dated eleventh century) and was perhaps not part of the original text. Anyway, it does not feature in the Latin translation of the alpha recension, whose author, Julius Valerius, has called it Res gestae Alexandri Macedonis, and it appears only in the subtitle of the Armenian version, presented as a History of the Great World Conqueror, Alexander of Macedon. A Life of Bravery and Heroic Deeds and also a Death Marqued with Marvels. Unfortunately, nothing in the Greek version indicates how the author viewed his own work, for it is devoid of any kind of metadiscourse, and does not even possess a preface serving to introduce Alexander’s story. The alpha recension opens with a praise of the Egyptian sages, given as the authoritative source of the first part of the narrative, the socalled ‘Nectanebo novella’: it tells the story of Alexander’s conception, and presents him as 1
We have three witnesses of the alpha recension, a Greek text and two translations, a Latin and an Armenian one, composed in the fourth and fifth centuries . On the textual history of the Romance, see Merkelbach () and Stoneman (: ); on its successive rewritings, see Jouanno (: on the bēta recension, on the epsilon recension). The Greek text will be quoted from Stoneman and Gargiulo’s ( ) edition for books and , and from Kroll’s () edition for book ; English translation by Haight (), sometimes slighty modified. For the Latin translation by Julius Valerius, see Callu (), and for the Armenian version, Wolohojian ().
the illegimate son of the last Egyptian pharaoh who, after the Persians invaded Egypt, sought refuge in Macedonia and made use of his magical powers to seduce Queen Olympias. To be sure, the Egyptians’ praise in the very first lines of the work can be viewed as a pretence to veracity—but a pretence applying only to the Nectanebo novella: the author would thus try to establish his alternative version of Alexander’s genealogy as the true story of the celebrated conqueror. The same seems to happen in an intriguing detail of Alexander’s birth narrative, where Philip (turned into Alexander’s putative father) is said to have called his newborn son ‘Alexander’ in remembrance of a previously dead child (..)—as if the Egyptian, bastard hero of the Romance were a substitute for the legitimate, Greek Alexander of the historical tradition. In the first Greek rewriting of the Alexander Romance, the β recension (probably fifth century), the oblique claim of the A text becomes explicit in a preface where Alexander’s Greek fatherly lineage is conspicuously presented as a misapprehension that the author aims to correct. One of the main reasons that prevent us from extending the significance of the opening gesture of the A text towards reliability to the whole work lies in the fact that the Alexander Romance is a composite text, a sort of ‘patchwork’, made of heterogeneous elements: its anonymous author has reused pre-existent material, some of which goes back to the very beginning of the Ptolemaic period and must have been circulating independently quite a long time before becoming part of the Romance, at a date difficult to specify with any certainty.2 The emergence of the Alexander Romance as a fully-constituted text may have occurred at the end of the Hellenistic period or, more probably, during Imperial times: there is currently a strong tendency to date this text, previously considered as a late antique production, back to the first centuries of the Roman Empire.3
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.................................................................................................................................. The heterogeneous character of the Alexander Romance, a striking example of ‘popular biography’ (see Chapter in this volume), is particularly obvious in the alpha recension, which will be the main focus of the present chapter. In this version, the idiosyncrasies of the various components which have been sewn together remain clearly discernible, so that the whole work possesses a rather unequal texture—a peculiarity much softened in the subsequent rewritings, especially in the β and ε recensions (respectively composed in the th and th–th centuries), whose authors have done their best to make Alexander’s story more uniform by cutting, compressing, or rewriting the different pieces of the ‘patchwork’.
Although the term ‘author’ may seem questionable for such a composite work, and one could be tempted to speak rather of a ‘redactor’ or ‘compiler’, I eventually decided to use it, insofar as any compilation results in a new work (see also Kimmel Clauzet : on the Contest of Homer and Hesiod). 3 See Stoneman’s review of the various chronological arguments, in Stoneman and Gargiulo ( ; : XXV XXXIV). Callu () considers the reign of Alexander Severus, notoriously ϕιλαλεξανδρότατος (‘very fond of Alexander’), as an attractive time for the composition of the Romance, but in the introduction to his translation of Julius Valerius he finds there are eventually more clues pointing to the end of the first century or the very beginning the first century (Callu : ). 2
These pieces were, indeed, of variegated origin and belonged to rather different literary genres, none of them biographical: we find in the alpha recension traces of folktales (e.g. the Nectanebo novella); excerpts from an epistolary novel involving Alexander, Darius, and the Indian king Porus (., ., ., ., ., ., .); lengthy pieces of presumably rhetorical exercises, inserted into the episodes of the siege of Thebes (.) and Alexander’s negotiations with the Athenian people (.–); two travelogues in epistolary form (. and .–), the first of which, addressed by Alexander to Aristotle, was circulating soon after his death and conveys ‘typical fabula material’ (Hägg b: ); pieces of a Cynic diatribe evoking Alexander’s encounter with the Gymnosophists (.–), to which has been added (only in the A text) the unabridged text of Palladius’ treatise On the Brahmans and the Indian Peoples (.–). As for the final part of the Romance (.–), the author has used a political pamphlet of Hellenistic origin on Alexander’s last days and will (the Liber de morte testamentoque), which had probably been produced on the behalf of Ptolemy to promote his regal ambitions (see Bosworth ). The author has used all these texts not, as the author of a historical work could have done, as sources for biographical information about Alexander, but as building materials. The result of such a compositional method is, as mentioned above, great unevenness in the texture of the narrative: one is struck by many stylistic irregularities and by strong variations in narrative tempo (with a striking example of narrative time slowing down in the rhetorical pieces devoted to the Theban and Athenian episodes and in Alexander’s will). The two epistolary travelogues in . and .– not only mark a break with the otherwise linear, chronological arrangement of the Romance, insofar as they offer retrospective accounts of past events, but they also offer a treatment of temporality at odds with the practice used in the remaining narrative. Whereas chronological indications are sparse and vague everywhere else in the Romance, we find in the two travelogues quite a lot of precise figures: Alexander specifies he stayed eight days on the Prasians’ promontory (..), travelled again for twelve days (..), or broke camp ‘in the third day of Zeus’ month’ (..; see also .. and ..), while in the remaining work there are many more imprecise connecting formulas, such as ‘after some time’ or ‘after a few days’ (e.g. .., .., ..). The narrative inconsistencies resulting from the juxtaposition of heterogeneous material lend Alexander’s portrayal a kind of instability, one can note, for instance, in the fluctuating discourse to be found, throughout the Romance, about his genealogy. In the Nectanebo novella, a nationalistic Egyptian production meant to appropriate the Macedonian conqueror and thus negate the foreign rule over Egypt, Alexander is undeniably presented as the pharaoh’s adulterous son, and he is explicitly destined to replace his dethroned father, and expel the Persian invaders from Egypt. But this Egyptian version of Alexander’s origin is not maintained till the end of the work, and other passages depict him in a more traditional way as Philip’s legitimate heir (see ..), or even give the impression that, far from being born from an impostor masquerading as the god Ammon, he really has divine ancestry (see Ammon’s dreamlike apparition to Alexander in .). In the Alexander Romance, life-writing is closely connected with encomium in a way which goes back to the earliest stages of the biographical genre (see Chapter in this volume on Isocrates) and appears as one of its most constant trends (see Chapter on Tacitus and Pliny). The author of the Alexander Romance selected his material in order to
give an idealized image of Alexander’s life, and the most embarrassing episodes of the Macedonian king’s historical biography (notably, his assassination of Parmenion and Callisthenes, as well as Clitus’ murder) have been duly eliminated. The protagonist of the Romance is a moralized Alexander, devoid of any tendency to drunkenness; neither does he indulge in homosexual affairs or extra-marital sex: he has been transformed into a monogamous hero, endowed with one wife only, Roxane, presented as Darius’ daughter, and there is no question of any love story with the Amazons or other exotic seductresses. Nevertheless, one can notice in the generally positive picture of Alexander small details that echo a darker version of his life and seem at odds with the dominant tone of the narrative. Whereas the Romance usually insists on his piety (e.g. his statement to the Persian women, whose ‘godlike honours’ he refuses, for ‘it brings danger to one’s soul’, ..), in his first proclamation to the Persian people, he takes various measures to organize a divine cult for himself (..–); then, in the final chapters of the Romance, he repeatedly expresses pretensions to divinity at odds with his usual restraint: he prays to be deified like Dionysus and Heracles (..–), and tries to throw himself into the Euphrates in order to make people think he has been transformed into a god (..–). Though he is portrayed most of the time as a highly self-controlled hero, already able, while still a child, to ‘dominate his emotions’ (ἐγκρατεύεσθαι, ..), he no longer appears as a mild and generous king in other passages, for instance in the Theban episode, where he reacts with dreadful violence, ‘gnashing his teeth and filled with wrath (ὀργὴν ἀναπνέων)’ (..), or in the chapters relating to his last days, where he is pictured as dangerous for his entourage (cf. ..: he beats his friend Medius on the head to punish him for a mistake) and is hated and feared by some of his companions, ‘struck by the arrogance of his mind (τὸ τῆς ψυχῆς ὑπέρογκον αὐτοῦ, ..)’. Even within the encomiastic sections of the Romance, praise is not fully consistent. Insofar as it offers an encomium of a king, Alexander’s biography has a certain degree of affinity with a basilikos logos, and pictures a hero endowed with some of the qualities expected from a stateman: courage, justice, magnanimity, or concern for the common good. Thus we can find a couple of episodes where Alexander behaves as an exemplary king, both eager to wage war against the barbarian oppressors of the Greeks (.., ..), and much preoccupied with establishing a firm and beneficial rule over the people he has conquered, as shown by his decree to his new Persian subjects (.), or by the gnōmē he has chosen as his political creed (according to Demosthenes): ‘I shall win everyone by benefitting my friends and making my enemies friends’ (..). The author of the Romance insistently portrays Alexander as Darius’ legitimate successor, even showing the Persian king on the point of death blessing his former enemy and giving him his daughter in marriage (.). Alexander’s celebration as a kosmokratōr is another political motif that takes pride of place in this text.4 However, the presence of such political overtones scattered throughout the narrative is not enough to make the Alexander Romance a basilikos logos: it is primarily the entertaining story of a folktale hero, and the atypical figure of the trickster coexists in one and the same text with the more canonical image of the ideal king.
4 See, for instance, .., .., .., and ... Konstan (: ) perhaps plays down the political element when he defines the Romance not as a story of warfare but as an ‘ego fantasy’, where Alexander is pictured not as a king but as an individual.
Alexander’s irregular birth and spectacular cunning (to which we will return below) are elements that clearly point to the imaginative world of popular tales (see Chapter in this volume), as well as the imprecise chronological setting and the geographical inconsistencies so striking in most parts of the narrative, where dates are few (.., .., .., .., .), anachronisms frequent, and topographical data extremely fanciful. All this attests the prevalence of fictional considerations upon historical ones, and the low value attached by the author of the Romance to factual accuracy.
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.................................................................................................................................. According to Plutarch, who developed the most thorough theoretical considerations on biographical writing, the first aim of biography (and its main departure from history) consists in investigating the hero’s ēthos (see Chapter in this volume). And, Plutarch states in the prologue to his Life of Alexander (, –), the biographer, in order to disclose most clearly the moral characteristics of his protagonist, has to focus on sayings and small facts, able to reveal ‘the signs of the soul’ (τὰ τῆϛ ψυχῆϛ σημεῖα) even better than reports of battles and other brave deeds. Has the author of the Romance preoccupied himself with constructing an image of his protagonist’s ēthos when combining the variegated material of which his composite work is made? Are the literary tools he employed to portray his fictionalized Alexander comparable to those usually operating in biographical texts? Is his ‘representional strategy’ akin to that elaborated by Plutarch in his Life of Alexander? We find in the Romance a short physical description of Alexander, inserted into the narrative as a kind of prologue to the section devoted to his childhood (..). It is indeed a strange portrait, meant to underline the fact that Alexander does not look like Philip and Olympias, with his lion’s mane, his eyes of different colours (‘one white, one black’), and his teeth as sharp as nails. Whereas his portrait, in Plutarch’s biography (.–), contributes significantly to his ethical characterization (Wardman : ), the sole element susceptible of a moral interpretation in the description of the Romance is his comparison with a lion, repeated when the author affirms he had ‘the energy of a wild lion’ (τὸ ὅρμημα λέοντος ἀγρίου), so that ‘it seemed evident how his nature would turn out’ (πρόδηλον εἶχε τὴν ϕύσιν ὁποῖος ἀποβήσεται). The main point, it seems, is the emphasis put upon Alexander’s singularity and his being far from the norms of ideal beauty. Nowhere in the Romance can we find any developed description of Alexander’s psychological characteristics. As a matter of fact, moral comments are extremely rare throughout the whole work: the longest one, introduced into the story of his education, does not exceed three lines and is intended to underline his intelligence, combativity and the ambivalent feelings he triggers in his putative father Philip: Now Alexander was loved by all for his resourcefulness and warlike qualities (ὡς ϕρενήρης καὶ πολεμιστής), but Philip was in two minds (ἐν ἀμϕιβολίᾳ) about him: for he rejoiced on seeing him such a warrior (τοιοῦτον ἀρειμάνιον), but he grieved on looking at him, in finding no resemblance to himself (μὴ ὅμοιον αὐτὸν ὁρῶν τοῦ ἰδίου χαρακτῆρος). (..)
In addition, we also read about Alexander’s ‘greatness of spirit’ (τὸ τῆς ψυχῆς ἔνθυμον, ..), andreia (..), intelligence (.., .., .., .., .., .., .., ..) and the fact that he is ‘exceedingly daring and reckless’ (τολμηρότερος καὶ παραβολώτερος, ..). We are also alerted to Alexander’s ‘generosity’ (μεγαλοϕροσύνη, ..) and, in the Armenian translation (the Greek text is lacunary), sōphrosynē after his victory over Darius (.). But axiological remarks of this kind play only a small part in the construction of Alexander’s image: the author of the Romance has indeed a marked predilection for indirect characterization. He prefers to portray his hero in action rather than resort to psychological descriptions and reify his virtues. He thus lends an important place to anecdotes (which are, indeed, one of the most usual tools of the biographer: see, for example, Chapter and Chapter in this volume), so that variegated images of Alexander emerge from the narrative, without being formalized by authorial discourse. Alexander’s commitment to courage, justice, and loyalty is underlined in the two mirror anecdotes evoking his opposite reactions towards a satrap, devoted to Darius, on the one hand, and a Persian traitor, on the other: he displays his admiration for the former, who dared to disguise himself as a Macedonian in order to cut off his head (..–), but harshly criticizes the latter, who wanted to betray his king (..–). A similar picture can be drawn from the episode where Alexander chastizes Darius’ murderers (..–). The Macedonian army’s willingness to obey his orders illustrates his capacity for leadership (e.g. ..), as well as the persuasiveness of the speeches that he addresses to his troops (e.g. ..). Several episodes in the Romance also picture a hero characterized by humanity and even sensitivity, and one who feels pity when seeing the remains of Bucephalus’ victims (..), is profoundly distressed by the fate of mutilated Greek prisoners (..), weeps in front of the dying Darius (..–), and seems deeply moved by the death of his friend Phidon (..). He is repeatedly presented as a friendly character, much attached to and confident in his companions, as appears most clearly in the famous episode of Philip the doctor (..–). Another strand of his character recurs quite often in the third and last book of the Romance, which is mainly devoted to his travels at the edges of the world:5 his curiosity, especially apparent in the episodes dealing with Queen Candace (..) and the Amazons (..), or Heracles’ steles, which he does not hesitate to perforate in order to find out whether or not they are made of solid gold (..). Another striking peculiarity of the Romance, with important consequences for the characterization of its protagonist, is the rather limited space devoted to narrative proper: it is a heavily mimetic work, offering a dramatized version of Alexander’s adventures, with a lot of space given to dialogues (e.g. the episode of the Persian embassy in ., or the story of Philip the doctor in .), speeches, and letters. The author uses all of these as literary tools to present us with different points of view about Alexander, and thus to illustrate various facets of his protagonist. Some of these voices agree with his own, as, for instance, Oxyathres’ and the Persian envoy’s praise (..–) of his leadership and ‘nobility’ (γενναιότης), both embodied by a ‘lion’s appearance’ (μορϕὴ λέοντος). Darius’ mother emphasizes his generosity towards his Persian prisoners (..), the Amazons allude to
For a discussion on travel as another way of delineating character ‘by exploring the relations between the traveller and the people he encounters in his journeys’, see Mossman (: ). 5
his bravery (..), and an anonymous Macedonian soldier compliments him as a good king whose reign was beneficial to Macedonia (..). The Persian women (..), Candaules (.., ..), and his mother Candace (.., ..) all marvel at his intelligence: Candace (..) even uses the same word, ϕρενήρης (‘resourceful’), as the narrator (.., .., etc.). But dissonant voices too can be heard in the Romance: not only Darius’ voice, who repeatedly denounces Alexander’s audacity, madness, and presumption (.., .., .., .., ..), but even Macedonian voices, for instance that of Alexander’s soldiers, tired of campaigning endlessly and complaining about their king’s ‘great ambition’ (μεγαλοϕροσύνη, ..). In a long, rhetorical episode narrating an Athenian debate, we can hear three leading Greek orators expressing opposing views on Alexander: a ‘civilized’ man (παιδευόμενος) educated by Aristotle according to Aeschines (..); a ‘bold tyrant who is a mere lad’ (μειράκιον τύραννον αὐθάδη), ‘crazy’ (ἀγνώμονι) and ‘audacious’ (τολμηρῷ) according to Demades (.., .., ..); and a ‘resourceful youth’ (ϕρενήρης παῖς) according to Demosthenes, whose words echo the narrator’s (..). Alexander’s own voice is heard through a number of speeches and letters he addresses to various friends or enemies.6 We could expect to find in such passages precious pieces of ‘ego speech’, offering a valuable contribution to the construction of the protagonist’s identity.7 But, in spite of their considerable volume (Alexander’s correspondence with Darius takes the lion’s share in the chapters devoted to the Graeco-Persian war), speeches and letters do not really help to fix the portrait of the hero of the Romance, for the values foregrounded in them appear variable according to the circumstances (as noted by Konstan : ). Alexander’s personality is depicted by contrast to his various interlocutors, and consequently shows notable fluctuations. His epistolary exchanges with Darius and Porus are dominated by a Herodotean Greek-barbarian polarity: portrayed as the antithesis of the two oriental kings, whose language is marked by hybris and alazoneia, Alexander speaks as a representative of Greek freedom, self-restraint, and piety—a contrasting technique well put to the fore in his declaration to the Persian envoys, whom he refuses to execute for the sole purpose of showing ‘the difference between a Greek king and a barbarian tyrant’ (..).8 As for the sort of creed he pronounces in ..–, to advertise the benefits of activism, it is a response to the Gymnosophists, meant to defend his own way of life against the criticisms of the Indian ascetics: These matters are managed by Providence above (ἐκ τῆς ἄνωθεν προνοίας) so that we may be servants of the gods’ rule, for the sea is not moved unless the wind blows, trees do not oscillate unless they are stirred by the breeze, and man is not set in motion except by Providence
Speeches to Macedonian veterans (.. ), Egyptians (.. ), his soldiers (.. , .. , .. , .., .. , .. ), Thebans (.. ), and Persians (.., .. ). Letters to Tyrians (..), Darius (.. , .. ), Athenians (.. , .. , .. ), Spartans (.. ), his satraps (.. ), Persian women (.. , .., .. ), Porus (.. ), Aristotle (.), Candace (.. ), the Amazons (.. , .. ), and Olympias (. ). 7 On the potential of letters as a fictional narrative form, through which ‘identities are negotiated and renegotiated, made and remade’, see Whitmarsh (: ). 8 Xenophon, in his praise of Agesilaus, had already exploited the same contrast between the two types (on that text, see Chapter in this volume). 6
above. I too wish to cease from war, but the master of my mind (ὁ τῆς γνώμης μου δεσπότης) does not let me. For if we all were of one mind, the world would be inactive, sea not be sailed, earth not be cultivated, marriages not consumated, children not produced. How many in the wars instigated by me had the misfortune of losing their possessions! But how many others made fortunes from the possessions of others? For we all seize the possessions of all men, and let them to others, and nothing belongs permanently to any man (οὐδενὶ οὐδὲν ὑπάρχει).
Such a speech has in fact little to do with introspection: it is a rhetorical reply to an accusation. Even in Alexander’s letters to Aristotle (.) and Olympias (.–) about his travels at the edges of the earth, which are the two most extensive passages written in the first person in the Romance, self-presentation turns out to be as secondary as in the rest of the work.9 In these chapters where Alexander is confronted with various supernatural beings and monsters, the emphasis is on the spectacle offered, not on his own feelings and reactions. A Herodotean fascination for the marvels of the edges of the earth clearly predominates over psychological matters. A clear sign of the lack of interest of the author for the exploration of the mind lies in his complete avoidance of interior monologues—a process which would have allowed him to depict his hero’s psyche from inside. We never see Alexander speaking to himself; there is no place for the ‘self in dialogue’ anywhere in the Romance:10 what predominates in this text is an objective image of the person, or rather a collection of variegated objective images, conveyed through exterior manifestations (acts, words, or gestures), observed from outside. The portrait of Alexander resulting from such a representational technique has a kaleidoscopic quality, not very surprising in a text which is itself a ‘patchwork’. It may give an impression of inconsistency, or dispersion, in sharp contrast with the strong coherence that Plutarch gives to his portrait of Alexander, structured by the leading idea of philotimia and that of internal conflict between two antithetical forces, logos (reason) and thymos (passion). The result in Plutarch is a dynamic biography, bringing to the fore an evolution in Alexander’s character11 and a progressive deterioration of his ēthos. To explain his hero’s evolution, Plutarch emphasizes the various influences exerted upon him (such as the beneficial effect of Aristotle’s teaching and the pernicious one of flatterers). There is nothing of the kind in the Romance, whose hero does not show any sign of psychological evolution: for all the plasticity of his reactions to external circumstances, his character is not modified by the good or bad influence of other people. The chapters devoted to his education are revealing in this respect, for none of Alexander’s masters is able to teach him anything: on the contrary, it is Alexander himself who teaches his own masters (Nectanebo in ..; Aristotle in .), so that the puer senex motif prevails in his description as a child. Only a few snippets of self analysis can be found in the Romance: see, for instance, .., where Alexander evokes his principles of ‘reverence for all’ (τῆς περὶ πάντας εὐσεβείας) in a letter to Darius, or his mention of his ‘wise strategy’ for battle (σοϕὸν βούλημα) in a speech to his troops (..). 10 Expression borrowed from Gill (: , ), who underlines the limited exploration of ‘personality’ in Antiquity. 11 See the numerous passages contrasting what Alexander was ‘at the beginning’ and what he became ‘afterwards’ (e.g. Alex. ., . ). 9
T S O H
.................................................................................................................................. In an important article called ‘L’illusion biographique’, Bourdieu () points to the fact that whoever embarks on writing a biography postulates that the life which one will narrate is significant: therefore, any biographer is anxious to make logic, consistency, and constancy emerge from the existence that he wants to transform into a meaningful story. One might wonder whether the Romance, with its kaleidoscopic hero, fulfils this request of ‘biographic illusion’. A first element that importantly contributes to convert this collection of heterogeneous material into the account of a meaningful destiny is the introduction of a long series of signs, prophetic dreams, or divine utterances meant to announce the main events of the hero’s life, his successes, and his premature death (on these signs, see Muckensturm-Poulle ). Although Alexander’s birth does not happen before the twelfth chapter of the Romance and his name does not even feature in the Nectanebo novella (Hägg a: –), various presages and prophetic announcements ensure his presence in the narrative, even before he is brought into the world. A first veiled allusion appears in .., as part of the oracle uttered by Hephaestus to the Egyptians after their pharaoh has vanished: the god prophesies the coming of Alexander as a new Nectanebo, destined to free Egypt from the Persian rule (which happens in .). Then Alexander’s birth is announced to Olympias (by Nectanebo in .., by Ammon in .), and he is twice portrayed as his mother’s avenger (which he becomes in fact in .). A few pages later Nectanebo addresses the still unborn child in the words ‘unconquered, indomitable seed’ (..), thus introducing the kosmokratōr motif. Moreover, Ammon appears to Philip in a dream (..) and, after foretelling him the birth of his son, predicts Alexander’s conquests and compares him to a lion (an image reused in .. and ..). The presage of the egg and the serpent (..), besides restating the prophecy about Alexander’s conquests, introduces the theme of his premature death. And, finally, in a prediction uttered by Nectanebo immediately before his birth, he is presented as an Egyptian, as in Hephaestus’ oracle, as well as a kosmokratōr (..). The main lines of Alexander’s story are thus foretold in the very first chapters of the Romance. Many other prophetic signs, scattered throughout the remaining narrative, map out the development of Alexander’s existence: the Delphian oracle (.) announces his taming of Bucephalus (.); Zeus’ priest interprets his victory at the Olympic Games as presaging his future victories over a multitude of enemies (..); the priestesses of Athena (.) and Korē (..–) prophesy a glorious destiny for him; a dream foreshadows his victory over the Tyrians (..–). His premature death, already alluded to in .., is predicted again by the speaking trees (..–) and confirmed by the birth of a monstruous child (.), while an epiphany of Sarapis in the gods’ caves announces in a rather enigmatic way Alexander’s posthumous fame and sepulture in Alexandria (..). The effect produced by these numerous signs is reinforced by a series of doublets that contribute to the thematic coherence of Alexander’s biography. Nicolaus, defeated by Alexander at the Olympic Games (.), appears because of his presumptuousness as a prefiguration of the two braggart barbarian kings Darius and Porus, who are themselves twin characters, as shown by their very similar letters (as underlined by Alexander himself in ..). Likewise, Alexander’s incognito visit to Candace (.–) duplicates his former
visit to Darius (.–), insofar as both episodes are exploiting the same motif of disguised identity. In playing this way with the principle of seriality, the author gives the impression that there is little room for pure chance in his hero’s life, placed under the divine guidance of Pronoia12—a point Alexander himself underlines in the ‘creed’ he addresses to the Gymnosophists (..–). Emphasis is placed in the Romance on Alexander’s exceptional nature, clearly suggested by the cosmic signs accompanying his birth (..) and death (..–), and by the singularity of his physical appearance (..). As argued by C.M. Thomas (: ), the author of the Romance is less concerned about revealing the ēthos of his main character than presenting ‘a veritable “greatest hits parade” of the hero’s outstanding deeds’. He makes this idea all the more striking by contrasting Alexander’s small stature with his invincibility (see .., where the Persians ‘were amazed at the small size of his body, but they did not know that the glory of heavenly Fortune was contained in a small vessel’, or ..–, where the -cubits-high Alexander kills the giant king Porus). Unlike Plutarch’s Alexander, meant to inspire a μιμητικὸς ζῆλος (‘ardour for imitation’) to the readers of his biography,13 the hero of the Romance is not portrayed as an example to imitate but as an object of wonder. Alien to the Plutarchan moralizing and pedagogical approach, the author of this ‘historical fiction’ (Hägg b: ) wants to arouse surprise and fascination, and the admiration expressed by so many of his characters in front of Alexander can be considered as a kind of mirror of his own literary aim (see, for instance, the conclusion to the episode of Philip’s remarriage, where Alexander wins admiration from all the Macedonians for reconciling his parents (..), or the wondering exclamations of Aristotle in .., Philip in .., Candaules in .., or Candace in ..). Only one thing can get the better of such a fascinating and irresistible hero—death itself, Alexander’s sole dreadful enemy. This probably explains why the author of the Romance lingers so much on this particular topic, insisting on Alexander’s obsessive preoccupation with his own death (in the famous episode of Ammon’s oracle in .., the exchange with Sarapis in .., and the fabulous story of the talking trees in ..–), and devoting an extensive development to the circumstances of his agony in the final part of the narrative.14 What most contributes to making the hero of the Romance an outstanding character is his extraordinary wit, which narrator and characters alike repeatedly underline with a great variety of words : ‘prudence’ (ϕρόνησιϛ, .., .., .., ..), ‘inventiveness’ (ἐπίνοια, .., .., ..), ‘wit’ (ϕρένεϛ, .., .., ..), ‘cleverness’ (ἀγχίνοια, .., ..), ‘thoughtfulness’ (συμβουλία, ..), and ‘reason’ (λογισμόϛ, .., ..). Presented as ‘resourceful’ (ϕρενήρηϛ, e.g. .., .., ..) or ‘clever’ (νουνεχήϛ, ..), Alexander appears richly endowed with this particular kind of intellectual dexterity Greeks called
12 For a different use of the same principle of seriality in ancient political biography (as a way to underline characteristic and typical aspects of a certain class of men), see Chapter in this volume. 13 The expression occurs in the introduction of the Life of Pericles (.), where Plutarch insists on the admiration and desire for emulation produced in the reader’s soul by virtuous action, for the Good, he says, implants in the spectator ‘an active impulse’ (πρακτικὴν ὁρμήν). 14 On the significance of death in ancient biographical literature, as a moment emblematic of the subject’s character, see König (: ). On the importance of this topic in the Alexander Romance, see Romm (: ).
mētis, and has therefore a special connection with Hermes, the tricksters’ god.15 Most of the times it is thanks to his cleverness and verbal skill that he gets the better of his adversaries, as early as his first military raid against the city of Mothone during Philip’s lifetime: for he persuades the rebels to submit by a ‘simple speech’ (λόγῳ), and they even accept ‘gladly’ (ἀσμένως) to pay tribute to Macedonia (..). Alexander’s cunning particularly stands out in his epistolary correspondence with Darius: even if the letters exchanged by the Macedonian king and his Persian enemy exploit the Greek vs. barbarian opposition, the ethical confrontation of two antithetical human types often tends to give way to a battle of wit, as noted by Konstan (: ). One can quote as an example the episode of the three gifts, where Alexander astutely manages to present as presages of victory the strap, the ball, and the money box Darius had sent him with an insulting intention (., .). Because the author of the Romance does not want to educate, but to entertain the readers, his hero’s sayings, far from being the vector of any ethical teaching, become part of a playful setting. His penchant for puns and witticism is prominent in the episode concerning the punishment of Darius’ murderers, whom Alexander exposes thanks to a promise based on an amphibology—the double meaning (figurative and literal) of the adjective περιϕανής, ‘conspicuous’ (.., ..). His indulgence for lies and disguises is another part of the same entertaining mise-en-scène and mirrors the author’s predilection for storytelling, as suggested by a comment in the episode of Alexander’s embassy to Darius’ camp (.–): in this fanciful episode, the hero of the Romance is not content with deceiving the Persians by adopting the disguise of a messenger, but he steals the Great King’s golden cups and resorts to lying to justify his theft, falsely maintaining that his own king makes a present of the cups when giving a dinner to foreign guests. The Persians are ‘amazed’ at this deception, which the author explicitly applauds: ‘A fabricated story (πλαστὸϛ μῦθοϛ), if it carries conviction (πίστιν), always has the hearers enthralled’ (..). This authorial intrusion is all the more remarkable as it is the only one in the Romance: it clearly indicates the fictional and playful prospect of a work whose protagonist even professes to be able to transform war into play (a metaphor, as it happens, surfacing elsewhere in the text: ‘The clash of war is child’s play (παίγνιον) for us’, ..). The recurrent motif of Alexander’s smile—presented again and again throughout the Romance (e.g. as an answer to Nicolaus’ insult in .., the Abderitans’ cowardice in .., the Thebans’ provocative attitude in .., and Darius’ boasting in ..) may be seen as a symbol of a work composed under the sign of pleasure and play.
C
.................................................................................................................................. As stated in the introduction to this chapter, the Alexander Romance is a fictionalized biography, and the very fictitiousness of this hybrid text has important consequences concerning its relationship with the biographical genre, for it implies the author’s handling of the usual tools of historical biographies (anecdotes, sayings) as well as tools characteristic
15
Ammon appears to Alexander in the shape of Hermes, and invites him to put on the latter’s outfit to go to Darius’ camp disguised as a messenger (.. ). See Koulakiotis (: ).
of storytelling (plasma), such as dialogues. Moreover the author, playing with generic conventions, makes use of the tools proper to biography in a rather distorting way, by subjecting them to a new aim, so that they serve to construct a work whose protagonist is an ‘actant’ rather than a character, and thus appears of a rather different nature from the hero of a canonical biography.
F R For an overview of the Alexander myth, its formation and transformations throughout the centuries, one can consult Suard (), with special focus on the modern European reception (in the Renaissance and the seventeenth century) and Stoneman (), who is more interested in the oriental developments of the legend. On the mythologizing narratives surrounding Alexander’s birth and genealogy, a significant number of which go back to Alexander’s lifetime, and illustrate the early intermingling of fact and fiction in the elaboration of Alexander’s biography, see Ogden (). On the Alexander Romance as a product of ‘instrumental’ literature, which developed on the margins of the official, highbrow literary production and was characterized by different, more flexible mechanisms of transmission, see Pecere and Stramaglia (), especially the articles by Stramaglia on the didactic use of narrative ( ), Gallo on the ‘biografie di consumo’ ( ), Schepens and Delcroix on ancient paradoxography ( ), and Cribiore on school exercises and popular culture ( ).
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Satirical and Idealizing Lives (Peregrinus, Alexander, Demonax) ......................................................................................................................
T second-century satirist and belletrist Lucian is not primarily associated with biography as a genre, but he has nonetheless left two substantial satirical pamphlets which include many biographical claims about their victims, the religious activists Peregrinus of Parium and Alexander of Abonotichus. He has also produced a collection of satirical quips which he attributes to his own teacher Demonax, as the central section of an appreciation of his master. From these we can at least suggest some characteristics of Lucian let loose on biography. It should be said at the outset that Lucian is a law unto himself as far as biography is concerned. While he can theorize plausibly at some length on the precepts of historiography, he follows no rigid guidelines in the three Lives that he chooses to present through biographical eyes. There is no ‘How to write Biography’ in the same way there is a ‘How to write History’. It is perhaps most helpful to say that the key in each case is Lucian’s own personal involvement with his subject: Peregrinus’ exhibitionism has annoyed him, so that he will dredge up any discreditable information on him that he can. Alexander’s fraudulent cult has annoyed him, so that once more he will summon assorted scandalmongering to his aid. For Demonax, he has only good things to say, but most of it is sandwiched into a collection of the most random reminiscences, in which Demonax instead of Lucian takes on assorted charlatans-in-the-Athenian-street. Among Lucian scholars there has been long-running debate on the balance of literary versus historical across the whole spectrum of Lucian’s own work, and the biographical pieces are part of that debate. There has been a tendency for literary scholars to doubt the historicity of many details,1 and for prosopographers and epigraphers to emphasize the proportion of details that can be confirmed by standard historical and archaeological tools. The biographical pieces in some of their details can be used to support both sides: they often contain elements of invention, sometimes admitted by the mischievous narrator Lucian as he goes along; but at the same time they can support a sense of authenticity in the
1
For example, Bompaire (: ), who sees his author largely in terms of literary mimesis.
background of the Eastern Roman Empire in which Lucian’s villainous enemies can be seen to flourish.
O D P
.................................................................................................................................. In fact, Lucian’s own title On the Death of Peregrinus (Περὶ τῆς Περεγρίνου τελευτῆς) already emphasizes that the piece is more about Peregrinus’ bizarre death, by selfimmolation after the Olympic Games of , than about his life. It purports to be a letter to one Cronius, probably identical with a known Platonist, bringing the latter up to date on Peregrinus’ end. It begins with a speech Lucian claims to have heard delivered by Peregrinus’ collaborator, the Cynic Theagenes, by way of eulogy of the sage himself; this speech is countered at considerable length by an anonymous enemy, clearly intended as a porte-parole of Lucian (‘I do not know what that excellent fellow was called’, ). The bulk of the biographical details of Peregrinus’ life is concentrated in this allegedly anonymous monologue (–). Lucian takes another ten paragraphs to ridicule Peregrinus’ motivations for the coming event, and goes on to describe what little he could hear of how the sage himself explained it. Then follows the suicide itself, and how Lucian in turn embellishes his own eyewitness account of it, to be exaggerated in turn by others (–). That leaves the future prospect of a cult, and two damaging anecdotes about the sage’s conduct in the period leading up to the immolation (–): the sage as a coward in a storm at sea, and preoccupied by irrelevant and trivial ailments irrelevant to his impending suicide. From all this we can note the prominence of Lucian himself in the fabric of the narrative: the focus of his account is his own anonymized denunciation of the sage’s past life, followed by a detailed account of the suicide itself, but including fictional details of an apotheosis, which he openly admits to inventing. The initial scenario of Peregrinus presents what is for Lucian a familiar set-up: he overhears a ranter making a polemical defence of Peregrinus’ intention to immolate himself, and takes him on. There is a comparable beginning to his still more bitter invective, the Pseudologista, where another supposed charlatan is similarly heard and similarly ridiculed, this time in a defence of Pythagoras’ inclusion in the mysteries (Pseudol. –). The actual content of Peregrinus’ Life Lucian claims to have obtained by closely observing the sage’s career from the outset, and in particular from his victim’s own fellow-citizens, the people of Parium on the Hellespont (). This does not guarantee the authenticity of any given charge, such as punishment for adultery and a payoff for paederasty (), but it does draw attention to the charge of patricide levelled at the sage. He is said to have been forced to leave the locality to escape this affair (), only to find it still a live issue after considerable wanderings, so that he is forced on return to buy off his detractors by ceding his property, which he then was unable to reclaim even by petitioning the emperor (–). While it is not proven that Peregrinus actually did murder his father, the local suspicion that he did so seems to have been real enough, and outwith Peregrinus’ own power to control (, –). Further adventures show Peregrinus as a high-profile controversialist and religious and philosophical adventurer. He has a flirtation with an early Christian community in
:
Palestine, a fact which Lucian interprets cynically, as a ploy to exploit the gullible (–). The sage attends a celebrated Cynic, Agathobulus, in Egypt (), before abusing an emperor, most probably Antoninus Pius, in Rome, and acquiring the prestige of an expelled philosopher (). In Greece itself we then find him counselling revolt, before attacking the celebrated Herodes Atticus at one Olympic Games for provision of a water supply at Olympia, only to praise him for the self-same act at the next (–). The narrative culminates in the self-immolation itself (–), explained by Lucian as a stunt when all his other publicity-seeking enterprises have been exhausted. The satirist has little trouble in exposing what he sees as the folly of it all: an imitation of Heracles’ self-immolation does not require a large audience (), while even the Brahmans as possible models can have their own idiots and kenodoxoi (conceited people), though they at least burn themselves with dignity (), in contrast to the sage with his eye on the prospect of a cult (–). The actual event of Peregrinus’ self-immolation is presented from various angles as a dramatic performance. Theagenes is seen as the mere deuteragōnistēs (second-part player) (), a Philoctetes to Peregrinus’ Heracles (), or indeed all mankind is exhorted to play Philoctetes to Peregrinus. Again, the whole business is a tragedy (); and even fire itself is seen as a means of tragedy (), or the immolation is presented as the denouement (). It is perhaps tempting to overplay the significance of Lucian’s metaphor: but it comes readily to him throughout the range of his writings.2 The occasion becomes the spur for Lucian’s considerable talent as a practical joker who delights in exotic lies (): Whenever I saw someone of refinement, I would recount the bare facts, just as I have told you; but to people who were thick headed and open mouthed for something to listen to, I would lay on the drama a little on my own part, that after the pyre was lit and Proteus proceeded to fling himself in, first there was a great earthquake, with a roar from the ground, then a vulture flew up from amid the flames, and departed to heaven, bellowing loudly in a human voice: I have left the earth; I go to Olympus. These men were amazed and shuddered in awe, asking me whether the vulture flew east or west; I gave them whatever answer came into my head.
Already Lucian encounters an old man relating a resurrection appearance of the sage, embellished with the vulture which Lucian himself claimed to have seen (). The vulture instead of the usual eagle for apotheosis reminds one of the incongruous vulture’s wing which the Cynic Menippus uses in his flight to heaven (Icar. ); or the vulture in a parasite’s dream invented by Alciphron (..). A number of adjustments and corrections need to be applied to Lucian’s account. Aside from lost works which point to continuing interest in the sage, the miscellanist Aulus Gellius mentions Peregrinus twice (Attic Nights .; .) in terms that suggest a degree of reverence and indeed a lack of the kenodoxia (conceit) emphasized by Lucian. The sage calls to account a young man of equestrian rank for inattention, and Gellius himself had Cf. Branham (: ). The whole notion of theatricality is a typical feature of literature in the Second Sophistic mode. 2
visited the hut outside Athens where the sage had his quarters, and saw him as ‘virum gravem atque constantem’ (‘a man serious and steadfast’); he also purports to quote from a philosophical discourse on the necessity of probity even when one cannot be found out, a contention further underscored by two lines of Sophocles. The picture is of a venerable figure respected by Gellius, in much the same way as he respects Favorinus or Herodes Atticus, and no stranger to polite literature. This is where problems arise: in the Lives of the Sophists (VS ) Philostratus notes that the sage insulted Herodes in language that was hēmibarbaros (only half-civilized): the latter took exception to the abuse for its lack of style. We should not have guessed this from either Gellius or Lucian, for all their polarized views of the sage: both are especially interested in pedantries of language, and Lucian would have been the first to insult Peregrinus for his lack of grammar if he had had the evidence. Gellius, for his part, could be naively admiring, but his evidence is still first-hand. Peregrinus’ involvement with the Christians is presented in a perhaps surprising way, through the perspective of a potentially hostile outsider. The idea that in no time the sage is elevated to a rank next to Jesus Christ himself is typical of Lucian’s hyperbole, as is the idea that the sage was reverenced as a god in his own right or entitled the New Socrates (). We need not invoke a template drawn from philosophic biography here. It does, however, seem perfectly plausible that he should have turned his hand to Christian apologetic (Jones : –), and that the Christians generously supported him in prison. The idea of Jesus Christ as a crucified sophist () seems a natural enough perspective for a writer as close to the Second Sophistic as Lucian. König (: ) has usefully noted references to crucifixion much later in the text. These need not merely remind us of the sage’s sometime Christianity; they can also be related to crucifixion as a lower-class punishment. The commendation of Peregrinus’ spirit to his parents on the pyre may indeed be Christian in inspiration (König : ), but seems all too clearly contrived to remind us of the alleged patricide that has dogged him from the start (). Jones (: –) suggests that Lucian’s forecast of a cult for Peregrinus is really post eventum prophecy, so that some time has to elapse between the immolation and Lucian’s pamphlet. This is certainly possible, but one might also argue that Lucian was sufficiently familiar with the way cults could expect to spread that he was perfectly capable of secondguessing how any cult of such a figure would have been likely to develop. By , Lucian must already have encountered the mysteries of Alexander at Abonotichus, and assumed that Peregrinus would be similarly enterprising (cf. Peregr. ). One certainly should be tempted to suspect the exchange of oracles of the Sibyll and Bakis between Theagenes and Lucian’s anonymous porte-parole (Peregr. –; cf. Jones : –): the battle of oracles would have reminded an Aristophanic devotee like Lucian of that between the oracles of Bakis and Glanis in the Knights (–). It is difficult to find the measure of Peregrinus on the strength of what survives. Lucian’s hostility and contempt are extreme in any case, and we lack any of Peregrinus’ own writings. He does have the air of a cult figure who ‘shopped around’ in the bazaar of second-century beliefs, and Lucian’s view of his contact with the Christians does give some impression of how the sect might have been viewed in some educated quarters of the pagan world. One notes the great array of connections he makes between Peregrinus and anything to do with fire: the adoption of the name Proteus naturally connects with Homer’s making him change into fire; the Phoenix, his latest name, is the firebird par excellence ();
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Theagenes connects him with Empedocles, Asclepius, and Dionysus (); and even Herostratus’ infamy is invoked (). We can note the contempt Lucian himself has elsewhere for what he sees as the vanity of Empedocles jumping into the crater of Etna (DMort. .), or the spectacle of his emerging as a half-burnt figure in the vicinity of the moon (Icar. ). Much of Lucian’s hostility may be put down to an overall feeling of distaste: this is not the way a pepaideumenos should conduct his career or orchestrate his end. Peregrinus is ironically presented as a Polyclitan canon (), while Theagenes has compared him to Pheidias’ Zeus (), and the metaphor is sustained (). Lucian is indignant at what he sees as publicity-seeking, at a site that might be claimed as the epicentre of Hellenism; but it might just as readily be argued that Peregrinus did not really take full advantage of the limelight at his demise: after all, he actually waited till after the games, and performed his suicide some distance away at Harpina, and after midnight; this stands in contrast to the allegation that he planned to commit suicide at Olympia itself and during the festival. Can we speak of a narrative strategy in Pereginus’ Life? Lucian seems to avoid a great deal of continuous narrative, confining Peregrinus’ dubious career to the speech he attributes to his anonymous self at Olympia, and then contrasting the immolation with his own spurious account of the vulture leaving the pyre, then tailing off with two anecdotes about the sage’s cowardice in the face of trifling inconveniences. There is a sense of ‘not with a bang but a whimper’ after all Theagenes’ and Peregrinus’ boasts about the whole business. If pressed to view the Peregrinus as a biography,3 we should perhaps best describe it as the biography of an event rather than a person: events in Peregrinus’ life are mentioned mainly to explain the planned and orchestrated suicide.
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.................................................................................................................................. Alexander (orig. title Ἀλέξανδρος ἢ ψευδόμαντις), like Peregrinus, is a polemical tract rather than an actual Life of Alexander, but this time events selected from the traditional biographical topics are in chronological order. In this case, the most significant events are at the beginning, with Alexander’s setting-up of the bogus oracle of the new snake-god Glycon (–). Once that is done, Lucian only has to note the escalation of Alexander’s propaganda and the increased prestige of the oracle itself. What the piece shares with Peregrinus is the increasing degree of involvement reserved for Lucian’s own interaction with the prophet (–): this takes the form initially of testing the oracle with bogus questions, but eventually there is a confrontation between them, which Lucian too late realizes could prove difficult and dangerous for himself, and he presents it as a murder plot. There is some sense of anti-climax when Alexander eventually dies and his son-in-law Rutilianus does not fill the post (); the anti-climax may well be deliberate on Lucian’s part.
3
Either as the inversion of hagiography, or more specifically of a martyrology.
The literary texture of the Alexander has a number of strands. Lucian himself mentions Arrian’s Life of Tillorobus (), evidently a notorious brigand, who nonetheless was accorded a monograph by the eminent consular (and biographer of the Alexander). Arrian’s treatment is lost, but the fact that Alexander resorts to a murder plot would naturally accord with what we might expect of the life of a brigand. There is room for an element of ecphrasis of the handsome physique of the prophet in contrast to the villainy of his character (–). In addition, there is the idea of a rhetorical anti-encomium or psogos, the inverting of the whole idea of hagiography into a kind of anti-gospel. One thinks of the villainous portrayal of Simon Magus in the Pseudo-Clementines, himself a picaresque antihero.4 I doubt if Lucian would have expected his sophisticated readers to recognize any specific parallels, as opposed to a general awareness of the oral traditions that could quickly and easily surround popular holy men in a less sophisticated society. Beyond this is the very considerable interest which Lucian has accumulated over the years in all manner of quackery. Although Plutarch has to apologize for and explain the relative neglect of oracles on the Greek mainland a few decades earlier, those of Asia Minor were flourishing, and with them the makings of a rationalist backlash which set out to explain the fraudulence of oracles, either from the viewpoint of Christian apologetic, or from some pagan exponents such as the Cynic Oenomaus of Gadara’s Exposure of Frauds (γοήτων ϕωρά). Lucian himself has plenty to say elsewhere on the subject of oracles themselves, and shows a great deal of interest in, for example, Croesus’ ill-fated oracletesting experiment, his barefaced bribing of the oracle at Delphi, and its disastrous consequences (Hdt. .–, –).5 Lucian gives Apollo himself a nonsense oracle in Juppiter Tragoedus , and has a sense of fun in the parody of many kinds of public statement, such as official decrees. Hence the temptation one suspects to indulge in some invention of bogus oracles on his own account. Caster () already suspected the oracular inscription Lucian claims to have seen at the house of Sacerdos (). In particular, the account of the latter’s transmigrations in the future is suspiciously like Lucian’s own parody of transmigration in the Gallus (). The overall question is how Lucian could have had access to Alexander’s records, let alone his alterations of unsuccessful predictions (). Lucian’s narrative takes its momentum from the expansion of the oracle’s activities and influence. He begins with the conception of the fraud of creating a new reincarnation of Asclepius to profiteer from the credulous but wealthy population round his native town, and the pre-advertising of the oracle, the planting of a tiny snake inside a goose egg, and the epiphany of the full-grown reptile in a dimly-lit room (–). Then follows the excitement as word of the new god spread, and the expansion of the cult industry across Thrace and northern Asia Minor (). This is the cue for the delivery of oracles fraudulently prepared in advance (–); the advertising of the oracle’s services further afield (); the reaction when Epicureans and others become aware of the fraud (); and the institution of ventriloquistic (‘autophone’) pronouncements (). The business gathers momentum with the cross-reference to fellow-oracles (), the impact even in Rome and Italy, and the intervention of Alexander’s predictions during the plague and the Danubian campaigns
4 5
On which, see now Edwards (a). Cf. Lucian Cont. , with slight differences in detail.
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of Marcus (, , ). With each phase of expansion come anecdotal insets: the disastrous enquiry of Severianus leading to the Roman defeat at Elegeia in the Parthian War (); the duping of the prophet’s client then patron Rutilianus in Rome (–); the reinterpretation by Rutilianus himself of an enquiry about teachers for his son () now that the boy has embarrassingly died; an ecphrasis of Alexander’s own local mysteries at Abonotichus itself (–); and the danger to an Epicurean who challenged Alexander in public (–). Branham (: ) divides the narrative into a five-act drama, though this is not particularly obvious at a reading: Lucian scatters theatrical metaphors throughout his corpus. Whatever view we take of the structure, we can note the context throughout of the urban rivalries in north-western Asia Minor, already evident from the intersection between Pliny the Younger’s oversight of the Bithynian cities and Dio of Prusa’s controversial participation in their politics (Plin. Ep. .–). It is a great flattery to the population of Abonotichus that the blessings of the new god Glycon are to descend on them, and Lucian goes to town in describing the ecstatic welcome the prophet receives (, –). The piece culminates in a detailed account of Lucian’s own involvement with the oracle. He himself draws on a whole range of tricks to wrong-foot the prophet—direct personal questions about Alexander’s baldness, or a prank where Lucian’s enquiry scrolls contain two identical questions on Homer’s birthplace (), while the messenger misleads the oracle with quite different indications of the content: the messenger’s bogus questions are answered, but not the sealed enquiry. In another set-up, only one question is asked, but the fee for eight different questions is paid: all eight receive off-the-point responses. Lucian claims to have attempted to dissuade Rutilianus from contracting a marriage with Alexander’s daughter (), and so antagonizes the oracle. When Lucian appears in Abonotichus itself, Alexander stages a reconciliation (), but afterwards allegedly tries to have Lucian and his servant thrown overboard from a ship, thwarted only by the piety of the captain (–). An attempt to persecute Alexander before the governor of Bithynia and Pontus fails because of the latter’s loyalty to Rutilianus (). The unique interest of the Alexander lies in Lucian’s unusual ability to catch a cult at the very moment of its inception (–).We are looking at a parody of the manifestation of a deity, undermined by the hint that there will be some material advantage for the local populace if they go along with Alexander’s trickery: At dawn he ran forward into the marketplace carrying his falchion and naked except for a loin cloth (this was also gilded), and at the same time tossing his loosened mane like the devotees of the Great Mother in their frenzy. He climbed up on a high altar and delivered an address to the people, congratulating their city because it was about to receive the god in visible form. Those present for almost all the city, including the women, old men, and boys had come running in a body wondered, prayed, and offered obeisance. Alexander uttered some meaningless sounds like Hebrew or Phoenician, and put the people in awe, as they did not know what he was saying, except that he kept bringing in Apollo and Asclepius. Then he ran off to the future temple, made for the excavation and the fountain head of the oracle that had been improvised beforehand, went into the water, sang hymns at the top of his voice to Asclepius and Apollo, and called on the god to make his auspicious entry into the city.
Even though many of the details must necessarily have relied on Lucian’s reconstruction of a now distant event, we have the sense of an occasion dramatically preserved in urgent and racy narrative. One fictional text has light to throw on Alexander and his oracle. Lucian describes reminiscences by one Eucrates of a youthful trip up the Nile: he hears from the colossus of Memnon, not his usual dawn-song but ‘I heard from it not some meaningless sound, as most people usually do; but Memnon in person really did open his mouth and gave me an oracle in seven verses, and if it were not too much off the point, I would have quoted the very verses to you’ (Philops. ) Part of the manipulation inherent in oracle-mongery is the flattery of the enquirer, who can all too easily be made to feel uniquely privileged. Lucian is not slow to condemn the out-and-out villainy of Alexander, while presenting a careful appraisal of his shrewd business sense in managing what had in effect become an oracle industry. He finds an apparent gap in the market, and goes from strength to strength in his capacity to fill it. But it is very hard to justify his initial motivation. Anyone believing a dream of Glycon instructing a prophet to set up the shrine would have been one thing, and we could have seen Alexander as a self-deluding visionary soul setting up a sacred citizens’ advice bureau, and stimulating the local economy for good measure. But since the tame snake’s mask is man-made, Alexander stands convicted of blatant fraud with his synthetic god. He is every bit as guilty as the man who allegedly taught African parrots to tell others to worship him.6 That said, Lucian himself may be as guilty as elsewhere of embellishing, exaggerating, and distorting the picture, though we have no means of knowing the part played by Lepidus of Amastris () or Timocrates of Heraclea () or similarly minded individuals in eliciting information which Lucian has then endeavoured to piece together. There is no gainsaying his contribution to our understanding of the otherwise odd collection of Realien connected with the cult, including a cult-statue of the bogus deity Glycon himself from Tomis, the scatter of coins depicting an oddly-headed snake, and the apparent lion sacrifice on the Danube on the column of Marcus Aurelius (cf. Alex. ). One important factor binds the piece to Peregrinus: the contempt of Lucian for so unHellenic a set-up. The garlic-reeking, brogue-wearing officiants at the mysteries of Alexander tell us a great deal about the attitude of the author. We can see plenty of evidence of traditional topics of a biography here. But the initial run of birth, ancestry, and birthplace occur, as we should expect, only to serve the purposes of invective: Abonotichus is mentioned only as a place with a rich but gullible population (); Alexander’s parents were known as obscure and low-born; and there are no birth-miracles to adorn the life of the charismatic holy man. The topics of a Life are subordinate to the needs of invective, and Alexander is yet another charlatan to be unmasked. Again, can we identify a narrative strategy for the Life of Alexander? We might see the villain’s career as an escalation from humble and ignoble beginnings in Paphlagonia to schemes for ripping off the Roman Empire, culminating in the oracles relating to the Danubian War and the plague—and the ignominy of Alexander’s miserable end and false wig, with a special place for Lucian’s own counter-trickery of bogus enquiries. We might
6
Maximus of Tyre, Or. ., among several variant versions.
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choose to see the piece as parody of a Life of Pythagoras, but to a large extent the subjectmatter follows its own path without any need for or sense of a template.
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.................................................................................................................................. On the strength of his biographical invectives, one might have expected an ingenious tour de force of encomium from Lucian for someone he wished to present in a favourable light. Instead, his laudatory treatment of his teacher Demonax (Δημώνακτος βίος) may come as both a surprise and a disappointment. The initial chapters give a rather bland picture of a good-natured eclectic philosopher, resumed in the last few chapters on his last days and death: the main body of the piece (–) consists of some fifty anecdotes or bons mots. These are in what appears to be a largely random but occasionally associative order, and their appeal is rather to students of second-century cultural history or of anecdote itself rather than biography as such. Lucian claims to have studied at length with Demonax, and wishes to provide both a memoir and a philosophical model (–). His subject belonged to Cypriot aristocracy, but the four teachers listed, Agathobulus, Demetrius, Epictetus, and Timocrates, hint at Cynic and Stoic sympathies (); his hardy physical training and taste for parrhēsia (outspokenness) would also point to the former (–). He did, however, also have a taste for poets, eloquence, and ‘Attic charm’ rather than Socratic irony, and Lucian emphasizes his eclecticism: he especially looks up to Socrates, Diogenes, and Aristippus (). He also cherishes quiet philosophical virtues such as friendship and capacity for conciliation. This did not keep him free of controversy: he refused to be initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries or to sacrifice to Athena, and confronted the Athenian ekklēsia on both counts (). The length of the bons mots inclines to the brevity of the chreia: ‘When someone asked him if even he ate honey-cakes, he replied: “Do you suppose then that the bees make their honey only for fools?” ’(). Many indeed would be at home in the late antique joke-book, the Philogelōs (Laughter-lover). They do not offer the elaborate contexts offered by Aulus Gellius or to a lesser degree Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists, but the whole collection still offers a tantalizingly limited perspective on the cultural and intellectual life of Athens in the second century . A number of put-downs are concerned with deflating pomposity. One of the more elaborate examples of verbal vanity will suggest the possibilities of the medium (): When the Sidonian sophist was displaying his prestige at Athens and pronouncing praise on himself, claiming that he was skilled in all philosophy no bad thing to quote him exactly: ‘If Aristotle calls me to the Lyceum, I will follow; if Plato to the Academy, I will be there; if Zeno, I will spend my time in the Painted Porch; If Pythagoras, I will be silent.’ So Demonax got up in the middle of the audience and said ‘You there’ (mentioning his name), ‘Pythagoras is calling you.’
There are two surprises here: Pythagoras is not given a place for the sophist to go to, but an action to perform. And the punch line, ordering the victim to shut up, is enhanced by
keeping the word Pythagoras in the Greek word-order to the very last. This Sidonian sophist has a tediously enumerative style, like the Maximus of Tyre whose Dialexeis (‘Discourses’) survive; but so, no doubt, had many others. The anecdote is also similar to many recalled by the Elder Seneca from his attendances in the Roman rhetorical schools. Others are generally less complex. The sight of Apollonius about to sail from Athens with an entourage of pupils prompts comparison with Apollonius (Rhodius) and his Argonauts (). We are in the world of teachers vaunting their pupils, like Herodes Atticus and his Hellēnes. A number of one-liners turn on extravagant dress: when an ostentatious Cynic claims to be a disciple of Diogenes and other worthies, Demonax punningly makes him a disciple of the orator Hyperides, on the strength of the hyperon or bar he parades as an outsize Cynic staff (). Another Cynic wears a bearskin, so that Demonax re-christens him Arcesilaus (‘bear-man’). Or a magistrate proud of his purple stripe () is reminded that a sheep wore it before he did. A few bons mots are actually concerned with philosophical issues as such: when Agathocles claims to be first among logicians and that there is no other, Demonax need only point out that if there is no other, he cannot be first; if he is first, then there are others (). But individual philosophers come in for specific censure on more personal terms: Peregrinus criticizes him for not being dog-like, only to be told he himself is not manlike (). Again the sting is in the very last word (ἀνθρωπίζεις), and its openness to a wide range of interpretation. Or Epictetus advises Demonax to marry, but is shown up for being unable to provide any daughters as brides (). A proportion of the asteismoi (witticisms) are concerned with effeminate behaviour and related issues, most obviously those dealing with Favorinus of Arles (–). The latter was indeed criticized for effeminate rhythm: when he asks Demonax what entitles him to practise philosophy, he receives the one word put-down orcheis (‘balls’) (); and there is the inevitable joke on Favorinus’ lack of a philosopher’s beard: both jokes are extended to provide the substance of Lucian’s Eunuchus. There is also an elaborate quip against a proconsul who practises depilation and is about to punish a Cynic who criticizes him; a repeat offence is to be punished with . . . depilation (). The issue had caused a rift between Scopelian and Timocrates in Smyrna (Philostr. VS ); here even Athens does not escape pitch-plaster wars. A number of other quips belong to the sub-literary flotsam of commonplace wisdom: Demonax is not dismayed that in a shipwreck he should be eaten by fish, as after all he has eaten so many of them (). The same motif already occurs as a joke in Petronius, where it is reversed: Satyrica . (et si, inquam, ursus homuncionem comest, quanto magis homuncio debet ursum comesse ‘and if a bear gobbles up one of us poor little men, how much more should a poor little man gobble up a bear?’). Again, when asked how many pounds of smoke should be produced by burning a thousand pounds of wood, he tells the enquirer to weigh the ashes, and the rest will be smoke (). Sir Walter Raleigh actually carried out the experiment (using a small quantity of tobacco) and won a wager with Queen Elisabeth I on the strength of it. In the Greek it is tempting to see a pun on kapnos as both ‘smoke’ and ‘nonsense’; Lucian may well intend to hark back to nonsense experiments like measuring the flea’s jump in Aristophanes’ Clouds (–). Lucian’s own taste for practical jokes may owe something to Demonax. The latter masquerades as a sorcerer who will raise a bereaved man’s son—if he can name anyone
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who has not mourned (). Or he pretends to bring a message from his deceased foster-son Polydeuces in Hades, inviting the excessively mournful Herodes to join him (). We are in the fantasy-world where Menippus can claim to have come from hearing a decree in the underworld (Nec. .–).We also have a similar if less caustic witticism on Herodes’ mourning by one Lucius preserved in Philostratus (VS ), and a second gibe on the same subject in Demonax . The collection of asteismoi ends at ; thereafter Demonax appears in old age as a figure of universal reverence, fed and accommodated by private individuals free of charge. He reduces the assembly to silence by mere appearance, as does Apollonius of Tyana in a crisis (Philostr. VA .). He enjoys a quasi-divine status. And he commits suicide by starvation; despite his sympathy for feeding birds and dogs, he is accorded a public funeral with philosophers carrying his bier. Hägg (a: ) comments on the contrast between Lucian’s unusually mild philosopher not given to making enemies and the central section of often barbed witticisms calculated to fuel the verbal quarrels of a caustic age. It may be that given Lucian’s own temperament, it is the barbs that he is more inclined to find memorable, and the chreia as a form also tends to favour pointed put-downs. Many of the bons mots quoted by Lucian would fulfil Plutarch’s criteria in Alexander ., of illuminating their subject’s character by means of a joke. But the arrangement and proportions of Demonax take it as far as possible from the shape of a Plutarchan Life, or for that matter any traditional model of an encomium: here we have Lucian at his most casual and informal, and furthest removed from literary artifice of any kind.
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.................................................................................................................................. Mention needs to be made of a lost work noted in the Demonax itself: a monograph on a figure Lucian calls Sostratus is briefly summarized: he was large and strong, led an outdoor life, slept rough, and functioned as a latter-day Heracles (Demon. ). A complementary and detailed sketch of what is obviously the same figure survives in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists –, where he is nicknamed Agathion and the Boeotian Heracles. Philostratus emphasizes his patronage by Herodes Atticus, his pure Attic speech, and his supernatural powers of perception. Here we might well have had something closer to conventional biography than in any of the three surviving pieces. It is clear enough that Sostratus was approved of by Lucian, and one might suspect the author’s Cynic sympathies to be prominent here. Lucian does not mention the link with Herodes, but could scarcely have avoided knowing of it, or may even have known of Sostratus through the latter’s association with Herodes himself (Jones : ). Perhaps the piece had the flavour of Dio of Prusa’s sketch of the subsistence hunters of Euboea (Or. ), or of the sturdy Peloponnesian herdswoman and clairvoyant (Or. .–). Jones emphasizes the Athenian background of Demonax (: ) but it might be noted that this does not redound to the credit of its citizens: neither over the issue of the Mysteries nor sacrifice to Athena do they emerge with particular credit, and their assembly is
quarrelsome (), whereas in Nigrinus,7 they show up ostentatious outsiders. This last piece offers a further tail-piece to discussion of Demonax: it is a no less bizarre tribute to the otherwise unknown philosopher Nigrinus, which quickly turns into a contrast between Athens and Rome, and pushes some of the more eccentric conventions of Platonic dialogue to the limit. This is a literary artifice which the Demonax avoids, and suggests how a contrived and rhetorical encomium of Demonax might all too easily have turned out. But as Nigrinus does not purport to offer actual biography of the philosopher himself (other than as extravagant autobiography of Lucian’s alleged conversion to philosophy), it can throw little further light on the three biographical pieces. Clay () usefully treats all four as a group concerned with individual philosophers.
C
.................................................................................................................................. We can now stand back from Lucian’s excursions into biography. It is as clear in the piece on Demonax as in the hostile pamphlets on Peregrinus and Alexander that Lucian’s forte is the exposure of charlatans, at least as he sees them.8 The kind of charlatanism he sets out to counter can take various forms. In Peregrinus, he sees a figure who acts as a vulgar exhibitionist, presented as a counterpart to Heracles and even Zeus himself, and as a Polyclitan canon who brings traditional ideas of artistry into disrepute through his unwholesome lifestyle. Biography is recycled into invective and caricature by Lucian’s rehearsing the various turns in his life, as he goes from one bout of publicity-seeking to the next, till he finally has to resort to public suicide for one last burst of publicity. In Alexander, he sees an astute and dangerous entrepreneur whose biographical progress is a narrative of ever bolder expansion and ominous control over more and more of the empire. The forces of philosophic and religious pretention engage Lucian wherever he encounters them, and he will take them on, often with counter-falsehoods of his own as he pleases. The associates of Demonax, and the master himself, exert an obvious influence: we are on the sidelines of the Second Sophistic, on its philosophic fringe. The ghosts of Apollonius of Tyana (Alex. ) and Timocrates of Heraclea (Alex. ) stand behind Lucian’s enemies and his own values respectively. No doubt he resented Peregrinus’ ostentatious suicide next to the very heart of Hellenism itself just after the Olympic Games. It is perhaps surprising that Lucian figures not at all in the bons mots of Demonax himself. If Demonax ever brought his lively pupil to heel, we never hear of it. Lucian contributes a great deal that is not found elsewhere, though he accords well enough with the controversial reputation of Peregrinus or the archaeology of the Glycon cult. The Demonax is probably the most reliable of the three: Lucian seldom seems to voice unalloyed sincerity when artifice will do, and the two polemics find admissions of falsehood on his own part, and suspicions of more. Jones (: ) sees the Demonax as a kind of reflection of Lucian himself, a more discreet intrusion 7
This bizarre work might be advanced as an example of Lucian’s performance in autobiography, describing as it does an early and enthusiastic conversion to philosophy; the result is not very convincing. 8 On Lucian’s depiction of charlatans, see Gerlach (: ).
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than in either of his pamphlets. But it is hard to disentangle what proportion of these materials represents the genuine influence of Demonax on Lucian himself in the first place. It is tempting to see the two polemical pamphlets as more symmetrical than they really are. Both purport to be letters giving accounts to friends of a rational sceptical disposition like that of Lucian himself: one Cronius, plausibly a known Platonist, and the Epicurean Celsus of the treatise Against the Magicians. Only the Alexander has a genuine biographical structure, proceeding as it does in strictly chronological order, as we are taken from Alexander’s abuse of his youthful charms to his allying himself with a Roman consular married to his daughter, while Peregrinus has Lucian’s anonymized figure recapitulating his career. Peregrinus is portrayed as shifting his allegiances and never really getting it right, whereas Alexander develops one single initial fraud with impunity. Both contain alleged initial sexual scandals, and have humiliating anti-climaxes just before the death, including Peregrinus’ cowardice at sea and the final discovery of Alexander’s baldness. Although both enjoyed a well-attested prominence, Peregrinus emerges as having the credentials of a genuine religious activist, for all his evident publicity-seeking, while Alexander comes closer to a dangerous and unscrupulous manipulator. However, in terms of literary structure, we could suggest that the materials of the Alexander have a dramatic momentum of their own, which Lucian himself scarcely needs to manage; whereas in Peregrinus, we have the more or less constant manipulation of artfully treacherous reportings. The most striking common factor is that they should have incurred the contempt and considerable displeasure of Lucian, who does not hesitate to project himself into the task of exposing them. By contrast, the Life of Demonax deals with the victims exposed, rather less caustically, by a teacher of Lucian whose own life pattern is quietly admired by his unusually gently disposed pupil. The unstudied structure contributes to the impression of a rare degree of sincerity in contrast to the managed malice of the other two. In light of this discussion, we can touch on the question of invention versus authenticity in Lucian’s biographies. On balance, one suspects that there is Lucianic mischief in claiming that Alexander’s early collaborator Coconnas died of snakebite (Alex. ): it is of course perfectly possible, but ben trovato nonetheless. Similarly, when Lucian claims that Peregrinus’ acolyte Theagenes made to pull out his hair ‘taking care not to pull too hard’ (Peregr. ), the author seems clearly enough to be having fun at the expense of Peregrinus’ assistant, rather than preserving a precious nugget of authentic detail. On the other hand, the apotropaic verse Alexander advised people to use as a protection against the plague has indeed been confirmed epigraphically (Jones : ). So too has Herodes Atticus’ treating of Pollux as still alive (ibid.: ). Neither side has taken very seriously the claims of sexual abuse Lucian levels at either Peregrinus or Alexander, though the frequency of such charges then as now can point either way. One resource that has been under-used in studying the Demonax is the number of quotations in medieval sources that have been attributed to him, now re-examined by Searby (). Some of these appear to confirm the rather gentle temperament noted in the outside frame of Lucian’s piece, while at least one would not look out of place in the rogues’ gallery of the middle section (Searby F = Funk : ): when a sophist found fault with him and asked, ‘Why do you speak ill of me?’ Demonax replied, ‘Because you do not despise those who speak ill of you.’ A useful way to focus on Lucian’s viewpoint and attitude to his subject is suggested by a biographical incident mentioned elsewhere, in his How to Write History (–):
By Zeus, that too is a really convincing story this same fellow reported about Severianus, swearing on oath that he heard it from one of the survivors who had survived this very event: he said that Severianus was unwilling to die by the sword nor to poison or hang himself, but devised a dramatic end, bizarre in its daring novelty: now it so happened that he had massive drinking vessels of the most beautiful crystal, and that when he had taken the decision to die come what may, he broke the largest of the vessels and used one of the fragments to kill himself by cutting his throat with the crystal. So he could find no dagger, no spear to afford him a manly and heroic end! Then since Thucydides pronounced a funeral speech over the first casualties in that celebrated war, this historian thought he also ought to pronounce a speech over Severianus . . . So after giving him a magnificent burial, he has a centurion, a fellow by the name of Afranius Silo, mount the tomb to rival Pericles; his oration was so bizarre and so overdone that I swear by the Graces I shed tears upon tears of laughter, and especially when this orator Afranius shed tears at the end of his speech and with poignant lamentation recalled those costly dinners and toasts! His final flourish was in the manner of Ajax: for he drew his sword and right nobly, as befitted an Afranius, he slew himself on the tomb with everyone looking on by Enyalius, he had long before deserved to die for such a performance! As for me, I condemned him on every other count for only stopping short of reminding us of the soups and shell fish and shedding tears over the recollection of the pancakes, but I blamed him most for dying because he did not first cut the throat of the historian who put on the performance.
Lucian claims to be paraphrasing an anonymous contemporary historian celebrating the death of Severianus after the Roman defeat of Elegeia in the Parthian War, actually alluded to in the Alexander (). Immediately we have the suspicion of falsehood, as none of Lucian’s rogues’ gallery of historians of that war has been successfully traced. We then have the author’s explicit amusement at not one but two exotic suicides, featuring once more a principal actor and his acolyte, as in the case of Peregrinus and Theagenes, who provides the epitaphios in advance for his master. We have the distasteful deipnosophistry of culinary reminiscences on an occasion where they are completely out of place, and Lucianic laughter to set the tone of the whole, just as he laughs down Theagenes in Peregrinus. We are left with the strong impression that this is the sort of scene where Lucian is in his element: and his three biographies provide him with just so much more of the same. Biography is everywhere subservient to satirical invective, and it is Lucian’s outlook in that department that offers the key to his forays into biography rather than the sum of biographical traditions as such.
F R The literary and historical perspectives in general approaches to Lucian are well represented in Bompaire () and Jones () respectively. Still useful for Demonax is Funk (), now augmented by Searby () for non Lucianic ‘fragments’. A useful bibliographical overview of all three pieces (with Nigrinus) is provided in Clay (). Branham () adds a dimension of modern works on humour in general. König () well represents the pagan and Christian sides of Peregrinus; Hägg (a) incorporates the Lucian works well into the broader framework of ancient biography.
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Form and Content in Philostratus’ Apollonius ......................................................................................................................
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H Philostratus’ Apollonius been subject to peer review, it seems certain that somewhere in the referee reports would be the damning sentence, ‘Author is trying to do too much’.1 For many modern readers, Philostratus’ work is far more than they want. Those who are not put off by its sheer length (eight books, -odd pages) are liable to find its variety of subject matter overwhelming. Those who have turned to the work for a factual account of the life and teachings of the real Apollonius of Tyana, a wonder-worker-cum-philosopher from the early Imperial period, are often baffled by seemingly endless passages of material that is bizarre, fantastic, or just irrelevant, but at all events not historically accurate. Others have sought in Philostratus a literary response to the New Testament gospels and a precursor to Christian hagiography or Neoplatonic biography, but have encountered an author who more often invokes a formidable range of predecessors going back to Homer, Herodotus, Plato, and Xenophon, then continuing through such second-century figures as Dio Chrysostom, Arrian, and Lucian, as well as the other works of his own multifarious corpus. Many readers now (and more, one supposes, in Antiquity) revel in this same fantastic content and belletristic luxuriance, and most current scholarship on the Apollonius starts from the basis that the work is fundamentally fictional and meant to be read as such.2 Nonetheless, readings of the Apollonius as ‘frivolous’ or ‘novelistic’ have trouble coming to grips with the considerable part of the content that still does correspond to what those dissatisfied readers were seeking, namely, the words and deeds (however fictionalized) of a historically attested philosophical-religious celebrity, and prospective echoes of such works as Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus (on which see Chapter in this volume). 1
I will be using Apollonius as a title of convenience for Philostratus’ work. For a discussion of the original title, see n. below. 2 Discussions of the fictionality of the Apollonius include Meyer (), Bowie (), Koskenniemi (: ), Francis (), Gyselinck and Demoen (), and Kemezis (b). Readings that consider Philostratus as genuinely aiming to tell a factually accurate story (successfully or otherwise) include Grosso (), Lo Cascio (), G. Anderson (), and to some extent Flinterman ().
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This confusion is not the result of misreading, but rather of a real tension within the text. Philostratus indeed begins his work by laying out some relatively modest objectives (VA .): to refute those who claim Apollonius was a charlatan (γοής) or magician (μάγος) and instead to ‘give an accurate account (ἐξακριβῶσαι) of the man, both as regards the times at which he said or did various things, and as regards the characteristics of the wisdom by which he came to be considered godlike and holy (δαιμόνιός τε καὶ θεῖος)’. He will immediately (.) add a related goal, namely, the dissemination of new knowledge about his hero that has ostensibly just been found in an account written by a disciple named Damis, which has come into the possession of the Empress Julia Domna. Damis, who appears to be a fictional creation of Philostratus, supposedly wrote a plain and unrefined account of his master, which Julia has asked the narrator to put into proper literary form. But those rather specific objectives are somewhat belied by the work’s actual content and narrative persona, which suggest an entirely different literary project, an aggregative, even totalizing one that seems to be trying to mark out a vast extent of cultural material as the domain of a particular sort of hero and the author who has, to all intents and purposes, created him. Even if one wants to believe that the Apollonius really is intended as cult propaganda and/or philosophical apologetics, the medium seems oddly disproportionate to the message. If, however, one prefers to see the work as simply an entertaining display of authorial virtuosity, then the question remains of why one would employ this kind of tour de force to extol a figure such as Apollonius, who seems ill-suited to what we otherwise know of Philostratus and his literary milieu. This chapter explores the effects of that apparent mismatch. I will begin by examining Philostratus’ explicit rhetorical claims and his curiously ambiguous narrative stance, before moving on to the anecdotal and doxographical material, and the overall characterization of the hero. Then I will consider some key thematic strands of the work that seem to stretch normal generic parameters, these being its focus on foreign exoticism, Greek antiquarianism, and Roman political history. In all of these cases, the interplay between Philostratus’ stated aims and his grandiose means will reveal much about the kinds of cultural work that biography could do in Antiquity. The Apollonius announces itself as a self-contained sort of work, neatly defined by the scope and extent of a single human life, and that rhetorical position is never fully abandoned. Much of the rest of the text, however, will sorely test the limits of biographical form as its author strives to display his own consummate skill by piling the largest conceivable variety of Hellenic cultural topics into the life story of one man (see for a overview, Lo Cascio : –), and creating an outrageously over-sized literary hero whose story is capable of bearing such a weight.
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.................................................................................................................................. Readers trying to select a generic lens for a given ancient work naturally expect some help from the narrator in the form of self-positioning, implicit or explicit. The narrative persona of the Apollonius is certainly not reticent or averse to self-reference. Philostratus places himself in an elaborate frame narrative and continues throughout the work to offer
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editorial comments on his subject matter and the ways in which he has learned about it.3 He has surprisingly little, however, to say about his finished product, the book we are now reading. Neither in his preface nor elsewhere does he comment at any length on the style or structure of the work, nor does he name famous predecessors as objects of imitation or emulation. He does claim (VA .) to be more elegant and more knowledgeable than other writers on Apollonius, but these authors are either fictional and inaccessible (Damis) or obscure (Moeragenes, Maximus of Aegae). They are cited in order to illustrate the narrator’s informational circumstances, not as familiar authors whom readers might use to form expectations about the work before them. Philostratus is constantly comparing the ostensibly Pythagorean Apollonius with earlier philosophers, and this by implication makes the author comparable to the figures who have described those philosophers, but it is significant that that link is never made explicit. This curious obscurity extends even to the title of the work and its generic identity.4 Nowhere does Philostratus claim to be writing a βίος, although it appears that by the late fourth century the title βίος Ἀπολλωνίου was standard (see Eunapius VPS ). In a later work (VS ), Philostratus does claim to have written a work called Ἐς Ἀπολλώνιον, and this title is often seen as invoking encomium (‘in honour of Apollonius’, see Robiano ) or even romance (Del Corno ). At all events, the Ἐς Ἀπολλώνιον title from the Sophists does fit well with the vague way in which the Apollonius narrator speaks of his own project. If one can coax a rhetorical strategy from his self-presentation, the narrator seems to setting his generic sights beyond, and perhaps above, the form of biography as it existed from the Hellenistic world to Plutarch or Diogenes Laertius (see Billault ). However, he stops well short of acknowledging or accounting for what will have been most striking to his readers, namely, the unprecedented scope and scale of the Apollonius. The work as it stands invites now, and surely invited at the time, the question, ‘Why eight whole books, and on Apollonius of Tyana of all people?’ Given that Philostratus will be making extravagant claims for his hero’s historical and cultural significance, the obvious answer might be that as a special sort of man, comparable only to icons from the heroic past, Apollonius deserves a unique sort of book, comparable only to the works of Xenophon and his like. This is not, however, the answer Philostratus gives. Instead, he positions himself only within a tradition, which is largely his own invention, of writings about and by Apollonius.5 The narrator does see himself as writing the longest and fullest account that his hero has ever received. His characterization of his own work is that, in the interest of correcting widespread ignorance or misunderstanding of Apollonius, he will give a fully accurate account, as in the quotation above (VA ..). The idea seems to 3 On the narrative persona of the Apollonius, see Billault (a) and Whitmarsh (). Guez () also provides a consideration of the text’s implied audience. 4 See on this point Boter (), with full reference to earlier literature. Boter notes that while the Ἐς + [name of person] formula is standard in hymns and encomia, it is also used to refer to more seemingly neutral narratives, meaning simply ‘about’ or ‘concerning’. He also makes a cogent case that the definite article τά found at VS should not be read as an integral part of the title. 5 The surviving pre Philostratean tradition on Apollonius amounts to one passage of Lucian (Alex. ) and two mentions in Cassius Dio (.. and .[]..). In addition, there is a substantial surviving corpus of letters attributed to Apollonius (see Penella ), though it is not clear whether any of them predates Philostratus (see Jones for possibilities). Finally, it is clear from Origen (Cels. .) that a work on the sage by Moeragenes really did exist.
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be that Apollonius has hitherto been known only piecemeal, through letters, partial narratives, and perhaps doxographical works comparable to Lucian’s Nigrinus or Demonax. Now Philostratus is giving him a single definitive treatment. The subsequent narrative will at times give the sense of striving for fullness, of trying to turn a scattered and often inadequate tradition into something complete. At other times, however, the opposite imperative makes itself felt, and the narrator presents himself as selective, giving us only the best parts of the massive corpus of stories about Apollonius, which he has at his disposal thanks to the indiscriminate Damis (e.g. VA .). In summarizing the apparently extensive further travels that Apollonius made after his visit to Ethiopia, Philostratus explains that: To avoid either prolonging my account by explaining individually and in detail all of [Apollonius’] philosophical teachings, or on the other hand seeming to skip through a narrative that I have worked hard to pass on to those who are ignorant of the man, I mean to recount only those that are most serious and noteworthy. (VA ..)
Philostratus is thus evoking the perennial problem of epideictic rhetoric: how to make one’s words match the particular excellence of one’s subject. But the issue is not as simple as needing to write a great book for a great man. Apollonius is not only uniquely great, but also uniquely complex and multifaceted: he did and said all sorts of different things that one learns about and expresses in all sorts of different ways. Giving him an appropriate portrait in words will require authorial skills that go well beyond those of the average encomiast. Similarly, the many-layered narrative structure of the Apollonius seems designed to accentuate the air of mystery and complexity surrounding the hero. Philostratus’ framing and narrative techniques allow all kinds of voices to tell Apollonius’ story. There is the Philostratean narrator, earnest but still sophisticated and at times detached. Then there is Damis, the faithful but naive disciple, who is diligent enough to record events accurately, but often insufficiently discerning to get the point of the story he is telling. There is also a sort of vulgate tradition of anecdotes about Apollonius that the narrator sometimes cites as a supplement to Damis, but sometimes strives to correct, especially when the stories make him out to be a charlatan (γοής): the writings of Maximus and Moeragenes are dealt with in much the same way. Above all, there is the oracular but enigmatic voice of Apollonius himself. The Apollonius contains massive passages of the hero speaking in direct discourse. Sometimes these are presented as independently existing letters to which the narrator has privileged access, but more often readers are given to infer that they are speeches recorded by Damis. Indeed, large sections of the narrative are introduced with the phrase ‘they say’ (ϕασί), the ‘they’ apparently being a combination of Damis and his master (see Whitmarsh : –). All of this narratological back-and-forth has many effects. The frame narrative of Damis and his ‘found text’ seems to suggest links with several sub-genres of fictional text, including the Trojan revisionism of Dictys Cretensis and the fantastic material in the Wonders beyond Thule.6 However, the narrator’s subsequent description of his own
6 On the links to ‘pseudo documentary’ texts, see Bowie () and Kemezis (b: ). For the generic links with historiography and biography, see Gyselinck and Demoen (), and for novelistic tropes, see Billault (: ).
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researches and comparison of variants seems more reminiscent of more traditional biography as Plutarch or Suetonius might have known it. It also creates an impression of Apollonius as the object of considerably more literary interest and controversy than was probably the case in the world outside Philostratus’ pages. The author is highly attuned to questions of fictionality and verisimilitude, and readers are expected to enjoy the same sorts of literary play that we see in the fantastic works of Lucian, or indeed Philostratus’ own Heroicus, an alternative Trojan War narrative. This playful quality does come at the cost of a certain loss of focus, however. The narrator’s initial definition of his task, to describe Apollonius’ genuine divine wisdom while refuting allegations of charlatanry, had suggested that this was a question with a single answer, albeit one that required special sources of information and considerable labour. Apollonius was hard to find out about, but essentially knowable and tellable. The ambivalence of the narrator’s approach, however, suggests that such a definitive settlement of the question may not be possible. This is true above all of Apollonius’ human or divine status. Throughout the narrative, the ‘big question’ about Apollonius is simply what sort of being he is. Is he a charlatan who uses illicit magic, a philosopher whose wisdom brings him uniquely close to the divine, or in fact a fully superhuman being who can know and do things that nobody else can?7 This ambivalence is paralleled within the narrative itself, because many of the characters, and not least Damis, share the narrator’s preoccupation with interpreting the phenomenon of Apollonius. From start to finish, Damis regards his master as something of a puzzle to be solved: when an eastern king offers to grant wishes for Apollonius (..), the disciple explicitly mentions that he made several guesses as to what Apollonius would or would not ask for. Sometimes the narrator seems ready to employ Damis as a reliable interpreter, as when he says that Damis’ fuller narrative offers him a gloss on an obscurely laconic phrase about Indian sages that he has found in a letter of Apollonius’ (..–). More often, however, Damis seems inadequate. First of all, he is absent from several key events in Apollonius’ career, not least the sage’s final moments, from which in fact Apollonius appears to deliberately exclude him by sending him on an errand at the crucial point (.). Even when he is present, he seems to have a poor grasp of the major questions surrounding Apollonius, especially that of his human or divine status. At a crucial moment late in the Apollonius (.), Damis does claim to have become convinced that his master’s true nature is ‘godlike and superhuman’. Disconcertingly, though, what brings him to this realization is not the kind of σοϕία that the narrator mentioned at the beginning. Rather it is the fact that Apollonius can slip out of a set of chains, which sounds less the action of a philosopher than of a charlatan. Others throughout the narrative are little more satisfying, although some impressive figures take their turn at solving the riddle. There is one character, Iarchas the Indian Brahman, who seems to know everything there is to know about Apollonius, as he reveals at their first meeting (.), but we never really learn what Iarchas has to say about his fellow sage’s true nature. Iarchas’ inferior counterparts in Ethiopia repeat the scene (.–), except that they believe slanders from Apollonius’ enemies about him being a charlatan, and accordingly treat him rudely. In the climactic confrontation between Apollonius and
For various approaches to this crucial ambiguity, see P. Cox (: ), Flinterman (: ), Du Toit (: ), Boulogne (), Whitmarsh (), and Elsner (). 7
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Domitian, the emperor evidently believes the same charges about magic and charlatanry. In both cases, Apollonius mounts an eloquent defence of his philosophy, but without really clearing up the question of his own human or divine nature. The problem is a more developed version of that in the gospels, especially Mark and John, in which Jesus’ true nature is consistently misunderstood by friend and enemy alike. What is missing is a Simon Peter who can stumble on to the correct answer, have it confirmed by his master, and go on to preach it as the true gospel.8
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.................................................................................................................................. Philostratus claims in his preface (..) that Damis’ account (and thus prospectively his own) contained not just Apollonius’ journeys (ἀποδημίας) but also ‘his sayings, his speeches, and anything he uttered of a prophetic nature’ (γνώμας καὶ λόγους καὶ ὁπόσα ἐς πρόγνωσιν εἶπε). Indeed, the Apollonius does give its hero ample space not only to tell his story, but to engage in lectures or one-sided dialogues (for his various modes of speech, see I.H. Henderson ) on a remarkably wide range of topics ranging from the benefits of sobriety (.–) and the need for civic harmony (.) to the emotional life of elephants (.–) and the merits of Aesop (.–). Apollonius clearly sees himself as a teacher, and Philostratus’ book might justifiably be said to contain the ‘life and teachings’ of its hero.9 This combination, however, raises several questions, some that are particular to the Apollonius and some that are common to all texts that use (or claim to use) narrative to convey a body of knowledge not specific to the events being related. Does the Apollonius contain a coherent philosophical-religious system, Pythagorean or otherwise? Is the narrator or implied author conveying these teachings in earnest, or with some degree of irony? How do the direct-discourse passages relate to the particular narrative circumstances in which they are uttered, or to the characterization of the person who utters them? The Apollonius has not generally been rated highly as a work of philosophy in itself.10 The same might be said, to be sure, of many comparable biographical works. We would not rate Plotinus nearly so highly as a philosopher if we had only Porphyry’s Life and not the Enneads. The problem with the Apollonius runs deeper, however, in no small part because of the variety and extravagance of the book’s content. A great many of Apollonius’ speeches, such as his lecture to Vespasian on good government (.), his defence of Greek canons of artistic representation (.) or the ‘Homeric Questions’ that he puts to 8 J.Z. Smith () draws the parallel with the gospels, but sees closer analogies between Peter and Damis than I do. 9 Koskenniemi () gives an overview of Philostratus’ use of standard tropes of pedagogy. See also Billault (: ). 10 For the customary low estimate, see e.g. J.Z. Smith (: ; ‘Neo Pythagorean and Stoic commonplaces that may be found in any doxographical handbook’) or G. Anderson (: ; ‘the property of any educated eclectic’). Readings of the Apollonius’ philosophical project as more substantial (or at any rate better integrated into the larger philosophical tradition) include Boulogne (), Swain (), Flinterman (), Praet (), and Belousov (). Schirren (; ) argues that the Apollonius is in fact a form of parody that exploits the inherent tensions between the require ments of philosophy and of biography.
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the ghost of Achilles (.), have little discernible Pythagorean content at all. Furthermore, while Apollonius has many characteristics of the stereotype Pythagorean (see Flinterman ), key traditional aspects of that philosophy are either ignored altogether (mathematical teachings, abstention from beans) or mentioned in the narrative but in an unsystematic and consciously playful fashion (transmigration of souls, see examples in Van Dijk : –). It often appears that Philostratus is relying on readers’ knowledge of Pythagoreanism in order to add colour to his story, rather than seeking to increase or deepen that knowledge. Apollonius’ teachings have little intellectual or ideological consistency beyond a moralistic tendency and a general valorization of the Hellenic past not dissimilar to that seen in other elite pagan Greek literature of the Second Sophistic. The phrase ‘Second Sophistic’ is of course the invention of none other than Philostratus, and the identities of the author and his narratorial alter ego add another layer of complexity to the questions surrounding the teachings of his Apollonius. To judge from surviving evidence, Philostratus was a formidable figure in the Greek literary world of the early third century, with a considerable extant corpus to his credit.11 His Apollonius contains several passages that seem to evoke topics of his other works: the questions to Achilles recall the Heroicus (see Grossardt ), the discussion of aesthetics and visual representation the Imagines (see Birmelin and Platt ), the portrait of Musonius the Nero. Most significantly, the Apollonius and its hero have a complicated relationship with the same author’s later Sophists. The Philostratean Apollonius is distinctly a philosopher rather than a sophist, as those categories functioned in the intellectual world of the third century (see Sidebottom ), and he is often critical of rhetorical practices that appear to us ‘sophistic’ (see Billault b). All in all, he is an anomalous figure among his author’s own creations. While the Sophists does briefly mention Apollonius and Philostratus’ work on him (VS ), it is very difficult to find elsewhere in the Philostratean corpus any meaningful interest in Pythagorean philosophy, or indeed philosophy in general. That said, the work as a whole still bears its author’s distinctive stamp. The Apollonius and Sophists share several characters and recurrent narrative motifs (see G. Anderson : –). Apollonius himself, for all his critique of rhetoric, uses speech for persuasion, display and even entertainment more in the manner of Polemo or Scopelian than of a typical philosopher, and he certainly has a good deal more of the sophist about him than do the heroes of Porphyry or Athanasius. Enough so to create unease in a modern reader attempting to take Apollonius of Tyana seriously as a philosophical or religious figure. More than one critic has lamented that Apollonius has fallen into the hands of a littérateur whose embellishments may please audiences but can only obscure the hero’s genuine significance. As a cultural and intellectual historian, one can accept that the Apollonius has more to tell us about the preoccupations and intellectual background of its author than of its protagonist, but that still leaves unanswered an important question about the text. Does this read like a work primarily intended to convey or promote Pythagorean doctrine? If so, what is the purpose and effect of all the extraneous material, both narrative and doxographical? If not, what is the purpose and effect of putting all of these words in the mouth of an
11 On authorship questions within the Philostratean corpus, see most fully De Lannoy (), also Bowie (). For the relationship between the narrative personalities of the Apollonius and Sophists, see Billault (a).
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ostensible Pythagorean philosopher? The narrator does not seem to sense a disconnect between his hero’s allegiance and his words, apparently viewing Apollonius’ philosophical status as part of a larger package that included all-around intellectual excellence, superhuman virtue, and closeness to the divine. He views himself as a competent judge of that excellence, and his verdict is overwhelmingly positive, so that the text as a whole seems to endorse the opinions given in the speeches. The narrator does on occasion test or question Apollonius’ opinions on such points as the causes of tidal motion (.) and, more significantly, there are times, such as the ‘defence speech’ in Book , when it is not at all clear where Apollonius’ words and teachings end and Philostratus’ begin. However much Apollonius gets to talk, the book is still not his, but Philostratus’, in a way that is not true of Xenophon’s Memorabilia or Arrian’s Discourses. Apollonius’ speeches are excursuses within a narrative, rather than the narrative being a vehicle by which the speeches are conveyed. Thus, whatever teachings the Apollonius conveys are conditioned heavily by the character of the hero and the events in which he is involved. It is important to remember that one of the narrator’s main stated objectives is to establish what sort of person Apollonius was, specifically that he was not the charlatan that some make him out to be, but was instead a genuine philosopher. But this opposition works a little unexpectedly. Philostratus’ Apollonius is a quite different character from the stereotype of the philosopher and ascetic as unsociable or disturbing figures (Francis : –). He is uniformly pleasant and urbane, managing to function perfectly well in elite society without in any way compromising his philosophical principles. He can somehow contrive to preserve the five years of silence required of a Pythagorean disciple without appearing rude (.), and it often appears that his attractive character aids him in conveying philosophical teachings that might in themselves be unpalatable. He is in this respect the heir to the Lucianic figures of Demonax and Nigrinus, as opposed to the antitypes represented by the charlatans Proteus Peregrinus and Alexander of Abonotichus or the compromised speaker of the On Salaried Posts.12 In all of these cases, the authenticity or fraudulence of one’s philosophical teachings is indicated (with varying degrees of irony) by whether one can maintain the persona of a sociable and articulate elite male while still embodying the unworldly wisdom and high moral standards that distinguish the philosopher from his fellow men. This naturally affects the form and content of the philosophy one teaches. Apollonius is a straightforward and easy-to-digest sort of teacher, who claims to have genuine knowledge that he conveys either through long but elegant lectures, friendly conversations, or pointed epigrams, rather than through mystical utterances, abstruse technicalities, or the maddening ironies and aporias of the Platonic Socrates (see VA .). Like Lucian, Philostratus (and at times Apollonius) seem aware of the tensions and limitations generated by such a moderate stance, though Philostratus has a rather gentler approach than the satirical Lucian, who is forever undermining his own speakers. His Apollonius can thus encourage the landowners of Asia Minor in protesting Domitian’s campaign against vine-growing, even while smilingly acknowledging that as a teetotaller he has no personal stake in the matter (.). A similar ambivalence affects the question of his
On these texts, see Clay (), also Schlapbach (), Bendlin (), Fields (), and Chapter in this volume. 12
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‘miraculous’ powers. We have observed already that the text deliberately refuses to make up its mind whether Apollonius is a superhuman being or merely a uniquely gifted member of our own species. Thus, his apparently superhuman actions, though many and varied (see Lo Cascio : –) are less spectacular than one might suspect, and often the narrator (or Apollonius himself) leaves open the possibility of a naturalistic explanation.13 Thus, when he brings a seemingly dead young girl back to life (.), the narrator speculates that perhaps she had never really died. When asked to explain his apparent clairvoyance regarding a coming plague in Ephesus (..), Apollonius can blithely claim that his senses are heightened by his light diet. This moderation allows Apollonius to prevail in the many conflicts within the narrative that parallel the narrator’s own supposed external quarrel over whether Apollonius was a charlatan. All sorts of characters from an anonymous hierophant at Eleusis (..) through the Ethiopian sage Thespesion and ultimately the emperor Domitian himself accuse Apollonius of magical or fraudulent practices. Apollonius earnestly defends himself against these charges, but we are never allowed to forget that the defence is really unnecessary, because of how Apollonius and the narrator re-define the dilemma. If one believes Apollonius’ self-justification, then the stories are false and there is a respectable naturalistic explanation. But even if they are true, in that case they are proof of a divine nature that puts him on a plane above his accusers. The tension is most clearly illustrated by the climax of Apollonius’ confrontation with Domitian. The narrator in effect gives us two endings (.–): first, a miraculous version in which the superhuman Apollonius simply vanishes from the courtroom, and, second, an elaborate speech of defence in which Apollonius maintains at length that his powers consist of nothing more than a highly developed form of ordinary human wisdom. Only the first actually takes place in the narrative: the speech, we are told, is one that Apollonius wrote but never got the chance to deliver. In short, for all that Apollonius claims to have comprehensible knowledge and teachings, his own nature as neither quite human or divine, and the narratological complexities of how readers learn about him, all suggest that he represents a less approachable form of wisdom than he himself sometimes pretends.
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.................................................................................................................................. If Apollonius is a more complicated character than either Philostratus’ narrator or modern scholarly accounts would lead us to suppose, this is all the more true for the text of which he is a part. To be sure, the Apollonius ticks all the conventional boxes of a laudatory or hagiographic biography: its hero receives an education, travels in search of more wisdom, teaches extensively, visits key sites of cultural significance, performs miracles and confronts power and wickedness, all which are part of the stereotype of ‘holy men’ from Paul to
Thus, as G. Anderson (: ) notes, Philostratus ‘had therefore to invest his sage only with “rational” miracles’. On this point, see also Kee (: ), Reimer (), and Koskenniemi (). 13
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Plotinus.14 However, this material is often developed to astonishing lengths that bring in material from all sorts of unexpected genres and reflect in unexpected ways on the hero’s supposed philosophical wisdom. For the rest of this chapter, I will look at three categories of narrative material that play an altogether disproportionate role in the Apollonius and move it well beyond the range of any conventional genre. The first of these is the hero’s engagement with the Hellenic past. The opening words of the Apollonius highlight the book’s unusual presentation of the relationship of past to present. Philostratus begins not with Apollonius himself but with Pythagoras: the narrator gives a short characterization of the life and works of that iconic figure, and goes on to claim that Apollonius was a very similar character, which is why it is wrong to call him a charlatan (.–). Throughout the book, Apollonius will constantly be measured against the great intellectual figures of the Archaic and Classical Greek past, and will invariably equal or surpass their excellence. His engagement with the Greek past, however, by no means stops at emulating fellow philosophers. On the contrary, Apollonius constantly establishes links between his own world and that of the idealized past.15 Sometimes this takes the form of teaching or exhorting present-day Greeks to behave as befits their heritage (.–, .). In other instances he is able to recognize the people around him as descendants or even reincarnations of famous individuals from the mythological or historical past (., .). In all of these instances, Apollonius sets himself up as a privileged interpreter of the correct meaning of the past in relation to the present. It is he who can tell the Athenians the correct way to celebrate the Dionysia (.), or show priests how to maintain the ancestral cults (.), or explain to the Egyptians how to treat a lion who is in fact a reincarnation of the Pharoah Amasis (.). The present-day world is full of people who have lost touch with or misunderstood their past, and a large part of Apollonius’ brief is to set them right. There are two ways of looking at this. On the one hand, this is an intrusion into the philosophical sphere of material from other genres. Apollonius does not simply interact sociably with his less philosophical elite peers, he also shares their cultural preoccupations and addresses their anxieties. He speaks to the same audience as Philostratus’ Heroicus and Gymnasticus, both of which concern the correct maintenance of links between an idealized past and the present (König ). Indeed, the Philostratean narrator at times seems aware that his story and his hero are straying well beyond the bounds of philosophy, Pythagorean or otherwise. We can understand Apollonius’ need to moralize about the corruption of the holy site at Daphne, but when the narrator then gets drawn into telling the romantic origin myth of Daphne and Cyparissus, he feels obliged to pull himself up short (..). But not long afterwards, Apollonius encounters a superannuated elephant that had fought with the Indian king Porus against Alexander, and once again the narrator has to explain at length who Porus was, this time with no apology (.). Doubtless this material increases the entertainment value of the Apollonius, but it often strikes modern readers as extraneous, and the text suggests that ancients might have felt the same way. 14 For hagiographic tropes in the Apollonius, see Hanus () and Van Uytfanghe (), though Du Toit () and Koskenniemi () offer appropriate cautions against overly schematic readings of Apollonius as ‘holy man’. Parallels with the New Testament more generally are explored most fully by Petzke () and Koskenniemi (), see also Reimer (). Elsner () illuminatingly explores the specific theme of religious travel. 15 See more fully Hanus (), Van Dijk (), and Kemezis (a: ).
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Looked at the other way, however, Philostratus’ version of Apollonius can be seen not as diluting the philosophical or religious nature of its hero’s story, but rather expanding the scope of action of the philosopher-holy man into important new areas. The past that Apollonius interprets is not simply a set of amusing myths or learned anecdotes. Rather, as the opening Pythagoras comparison makes clear, it is the authoritative resource on which rest all the claims of Greek culture in the author’s own day. The entire heritage of Hellas, from literature, athletics, civic life, and historical memory to, above all, religion, are thus all interpreted by a representative of one part of that heritage, namely, philosophy. While it is anachronistic to read the Apollonius through the lens of pagan-Christian apologetic, it is not difficult to see why, when apologetics did become a more central cultural issue at the end of the third century, a figure like Sossianus Hierocles would seize on the text as a counterblast to the teachings of the Christians.16 In this sense, the Apollonius points the way to the world of Julian and Eunapius, in which ‘Hellene’ and ‘Christian’ are antonyms, and the entire legacy of Classical Greece has been appropriated by an intellectual agenda centred on both philosophy and pagan cult (see Swain ). If we remain focused on the early-third-century context, however, we must remember that this philosopher who can encompass all of Hellenic learning is the self-conscious creation of a literary artist for whom the joys of antiquarianism, and the cultural authority that they bring, remain an end in themselves.
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.................................................................................................................................. One of the nicer metaliterary touches in the Apollonius comes at the end of Book , when Apollonius and Damis are in India and pass a monument indicating the furthest point reached by Alexander’s army. They continue on east, and thus Book can ostensibly be seen as breaking new ground by presenting the actual teachings of the Indian wise men whom Apollonius has come to visit. It does not turn out quite that way, however, since what the Indians have to say turns out to concern almost exclusively Hellenic topics, discussed in ways well known from many another work of Greek literature. The same could be said for much of the travel narrative in the Apollonius.17 Unlike Porphyry’s Plotinus, who merely contemplates an eastward voyage when the opportunity offers (Plot. ), Philostratus’ hero on his own initiative goes to the eastern, western, and southern extremities of the world, and what he finds there is indeed exotic, but it is familiar exotic. It is 16
The activities of Hierocles are known from the treatise Against Hierocles attributed to Eusebius of Caesarea, in which the author in effect refutes Philostratus’ portrait of Apollonius. On the specific question of Hierocles and the authorship of the counter treatise, see Hägg (b), who raises some cogent objections to identifying the author as Eusebius. On the text’s afterlife in late antique religious controversies more generally, see Hanus (), Hägg (a), and Jones (a). Sfameni Gasparro () sees this later explicitly apologetic reading as already present in the controversies over magic and charlatanism that are apparent in Philostratus’ narratorial statements. 17 For Apollonius’ eastern travels, see G. Anderson (: ), Romm (: ), Hanus (), Elsner (), Jones (), Parker (: ), Reger (), and Eshleman (). Man olaraki (: ) also provides an examination of the role of Egypt in the Apollonius.
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self-consciously the sort of content that Greek readers since Herodotus had learned to expect in narratives of faraway places. The point is not to convey any genuinely new knowledge from the periphery, nor even to impart a veneer of novelty to old knowledge. Rather it is to invoke a huge mass of existing cultural material on the limits of and alternatives to traditional Greek paideia, and to position his hero relative to that material.18 This positioning is anything but simple or uniform. One would expect nothing less from Apollonius, the avatar of Proteus, but in this case there is also a rich intertextual layer. Apollonius acts differently depending on which of several authors and literary traditions he is associating himself with. At times he can be an Odysseus-like figure, with the Nile cataracts as his version of the Sirens’ song (., for further parallels see Van Dijk ). The nods to Herodotus are many, as when in Iran he finds constant resonances to the fifthcentury wars, including the descendants of some prisoners settled there by Darius, and no sense of the distinction we would make between Achaemenid and Arsacid (Jones ). Sometimes, however, the sage seems to be ostentatiously rejecting Herodotus-style tourism, as when at Ecbatana he dismisses out of hand the walls that the Father of History had described in loving detail (VA .. Hdt. .). Xenophon is naturally present, now as the author of the Anabasis and the Cyropaedia, and alongside him also Arrian, whose writings deal with Alexander and India but also with the reported sayings of a philosopher (see Robiano for suggestive parallels). Various earlier Alexander-historians are also named for points of geographical detail (., .). In addition to these ostensibly more serious accounts of the ends of the earth, the preface has already alerted us to questions of fictionality and fantasy, and one has still to keep in mind texts like the Wonders beyond Thule and Lucian’s True Histories: Philostratus at times makes a point of dismissing stories like those of the ‘shadow-footed men’ from Scylax (.), but at other times will ingenuously pass on tales of half-black-half-white women (.) and levitating sages (..). This blurred line between sanctioned paradoxography and laughable fiction parallels the overall rhetorical question of Apollonius as mainstream philosopher or marginal charlatan. The travellers do not just see exotic marvels, however, they also interpret them, often in quite contested fashion. In some cases, the question is whether a given thing is a real marvel or not, and opinions may differ according to the various layers of narration. Thus, Damis is bowled over by the magnificence of an Indian king’s feast, but fails to impart that enthusiasm to his master, who is more interested in the same king’s philosophical tabletalk (.–). Less explicitly, it is a little puzzling to see the narrator deliver a long geographical excursus on the Caucasus (.–) only to then read that when Apollonius gets to those mountains, he goes out of his way to belittle the importance of spectacular topography for the philosophical mind (.). The issue of what is or is not marvellous can easily take on a cultural colouring, shading into the issue of what is or is not strange and foreign. The faraway places through which Apollonius travels contain all sorts of strange people and customs, but suspiciously often the customs turn out to be analogues or inversions of Greek practices, and the people have an unaccountable compulsion to engage with and comment on Greek culture almost to the exclusion of their own. Here again, Philostratus is following in a venerable tradition going back to Herodotus. There is a great
For varying recent perspectives on the ‘alienness’ of Apollonius’ teachings and their consequent relationship to Greek paideia, see Whitmarsh (), Abraham (), and Downie (). 18
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deal of interpretatio graeca in which Indian or Ethiopian buildings, garments, and landscapes can all be likened to counterparts in the Greek world. The narrator and implied reader clearly find this the most interesting aspect of travelling: when Apollonius and Damis look around the dwelling-place of the Indian sages (..), they see Indian and Egyptian artworks, which the narrator notes is ‘nothing to wonder at’, but also several likenesses of archaic Greek statues, which are then named and commented on. Similarly, the most interesting thing about foreigners seems to be what they think of Greeks. When Apollonius visits Spain, virtually all we are told about the inhabitants is that the natives of Gadeira are surprisingly Greek and thus have religious customs worth describing (.–), whereas those of Hispola are so barbarous that when a Greek tragedy is performed for them (..), they flee in fear of the protagonist’s outlandish costume and vocal delivery. The extended dialogues that Apollonius has with the Indian sage Iarchas in Book and then his inferior Ethiopian counterpart Thespesion in Book similarly consist to a great extent of the foreigner’s critique of some key aspect of Hellenic culture (Homeric heroes, Spartan morality, Delphic wisdom, see Downie ) and Apollonius’ response, sympathetic in Iarchas’ case and disputatious in Thespesion’s. Adopting the persona of a wise but detached foreigner was a recognized tactic for commenting on one’s own cultural institutions, reminiscent of Dio Chrysostom’s Borysthenicus, or Lucian’s Anacharsis and Toxaris (Branham : –). Iarchas lacks the satirical bite of Lucian’s speakers, but his narrative role still gives him an authoritative position in which key parts of Greek culture come under his judgement, positive or negative as the case may be. He can then pass that authority on to Apollonius so that, when that sage goes on to reform Hellenic ways in Greece and vindicate them in Ethiopia, it will be with a wisdom that he frequently attributes to the Indians (see Elsner ). Nonetheless, neither his teaching nor his persona actually become Indian, or anything other than Greek. When Apollonius tells the multilingual, ethnically hybrid Damis that he can understand all foreign (and animal) languages without having to learn them (..), this serves not only to demonstrate his miraculous nature, but also his homogeneous cultural persona. One game that Philostratus ostentatiously avoids is that of making his hero a cultural outsider along the lines of the Lucianic speakers in the Twice Accused or Syrian Goddess (Elsner ). He might have exploited Apollonius’ ‘Cappadocian’ origins in this manner, but instead he insists that the sage was a descendant of Greek colonists (..) and spoke perfect Attic from his childhood on (..). Philostratus is not trying to establish a position outside of the traditional discursive territory of Hellenism: rather he is creating a base on its edges from which the more effectively to dominate the whole. His literary predecessors in this endeavour are many and illustrious, and they, like the antiquarian material discussed in the previous section, are appropriated to further Philostratus’ project of concentrating as much cultural authority as possible in a single superhuman philosopher-hero, and in his literary creator.
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.................................................................................................................................. The Apollonius could very easily have been a story of Greeks dealing with other Greeks and perhaps exotically caricatured foreigners, with Romans either excluded altogether (as in the
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Greek erotic novels) or appearing only as anonymous, stereotyped authority figures (as in much of Dio Chrysostom and Lucian). In fact, the first four books of the Apollonius, and significant portions of the remainder, are exactly such a story, as Apollonius avoids the lusts of one Roman governor (.) and counsels the Spartans on how to respond to another (.). For much of the second half of the Apollonius, however, the hero moves among named, recognizable figures from Roman history, and takes part in their ongoing narrative.19 He is a secondary but significant figure in the opposition to Nero (see especially .), an alternately beloved and rejected counsellor to Vespasian (.–) and, finally and at greatest length, the heroic and ultimately triumphant foe of the tyrant Domitian (most of Books and ). On one level, the ‘history’ is quite ‘accurate’ (see Flinterman : – for specifics), with a good level of circumstantial detail in the form of anecdotes like Domitian’s devotion to Minerva (..) and punishment of delinquent Vestals (.), and second-rank characters like the Gallic rebel Vindex (.) and the Domitianic prefect Casperius Aelianus (.–). Distinct as the ‘Roman historical’ episodes of the Apollonius are in some respects, they are still well integrated into the overall aim of setting forth the hero’s true nature and freeing him from the label of ‘charlatan’, and they do so by appropriating earlier literary material. In this case, Philostratus begins Book by laying out a long series of examples from the Greek past of philosophers who resisted tyrants. He then unsurprisingly claims that Apollonius surpassed all of these figures (..). The rest of the narrative, however, evokes a more recent and specific set of past exempla. In the Antonine and Severan periods, the reigns of Nero and the Flavians were remembered as a time of brutal tyranny and heroic resistance. This was true for Greek speakers as for Latin (Kemezis : –), as seen at the time in Dio Chrysostom and Epictetus, and later in writings, including the pseudoLucianic Nero, which is likely Philostratus’ own work. We have evidence from Cassius Dio (..) that Apollonius had been associated with this story before, but in Philostratus’ telling, the sage of Tyana becomes its protagonist, and such figures as Dio Chrysostom and Musonius Rufus are relegated to supporting roles. Similarly, when Apollonius gives political advice to Vespasian, he takes over the role that Dio in his Kingship orations had played for Trajan (see Whitmarsh a: –). This is not simply aggrandizement of hero and author, but goes to the specific point of Apollonius’ status as a charlatan or a ‘respectable’ philosopher. Surely a man who gave advice to the emperor could not be a charlatan? Similarly, by having Domitian accuse and try Apollonius, Philostratus can put all the supposed calumnies of Apollonius into the mouth of a hated tyrant, and gives himself the chance to write for his hero a full-scale defence speech (.) that in itself largely fulfils the author’s stated apologetic purpose for the Apollonius as a whole. Here once again we can see Philostratus annexing another massive area of culturally authoritative material to build up his hero’s all-encompassing excellence, but that process is self-consciously complicated by the hero himself, who at times shows an ironic awareness regarding his political role. After all, if Apollonius is really as superhuman as he sometimes seems to be, then he has no place in a ‘realistic’ political narrative and no reason to bother
19 For the Apollonius’ relationship to Roman history and politics, see Billault (; : ), Koskenniemi (: ), Flinterman (), J.R. Morgan (), Kemezis (a: ), as well as Mazza () and Crampon () specifically on his advice to Vespasian.
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with human rulers who can neither help nor harm him; on the other hand, if he is simply a supremely accomplished philosopher, then there are limits to how much influence he can plausibly assert over pragmatic political figures. This is well illustrated by a scene in which Vespasian supposedly listens to Apollonius, Dio Chrysostom and Euphrates debate his future political course and that of the empire. After the other two speakers have discussed the merits of returning to a republican government, Apollonius points out how ‘puerile and inopportunely pointless’ (μειρακιώδη καὶ ἀργοτέραν τοῦ καιροῦ) such speculations are, and how unrealistic it is to expect a man in Vespasian’s place to do anything other than exercise the power he has fought to gain (.). But if the other two speeches are unrealistic, then cannot the same be said for the entire conceit that Vespasian called them in for a debate in the first place, or indeed that Apollonius played any major role in the proceedings? Having Apollonius interact with recognizable versions of Nero and Domitian gives him a certain historical concreteness, and may add a dimension of authority to his story in the same way as the frame narrative involving Julia Domna. But the presence of Apollonius himself as a major political character is a massive anomaly that affronts not only readers’ specific historical knowledge but also their overall sense of how power and culture in the Roman Empire work, and serves only to emphasize the unreality of the fictional world Philostratus has created. The same ambiguities of truth, fiction, and narrative authority that surround all the events of the Apollonius extend even to those episodes that seem most firmly grounded in external reality. They create a fictional-historical setting in which readers can question and re-think the dichotomy between the spheres of ‘Roman’ politics and ‘Greek’ culture. The Philostratean Apollonius does on one level seem to endorse the High Imperial myth of two complementary cultures, philhellenic Romans and loyal Greeks, but key aspects of the narrative call that endorsement sharply into question: in this sense, the ‘Roman history’ side of the Apollonius has many echoes of the bit parts played by emperors in the same author’s Sophists (König ).
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.................................................................................................................................. Arnaldo Momigliano, in comparing Philostratus’ two major quasi-biographical works, asserted that: ‘It would be impertinent to decide which of the two books, the life of Apollonius or the Lives of the Sophists, was nearer to Philostratus’ heart. What we do know is that the Life of Apollonius, that man of the past, had the future to itself ’ (Momigliano : ). Many others have similarly wanted to read the Apollonius forward, for the undeniable reason that those works with which it shares the most obvious generic affinities are chiefly later in date: the Neoplatonic biographies by Porphyry and Iamblichus (P. Cox : –), and indeed Christian hagiography from Athanasius on (Van Uytfanghe ). Philostratus’ direct impact is discussed in chapters in this volume on these later authors (Chapter and Chapter ), but for our purposes now, the later comparisons do illustrate important distinctive characteristics of the Apollonius as well as similarities. Philostratus is dealing with much material that will have a long future: the social role of the holy man, the culturally defining nature of Greek philosophical wisdom, and so forth.
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Nonetheless, as I hope to have shown, his literary approach is still that of his own time and of the previous century, when a unified elite culture still saw itself as having a monopoly on the authoritative resources of literature, philosophy, history, and religion. What the Apollonius perhaps gives us is a glimpse of how some of the characteristic strands of late antique culture had their roots in a world not yet defined by the conflicts and anxieties of an elite fragmented along the fault lines worn by their age’s religious and social upheavals.
F R The standard English translation of the Apollonius is that of Jones (), which is also the best Greek text currently in print, although a critical edition by Gerard Boter and collaborators is in preparation. The most complete overview of the work’s content, and of its author’s corpus as a whole, remains G. Anderson (); see also Lo Cascio () and Koskenniemi (). Flinterman () is an important treatment of the work’s historical and cultural context, a subject also considered in Kemezis (a). Recent scholarship has been greatly advanced by two essay collections, those of Demoen and Praet () and Bowie and Elsner (). For those studying the Apollonius’ literary characteristics and place in the genres of biography and hagiography, further important contributions include J.Z. Smith (), Francis (), Robiano (), Hägg (a), Schirren (), Gyselinck and Demoen (), and Van Uytfanghe (). The new studies of Bäbler and Nesselrath () and Miles () examine different aspects of the Apollonius’ engagement with its cultural and intellectual context in the Roman era Greek world. For the historical Apollonius and non Philostratean tradi tions, see Bowie (), Raynor (), Dzielska (), and the materials collected in Jones (b).
A The author would like to thank the editor for the opportunity to contribute to a much needed and most useful volume, and also Janet Downie and Kendra Eshleman for sharing unpublished work. All translations in this article are my own.
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T collection of Lives of Eminent Philosophers (as it is commonly called) transmitted in ten books under the name of Diogenes Laertius recounts the doings, sayings, and writings of the leading figures of ancient Greek philosophy from its origins down to its rapid efflorescence and institutionalization in the fourth and third centuries , with occasional glimpses of its continuing vitality in the centuries beyond. Encompassing over eighty philosophers, these Lives range in length from two or three sentences for figures of little influence to entire books for Plato and Epicurus. They vary widely in content too, some devoid of biographical information, some nothing else, but most a thick stew of names, dates, events, titles, anecdotes, sayings, theories, and more. The resulting compendium of what its subjects did and said and wrote and thought, how they came to philosophy, where they travelled and taught, whom they knew or encountered, the way they lived and died is a treasury of information and misinformation, at turns fascinating and frustrating, instructive and misleading, erudite and jejune, inspiring and deflating, that students of philosophy and its early history have for centuries devoured, dissected, deplored, and derided, but ignored at their peril. Diogenes’ Lives is an exceptional work on many counts, including some of special significance for this Handbook. For one, it is the single largest collection of Lives to survive from Classical Antiquity, handily surpassing Plutarch in number and scope if not in depth or length, and so too Philostratus and Suetonius. It is also a key witness to the early stages of biographical literature in the fourth and third centuries , preserving valuable evidence for pioneers like Aristoxenus, Antigonus of Carystus, Hermippus, and Satyrus.1 At the same time, it presents the single most comprehensive account of the origins and development of an entire discipline, and a distinctive form of intellectual history from a biographical perspective. It also, accordingly, represents a distinctive form of life-writing, framed by basic biographical data but lean, often very lean, on the standard biographical fare—from a modern perspective at least—of incident and narrative, and governed instead by its
Cited , , , and times, respectively; see Hägg (a: ), Schorn (b), and Chapter in this volume. 1
disciplinary orientation, its sustained focus on philosophy as a distinctive cultural practice and way to live. Its over-arching goal, evidently, is to tell, in condensed but leisurely fashion, how that practice began and evolved, the contributions of its formative figures, and especially the enduring fruits of their endeavours: a record of their memorable insights and sayings, their writings, theories, and other discoveries—stopping for the most part well short of the author’s own day, some time in the Severan age, most likely the opening decades of the third century . The result thus amounts to an ostensive definition of philosophy, as the author conceived it, in the form of a gallery of its most influential and memorable representatives in all their diversity of attitude, approach, and achievement (Mejer ; Warren ). Importantly for this Handbook, its peculiar methods, contents, and format also enlarge the range and scope of ancient biography, and in ways that invite and inform critical reflection on the nature and purposes of life-writing in Antiquity.
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.................................................................................................................................. The cast of Diogenes’ story—the roster for his gallery—is enormous, comprising over eighty biographical entries, along with hundreds more in various supporting roles as associates or rivals, patrons or antagonists, including cameos by many prominent public figures, and hundreds more again named as authorities or sources, which Diogenes cites with diligence and relish. Its chronological and geographical sweep is correspondingly vast, covering over three centuries fairly comprehensively, albeit often superficially, and spanning virtually the entire Hellenic world, from Egypt and Cyrene to the shores of the Black Sea, from Sicily and southern Italy to Syria and Cilicia, with scores of towns and islands in between, embracing even wider reaches of the Roman Empire with occasional mentions of Celtic Druids, Indian Gymnosophists (‘naked teachers’), and the like. To impose order on these hordes, and to make his story accessible by giving it a narrative arc, Diogenes integrates two related but distinct frameworks developed by Hellenistic authors drawing on historical research by Aristotle and his colleagues (Mejer : –; Zhmud ; Schorn b; ; Montanari ), and applying to philosophy approaches going back to local chronicles and mythography in the tradition of the Hesiodic catalogue: a complex genealogical scheme that traces the origins and multiple lines of intellectual descent in a broadly chronological sequence of ‘successions’ (διαδοχαί: von Kienle ; Engels ; Eshleman : –), each linked at every step by direct or indirect teacher-student relationships but continually enriched by interaction and innovation, and repeatedly branching into rival families or ‘schools of thought’—the various ‘stances’ or ‘ways’ of life and thought (αἱρέσεις > heresies; secta > sects: Glucker : –) that dominated philosophy in the classical world, including most notably the four granted imperial chairs under Antonine and Severan rule: Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, and Epicureans (Lynch : –; Oliver ), each occupying a prominent position in the overall scheme (Books –, , , ; cf. .). The resulting diachronic network is organized into ten thematically unified sections, each allotted its own ‘book’ and centred on one or two leading figures, typically the founder or titular head of a distinct philosophical tradition. A short prologue first sketches rival
accounts of the origins of philosophy, swiftly surveying both Greek and foreign traditions (.–; Gigon ), then introduces the genealogical scheme of ‘successions’—the four main lines of personal and intellectual descent—and their attendant ‘stances’ or schools of thought (.–). The remainder of the first book then introduces Thales of Miletus (.–), the traditional founding father of philosophy here depicted rather as a forefather along with a gaggle of fellow sixth-century ‘sages’ (.–; Goulet b), before closing with his twin forefather, Pherecydes of Syros (.–). The scheme then follows two main branches of descent, one from Thales and dubbed ‘Ionian’, filling Books –, the other from Pherecydes and dubbed ‘Italian’, filling Books –, each in turn ramifying into multiple sub-branches (Sassi ).2 Within this scheme, Diogenes interweaves for another seventyodd figures all manner of biographical information, ranging from precisely dated facts to dubious or apocryphal anecdotes, with lists of their writings and more or less cursory accounts of their teachings, arguments, and sundry other insights and innovations. The result is a panoramic survey of the first three or so centuries of Greek philosophy, replete with excerpts, quotations, and citations from a host of writers—philosophers, poets, historians, scholars, and antiquarians alike—unparalleled in breadth but correspondingly thin, frustratingly so for some today, on philosophical substance, either the taut sinews of argument and analysis, or systematic exposition of theories. Plainly more important for Diogenes, at least in the Lives, is the scholarly lore of prosopography (especially family, major historical figures, and authors of the same name), bibliography, chronology, and the well-turned phrase or bon mot, usually but not always to the philosopher’s credit. In line with this focus on the discipline’s earlier history, the abundant citations that pepper his text like embedded footnotes also come mainly from Classical and Hellenistic writers, only occasionally from Imperial authors, and never from his own contemporaries, with the possible exception of two or three figures of uncertain date he names in passing, who provide the most secure terminus post quem for his own work.3 Highlighted by this genealogy are the six traditions still competing in Diogenes’ own day: Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Peripatetics, Zeno’s Stoics, and Diogenes’ Cynics, all descended from Socrates and Thales before him; and descending from the Pythagorean tradition in a parallel Italian tradition, Pyrrhonian sceptics and Epicureans. Each of these six constitutes, in terminology standard since the Hellenistic period, a distinct hairesis: literally a ‘choice’ of standards for truth and value, and accordingly a choice of how to live or conduct one’s life, and then by extension a philosophical orientation or ‘stance’ and the resulting ‘school of thought’. The chains of individual Lives carry each of these schools into the third century , but rarely beyond, only in isolated cases (a pair of second-century Academics) or in bare lists (some later Stoics, Pyrrhonians, and Epicureans). In tracing the development of these lineages, however, Diogenes studiously
2 Ionian (literally ‘Ionic’) for the first few generations of Thales’ heirs in . ; Italian (literally ‘Italic’) likewise for Pherecydes’ first heirs in Books , Pythagoras of Samos and Xenophanes of Colophon, who each emigrated to southern Italy. 3 The Pyrrhonians Theodosius (.) and Sextus Empiricus (., cf. .), both active in the late second century (Jouanna ). The absence of any engagement with third century trends in Platonism or Christianity also favours the early decades of the third century.
includes several other traditions initially influential but long extinct, either abandoned or absorbed into the mainstream schools: Cyrenaics, Eliacs, Megarics, Eretriacs, even Eudaimonics, and Eclectics, all incidentally illustrating a peculiar philosophical idiom, explained in the prologue (.) and still alive today, of naming stances after the birthplace or theoretical orientation of their founders. Integral to this genealogical approach and hence the portrait of philosophy that Diogenes constructs are the progeny of its practitioners. These intellectual offspring take two very different but essentially connected forms. First of all, by a natural extension of ordinary usage, the progeny of most subjects of these Lives comprised their many students and associates, all drawn in the first instance by shared philosophical interests, and in many cases continuing their teacher’s or colleague’s work—their studies and teaching—as more or less formally recognized ‘successors’, often literally inheriting intellectual and institutional property as well as a philosophical stance (Dorandi a; Haake ). A central component of this process, moreover, and a major factor in its progress, was the production of written accounts of their work: the studies, dialogues, treatises, and other forms of literary composition produced by the philosophers themselves and their associates, which served both to sustain their own work and to extend its influence in space and time alike. Nor is the metaphor of progeny either anachronistic or strained. On the contrary, it figures in Diogenes’ own usage on both fronts: for ‘legitimate’ or ‘bastard’ students (., .) and writings (., .; ., .) alike. It also informs his rationale for devoting a large share of his account to three factors rarely found in other forms of ancient biography: long lists of writings, lengthy collections of sayings, and frequent summaries of doctrines—the factors of bibliography, anthology, and doxography (more on this neologism below) that give these Lives much of their distinctive character and flavour.
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.................................................................................................................................. Diogenes’ Lives sits firmly in the tradition of works ‘on famous men’ (de viris illustribus) illustrated by extant work of Nepos and Plutarch and remnants of Suetonius. In focusing solely on philosophers, however, Diogenes represents a special case, and his collection, by its very multiplicity, constructs a group portrait of ancient philosophy as a distinctive way of life: a series of individual Lives generically alike in their concentration on intellectual activity and influence of a sort explicitly defined at the outset by the discipline’s three established ‘parts’ or domains of ‘physics, logic, and ethics’ (.) which span the natural world as a whole, the mind’s operations in reasoning and acquiring knowledge, and the reasoned governance accordingly of human life and conduct; yet Lives richly diverse in the conduct and ideas they report, in both the background, habits, and manners they describe, and the distinctive theories, forms of expression, and styles of argument they recount. Diogenes’ gallery of philosophers thus demonstrates by accumulated example the full range of both philosophical ideas and philosophical ways of living (S. White ; Warren ). The basic format is simple enough. Most Lives begin with some standard biographical fare. First comes the scholarly equivalent of an identity card: given name, father’s name,
and birthplace, normally presented independently as a virtual heading or lemma.4 There often follows something about the philosopher’s family: lineage, upbringing, brothers (rarely any sisters), wives, children; often some highlights of their public life: civic office or service, interactions with local or foreign dignitaries; in most cases something about their death; and usually some indication of their dates: birth and death, ‘acme’ or floruit, or pivotal events. So consistent is the pattern that departures must often reflect an absence of credible evidence: cases where either Diogenes or the entire tradition had no reliable information. What most sets his Lives apart, however, is their pervasive emphasis on intellectual activity and teachings: each figure’s studies (teachers, mentors, reading, fellow students), travels (especially exotic sources of inspiration and encounters with celebrities), colleagues and associates (variously designated γνώριμοι, ἑταῖροι, and the like), rivals and critics, and especially their teachings, sayings, writings, and reception, contemporary and later alike. Two components loom especially large here: miniature anthologies of sayings and anecdotal repartee, on one hand, and synoptic surveys of their chief doctrines in a summary format called ‘doxography’ (from Diels ; see also Mansfeld ; ). Also unusual at least in degree is Diogenes’ attention to the apparatus of Imperial scholarship: especially the citations of earlier authorities and titles that fill his text,5 but also documents (letters, wills, decrees, epitaphs), catalogues of writings, and frequent quotations of a philosopher’s own words. Closely related, and found in no other biographies, are the lists of homonyms that conclude many of his: lists of notable writers of the same name, philosophers and others alike, each distinguished in turn by father, homeland, philosophical stance or disciplinary interests, and notable writings, and all drawn from Poets and Authors of the Same Name (., .) by Demetrius of Magnesia, a friend of T. Pomponius Atticus (Mejer : twenty-four of thirty-one extant excerpts come from the Lives; cf. Aronadio ). Into this framework Diogenes weaves all manner of illustration and ornament. Many of the more frequent components straddle the two domains, demonstrating in most cases the integration and integrity of a philosopher’s thought and action in their conduct of life. This is especially so with the vast harvest of anecdotes Diogenes preserves—brief vignettes exhibiting character and wit in action, variously labelled chreiai or ‘apophthegms’ (Kindstrand ; Arrighetti )—but also with the abundant verse and documentation he supplies for his leading figures. The opening lines of two poems ascribed to Socrates (.), for example, demonstrate fidelity to the very religious traditions he was put to death for violating, gloss the opening scene of Plato’s Phaedo (c–d), and incidentally challenge the mainstream tradition that he wrote nothing (.). Aristotle’s song to Virtue (F V. Rose ; PMG ) honouring his murdered father-in-law Hermias (.–) melds the family piety evident in his will (.–) with the lofty ethical views summarized later in the Life (.–).6 Samples of verse by and about Arcesilaus (.–) and his fellow Academics of 4
Sometimes supplemented by a demotic or mother’s name, either as a token of the philosopher’s significance and consequently a richer tradition (Thales ., Socrates ., Plato ., Aristotle ., Epicurus .), or simply to explain a succession (Plato’s nephew Speusippus, .). 5 No rationale is given: tokens of authority (Goulet ), a display of erudition, or some other purpose? 6 The song, variously called ‘paean’ (.) and ‘hymn’ (.), is recorded also by Didymus ‘Bronze Guts’ (in D. col. ) and Diogenes’ near contemporary Athenaeus (.a f); see Ford () and LeVen ().
the early third century (., .–) enrich the appealing picture Diogenes draws of their mutual devotion, softening their otherwise dour reputation for a rigorous brand of scepticism. So too the strings of Homeric and tragic parody he quotes for the Cynics Diogenes and Crates (.–, .–) both enliven and mitigate the badgering tone of the endless anecdotes he recounts to illustrate their stern asceticism and caustic wit. Lighter verse leavens other Lives too, including a handful from the comic stage for Socrates (., –), Plato (.–), and Pythagoras (.–), and a veritable bouquet of tart caricatures by the Pyrrhonist Timon of Phlius scattered throughout the work, for which Diogenes is again our single richest source (roughly half of the excerpts collected in SH –: Long ; Di Marco ; Clayman ). Diogenes naturally adapts his template to his subjects. His Lives of the founding figures for the main traditions are considerably longer, richer, and more varied: an entire book each for Plato and Epicurus (Books and : and sections), large portions of a book for Aristotle, Diogenes the Cynic, Pythagoras, and Pyrrho (.–, .–, .–, .–), and the longest single block of all for the Stoic Zeno (.–). Biographical detail is accordingly much thicker in each case: family background and youth, wives and children, friends and associates on one hand, rivals and detractors on the other, and sundry others, from dynasts and civic leaders to household slaves and freedmen; likewise training, travels, and teaching, along with pivotal episodes, even traces of a narrative arc at times. Their Lives also exhibit fuller documentation: letters by Plato, Zeno, and Epicurus (all but the last of questionable authenticity); verse by Plato (apocryphal epigrams) and Aristotle (the song to Virtue); full lists of their writings for all but Pyrrho, who wrote nothing; extended excerpts summarizing their teachings (one each for Zeno and Pythagoras, two for Plato, three complete letters by Epicurus and his Key Doctrines); wills for Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus, and an honorary inscription for Zeno. Doxography accordingly looms larger too: massive for Zeno (.–), lengthy for Pyrrho (.–), and substantial for all the rest except Diogenes the Cynic, for whom we are treated instead to a deluge of anecdotes (.–: Goulet-Cazé ). So large a part does doxography play in these cases, in fact, that the format here might more aptly be dubbed ‘biodoxography’ (Gigante ; Schorn ). Length generally corresponds to influence (at least as viewed from his own time), and other pivotal figures also receive special attention too: both pioneers like Thales (.–), Empedocles (.–), Heraclitus (.–), and Democritus (.–), and pivotal figures like Socrates (.–), Aristippus of Cyrene (.–), Menedemus of Eretria (.–), Arcesilaus (.–), Theophrastus (.–), and the Stoic Chrysippus (.–), the latter two each swollen by catalogues of their copious writings (.–, .–). Yet some of the most vivid episodes appear in the shortest Lives: Zeno of Elea defying his brutal captors by biting into his interrogator’s ear, then biting off his own tongue (.–); and Anaxarchus of Abdera, after accompanying Alexander to India, boasting defiantly to his captors as he was bound in a sack to be bludgeoned, ‘Pound away at Anaxarchus’ sack: you won’t strike Anaxarchus!’ (.). The Eleatic Zeno is far better known for his powerful paradoxes of motion, which receive only the briefest mention here; and the cursory Life of Anaxarchus, who serves here mainly to tie his companion Pyrrho to the Italian succession, otherwise highlights his moderating influence on Alexander. Shorter Lives also report some famous conversions to philosophy (Gigon ): Phaedo of Elis by Socrates (.), Polemo
of Athens by Xenocrates (.), Crates of Thebes by Diogenes the Cynic (.), and Hipparchia by Crates in turn, who subjected her to a brazen test of nudity before accepting her own comparably bold proposal of marriage (.–). Likewise for examples of civic leadership: Melissus commanding a squadron of Samian ships (.) that, according to Plutarch, rebuffed the Athenian fleet under Pericles (Pericles –); Menedemus of Eretria repeatedly elected by his city for negotiating its autonomy from Antigonid dynasts (.–); Demetrius of Phalerum managing Athens in the early years of Macedonian rule (.–); and so on. So too for amorous episodes of all stripes, from Xenocrates’ stony indifference to the allures of the celebrated courtesan Phryne (.) to the proud indulgences of the hedonist Aristippus of Cyrene (.–) and the staunch sceptic Arcesilaus (.–). The prevalence of unusual episodes in shorter Lives can often be ascribed to a paucity of relevant information of any other sort. But it also reflects another aspect of the work’s peculiar orientation: its ongoing efforts to pique interest in its theme, both the philosophers it portrays and the practice of philosophy more generally. Other features symptomatic of this agenda are a pervasive disregard for temporal sequence or for establishing, let alone maintaining, linear narratives, even more so than in Plutarch and other predecessors— compare their very different Lives of Solon (.– and Solon)—and also Diogenes’ evident relish in quoting his own verse to cap so many of his Lives, mostly elegiac couplets twitting a philosopher’s death but varied by a sprinkling of other topics and unusual forms, a total of squibs from the collection he dubbed Pammetros (Gigante : –). A closer look at two of the Lives, one longer and one shorter, will illustrate the flexibility of his template and some of its strengths and shortcomings.
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.................................................................................................................................. The foibles, flaws, and charms of Diogenes’ approach stand out in his Life of Aristotle, which thanks to its subject’s own prominence is more attentive than most to chronological sequence and detail. Table . displays its structure and main components.7 The whole comprises two main blocks of roughly equal length: first of all, important people and events in his life from beginning to end, then a survey of his thought as expressed both orally and in writing. Framing these two blocks is basic information about his identity: initially his parents, birthplace, ancestry, and philosophical patrimony (aptly conflated by labelling him Plato’s ‘most legitimate’ heir), and finally a list of ‘homonyms’ to distinguish him from other Aristotles. Each block in turn has a clear structure. The biography begins with a quick sketch of his appearance (physique, dress, hairstyle) and family (his only son, named Nicomachus after his own father, but illegitimate according to detractors). It then recounts in linear sequence some key episodes in his circuitous career: how he left Plato to start his own school in Athens and acquired the 7
Düring () collects and analyses the abundant ancient evidence, including Diogenes’ Life; cf. Sollenberger (), Natali (), and DPhA vol. , . Instructive treatments of other Lives include Brisson (b) on Plato, Long () on Arcesilaus, Goulet Cazé () on the Cynics, Laks () on Pythagoras, and Laks () on Epicurus.
Table 19.1 Topical outline of the Life of Aristotle Feature Topic A. Biography (5.1 16)
Family and studies
Parents and lineage, Plato, physical traits, son (1)
Teaching
Academy, Peripatos (2 3a)
Travels
Hermias and marriage; Alexander and Callisthenes; Athens and Eleusinia; Chalcis and death (3b 6)
Documentation
Trial, epitaph and song for Hermias (5b 8a)
More verse
Diogenes’ epigram on death, Aristotle’s Homeric parody (8b 9a)
Dates
Birth, Plato, Lesbos, Hermias, Philip, Athens, Chalcis; Synchronism with Demosthenes, relations with Alexander (9b 10)
Detractors
Theocritus of Chios, Timon of Phlius (11a)
Conclusion and addenda Will, peculiar habits (11b 16) B. Philosophy (5.17 34) Sayings (anthology) Writings (bibliography)
Maxims, anecdotes, other remarks (17 21) Catalogue and praise (22 27)
Teachings (doxography) Parts, logic, ethics, physics, summation (28 34) C. Prosopography (5.35)
Homonyms and associates (35)
nickname ‘Peripatetic’ (for his habit of strolling when teaching); then a stay with Hermias in the Troad, whose ‘mistress’ he married (other accounts say his daughter); then time in Macedonia teaching the young Alexander; and his return to Athens, where he taught for thirteen more years, until obliged by charges of impiety to decamp to Euboean Chalcis (his mother’s home, as other sources report), where he ended his life ‘at the age of ’ according to one historian, or as Diogenes promptly (and correctly) adds. Only here at the end, in an awkward return to the beginning, are we told that Aristotle first joined Plato at the age of . There follow the song to Virtue in honor of Hermias, Diogenes’ own epigram on Aristotle’s death (a frigid effort that turns on appalling wordplay), and a reprise of the main episodes, each now dated by both Olympiad and Archon from the Chronologies of the Hellenistic scholar Apollodorus, and finally a pair of verse caricatures. ‘That then is the life of the philosopher,’ Diogenes concludes, before continuing, ‘For our part, we also came across his will’ (.; cf. .), which he then records in full (Gottschalk ), before closing with a short list of peculiar habits. The sequence, though flawed by error and omission, is at least ostensibly linear and forms a complete circle from Athens and back, with Aristotle’s devotion to his wife and early patrons sowing the seeds of his eventual demise in the face of impiety charges. Defined by changing locations, it also highlights ties to famous names and events: the upstart tyrant Hermias, Philip of Macedon and his son, his own nephew Callisthenes, an abrupt death reminiscent of Socrates. Three of the four stages, moreover, are marked by philosophical endeavours: starting his own school, teaching Alexander, returning to teach in Athens; so too was the fourth, with studies in the Troad and Lesbos, about which
Diogenes is here silent. The finale, as often, is recited in detail and documented: Diogenes identifies the prosecutor’s name and station, along with an alternative contender for the villain’s role cited from Favorinus (a favourite Imperial authority), and quotes a verse inscription for Hermias at Delphi as well as the more famous lyrics, ostensibly to supply a basis for the charges but equally to indicate Aristotle’s own character and literary talents. Clearly the organizing principle is philosophical activity, each section centred on the philosopher’s lifework; even the first, highlighting his ties to Plato, ascribes their eventual divergence to his fortuitous absence when Plato died.8 The second block, comprising three sections, is more coherently organized: first of all, a selection of choice sayings as testimony to his philosophical integrity and high standards (Searby ); then a long list of his writings, nearly titles, many in multiple ‘books’ or volumes (Moraux ); a concise summary of some key doctrines, including explication of some distinctive terminology (Moraux ); all capped by the usual list of homonyms. Most of this material is also preserved elsewhere along with much more: biography, sayings, and titles mainly in later authors, ‘doctrines’ and terminology most fully of course in the many surviving writings of Aristotle himself. Nor does what Diogenes reports always accord with other evidence. Even his relatively full account here contains striking omissions and muddles: nothing on Aristotle’s youth, education, or initial conversion to philosophy; distorted ties to Plato; no mention of his numerous students, apart from a few named in the will; and so on (Natali : –). Compared with other life-writing of his own or earlier times, however, Diogenes represents a high-water mark in scope and scholarship. A final inventory is indicative: Aristotle’s own philosophical writings quoted twice, once with a title cited; his will and two of his poems recorded in full (the epigram not attested elsewhere); a handful of his remarks, including several verse parodies; numerous authorities cited by name, mainly Hellenistic; a pair of early verse critics, one harsh, one satirical. A census of names yields a rich harvest of prosopography too: twenty-one family members, including slaves and legendary ancestors, twenty rulers and other public figures, a dozen authors, eight fellow philosophers—and seven other Aristotles, all writers in turn. The Life of Parmenides (.–), despite its brevity, illustrates both the basic template and some of its typical complications (Rocca-Serra ; cf. DPhA vol. a, –). On the exiguous side as for many earlier figures (barely lines; Aristotle’s runs to over ), it is more thumbnail sketch than biography, framed by two short statements establishing his identity and distinguishing him from a single homonym. The first supplies the standard triad of names: ‘Parmenides, son of Pyres, from Elea’; the last lists only an otherwise unknown ‘orator and handbook-writer’. That is all we learn about his family or travels or activity in any public domain. In between come three short sections: on his teachers (.), his teachings and writings, with a single witness to reception (.–), and an indication of his dates capped by random addenda (.). The opening section typifies in miniature Diogenes’ handling of affiliation and its thematic prominence. He names three teachers: an opening claim, unattributed and in
The story of Aristotle’s absence is confused and probably false (Düring : ). Wording, however, minimizes divergence: ‘stood apart’ refers only to finding a new venue for teaching, not to philosophical ‘apostasy’; and Plato’s quip on him ‘kicking back’ highlights his independent thinking already in the Academy (cf. ., ., Ael. VH .). 8
his own voice, that Parmenides ‘was a listener of Xenophanes’;9 then a report (now in indirect discourse) from Theophrastus, or rather an ‘epitome’ or digest of his foundational work of doxography, Doctrines of the Natural Philosophers in all of eighteen books, that Parmenides ‘was a listener of Anaximander’; and finally a comment (in Diogenes’ own voice again) that ‘despite listening to Xenophanes too, he did not follow him’. To fill the gap created by this dismissal, Diogenes then names, on the authority of Sotion (active after , author of the first and most widely cited contribution to ‘successions’ literature: Wehrli ), the teacher ‘he did follow’: an otherwise unknown ‘Ameinias son of Diochartes, a Pythagorean and man of scant means but distinguished character’.10 To confirm his decisive role, Diogenes then supplies the only other biographical datum in the entire entry: how Parmenides ‘established a hero-shrine’ for Ameinias upon his death. Before turning to the next section of the Life, it is worth taking stock. Diogenes links Parmenides to four individuals, three simply named without identifying features: the father and two well-known philosophers, both subjects of earlier Lives (Xenophanes .–, Anaximander .–, and lines respectively). Their contributions, though certainly significant—one the source of life, stature, and wealth (.), the other two of philosophical insight—receive only passing mention, because from the perspective of a philosophical life, all are eclipsed by what the fourth supplied: ‘by Ameinias, not by Xenophanes, he was turned to serenity’ (εἰς ἡσυχίαν προετράπη). The student’s gesture of piety, not filial or civic but spiritual in its basis and objective—honouring the transformation of his own life and soul by Ameinias by transforming his benefactor in turn into a hero, an exalted status in Pythagorean cult and lore—is the signal episode in his life as philosopher, aptly singled out as the only unquestioned event in the entire entry. No other personal encounters are reported; nor any students, not even his famous younger compatriot and closest associate Zeno, who in his own life is introduced as ‘by nature son of Teleutagoras, by adoption of Parmenides’ (.) and then as his ‘boyfriend’ (paidika from Pl. Prm. b). Likewise nothing of his physical appearance, in striking contrast again with Zeno, whose ‘tall stature’ Diogenes notes on Plato’s authority (. from Prm. b again), who there describes Parmenides more fully as ‘already very old and altogether hoary with age, but distinguished in visage, about years old’ (still b). Diogenes may only be following an intermediate source here; some have doubted he ever read or consulted Plato’s dialogues. The salient point, in any case, is selectivity, whether on his own initiative or inherited: a general disregard for physical and material factors, be it looks, wealth, or civic stature, unless and until those intersect with his work’s golden thread, the life of the mind and spirit that constitutes a philosophical life. Following that thread into the heart of this particular Life, we find a succinct sketch (longer than the rest of the Life combined) of some of Parmenides’ more distinctive positions. A mini-doxography, again credited to Theophrastus (F D Fortenbaugh et al. ; cf. Sens. –), begins with cosmology and highlights a notable innovation: ‘the first to declare the earth spherical in shape and at rest in the middle’ of the cosmos as a whole. Then come epistemology and related innovations, supported by six lines from the master’s own poem and a passing comment on his use of hexameters: ‘the same as Hesiod
9 10
A frequent idiom, often literal for direct contact, but also by extension only for reading. The patronym is an emendation for Diochaites (BP) and Diochetes (F) in the codices.
and Xenophanes [before him], and Empedocles [later]’. The account concludes with two tributes to his influence: a rare positive assessment (hexameters again) from the sceptic Timon’s almost universally critical Silloi or Lampoons (SH ), and Plato’s eponymously entitled dialogue, described as ‘for him’ and assigned its topical label ‘On Ideas’ (cf. .). The Life concludes with chronology and addenda (.). Parmenides’ acme, presumably following Apollodorus of Athens, is assigned to Olympiad (– ). Four disputed attributions follow: the first to demonstrate that the evening and morning star are identical (i.e. Venus), a discovery others ascribe to Pythagoras; a denial by Callimachus that his poem is genuinely his; a claim that he wrote laws for Elea (cf. Strabo .., Plu. Adv. Col. A); and an attribution of the famous ‘Achilles’ and tortoise argument, otherwise universally ascribed to Zeno (cf. Arist. Ph. b). As in the opening section, so again in closing Diogenes reports conflicting opinions, which like a philosophical Herodotus, or the Pyrrhonian sceptics he plainly admires, he sometimes adjudicates (as we saw in .) but often leaves open, as here. Several features prominent in other Lives, including some for which the Lives are best known, are missing here: no anecdotes retailing pithy insights or biting retorts, no account of how Parmenides died, no list of writings. Rather than fault Diogenes, however, we might more reasonably credit him with adhering to available evidence, which could not have been extensive for so early a figure; in fact, nothing more of Parmenides’ life is recorded elsewhere, not even in the Suda, beyond his cameo in Plato’s dramatic fiction. Yet even in so brief a compass, Diogenes cites seven authorities, all major figures (four receive their own Lives): Plato and Speusippus, founding fathers of the Academy; Theophrastus and Sotion, twin fountainheads for doxography and ‘successions’; Pyrrhonism’s leading promoter, Timon, and his contemporary, the pioneering bibliographer Callimachus; and the great polymath (and fellow Academic sympathizer) Favorinus of Arles only a generation or so earlier than Diogenes, not to mention several lines of Parmenides’ own poem. This apparatus, bundled at either end of the Life, could serve multiple purposes: to give the account a stamp of authority, and enhance our author’s own credibility, as in his Herodotean attention to disagreements; to indicate or justify Parmenides’ place in the chain of successions, as a forerunner of Pyrrhonian scepticism rather than among Pythagoreans as his mentor might suggest; to provide pointers for further reading or study; and no doubt still others. Whatever the aim, it exemplifies again one of the more distinctive features of the Lives: its attention, verging on fascination, to displaying the long and rich tradition of scholarship on which the Lives here retold are based.
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.................................................................................................................................. This is a report of Diogenes Laertius’ studies, so that neither the generations of philosophers may vanish with time, nor their great and wondrous works pass untold, nor the reasons why they contended with one another as they did.
So might Diogenes have opened his survey of eminent Greek philosophers. In scope, variety, method, even ambition, his work presents striking parallels with the foundational
classic of ancient history, recast for the bookish, classicizing tastes of readers of an Imperial era. Shift the topic from conflict to disputation, from warring peoples to arguing schools of philosophers, and the testimony from crowds of oral informants to vast libraries of texts, and Diogenes is his subject’s Herodotus: a voluble investigator and ‘historian’ of Greek philosophy from its foggy archaic origins, when sages first won prizes not for valour in combat or prowess in athletic or poetic performance but for pithy insights and discerning judgement (.–), on through its rapid advance from scattered origins to convergence on Athens, where generation upon generation of students and devotees were drawn from all corners of the Hellenized world (cf. Bowie on Pausanias). The text as we have it, however, starts abruptly, launching directly into its theme without preamble or preface to state its aims or aspiration: no Herodotean proclamation or Thucydidean programme, let alone any self-promoting dedication like the boast of imperial instigation posted by Philostratus at the front of his Life of Apollonius (.). All we have is the work itself, and its opening words duly identify its focus as ‘the ergon of philosophy’: a distinctive form of ‘work’ embracing both activity and its products, in short, the practice of philosophy as a social reality and cultural institution, an entire way of living with its characteristic practices, standards, traditions, expectations, but also room for individuality and innovation. The ensuing prologue explains (Gigon ; Warren ). First of all, where did the practice originate, among Greeks or foreigners? And as Herodotus grants Persian authorities the first word, so Diogenes begins with rival ‘barbarian’ claimants, mainly Egyptian and Persian but with passing mention of several other neighbouring cultures as well: Babylonian, Indian, Celtic, Gallic, Phoenician, Thracian, Libyan (.). Like Herodotus, however, he swiftly dismisses their claims, invoking three legendary Greek poets instead—Musaeus, Linus, and Orpheus, each supplied with thumbnail Lives (.–)—before giving Egyptians and Persians more attention (.–). Language finally clinches the case: the word itself is natively Greek (.), adopted rather than translated by Roman and other cultures (Riedweg ). To show what the name denotes, and therewith the governing conception of the Lives and its influence on the selection, organization, and orientation of the biographies, the prologue then goes on to outline the system of ‘successions’ that defines the work’s superstructure (.–) and to introduce its basic divisions and categories, including both the discipline’s three parts and its key institutional factor of ‘stances’ (.–). As we have seen, the Lives that follow contain many standard components of biography and show abundant affinity to other ancient biographies. Yet they also contain much more, with doxography and bibliography repeatedly overshadowing biographical incident and narrative. Does the resulting composite still qualify as biography? Plainly not in today’s ordinary usage. But neither does most other ancient life-writing adhere to modern expectations. Equally plainly, the Lives does achieve the dual goal its opening words announce: a vivid exhibition of the ‘work of philosophy’ through a condensed and abbreviated but comprehensive survey of its leading practitioners and their distinctive practices, in particular, their teachings and writings, thereby revealing the implicit genotype by displaying the vast diversity of its phenotypes. The received title of the work, though almost certainly adventitious, is nonetheless accurate enough: Lives and Insights of the Eminent Philosophers (more precisely ‘those who achieved fame in philosophy’) and Abbreviated Summary of the Tenets (or Doctrines)
of Each Stance.11 The phrasing is alien to the text itself. ‘Insight’ appears only rarely here or in philosophical discourse generally, but frequently in later traditions where it commonly labels compilations of the kinds of maxims and sayings with which the Lives is so well stocked. More to the point, Diogenes’ own usage treats biography as only a part of his project, a major one certainly, but not the whole. In fact, he regularly characterizes his own approach rather differently. Not only does he never refer to his writing, either the whole or any part, by a collective title (only τὸ πᾶν σύγγραμμα in .); only twice does he ever refer to any of its chapters as a ‘Life’, and both times he does so it is to another section within the same book: once in a cross-reference late in Book to its first Life: ‘in the bios of Thales’ (., cf. . within .–); and again at a transition from biography to doxography in Book to explain why the summary of Stoic doctrines appears ‘in the bios of Zeno: because he was the school’s founder’ (.).12 To be sure, Diogenes characterizes much of his work as biographical, repeatedly referring to portions of it, including some relatively lengthy portions, as someone’s ‘life’; but he typically does so precisely at the end of his biographical section, either literally in formulaic phrases about their death (as in ‘he ended’ or ‘concluded’ his life: ten times), or formally as a transition to other material (documents, doctrines, or chronology: seven times). More often he describes his individual chapters simply as ‘talking about’ someone (cf. Schorn b), once even combining the two locutions in a single cross-reference: ‘which we discussed in the Life about Arcesilaus’ (ἐν τῷ περὶ Ἀρκεσιλάου βίῳ, ., cf. . within .–). Diogenes himself, then, evidently conceives of his work as including biography as we ordinarily understand it but not as life-writing tout court—not as an account in more or less narrative form of res gestae and life-episodes. Rather, he seems to envision his work as displaying a distinctive way of life: both the enormous variety and the essential core of the practice of philosophy as displayed in the sayings, conduct, and writings of its great pioneers and most influential figures.
A A
.................................................................................................................................. The fates were initially unkind to Diogenes. We have no trace of his Lives before the geographer Stephanus of Byzantium in the waning years of Antiquity and the rise of antiquarian compendia to preserve writings and information swiftly disappearing. But his work has had an influential afterlife, and profound influence on later thought (Dorandi 11 The transmitted title, inscribed at the head of the work in two of our three primary manuscripts (FP; the first leaf of B is lost) and (with minor variation) at the end of some books in two of them (PB), is βίοι καὶ γνῶμαι τῶν ἐν ϕιλοσοϕίᾳ εὐδοκιμησάντων, καὶ τῶν ἐν ἑκάστῃ αἱρέσει ἀρεσκόντων (or δογμάτων) ἐν ἐπιτομῇ συναγωγή. See also the reported title for the bio bibliographies in Callimachus’ Pinakes: ‘Tables of those Renowned in every Discipline [τῶν ἐν πάσῃ παιδείᾳ διαλαμψάντων], and of their Writings, in books’ (Suda κ s.v. Callimachus). 12 Diogenes freely assigns the title ‘Lives’ to works by others: Antigonus, Hermippus, Satyrus, Aristoxenus (.), Ariston of Ceos (.), Timotheus of Athens, Diocles of Magnesia; likewise Plutarch, whose parallel Lives he cites in the singular (‘the Life of Lysander and Sulla’ .; cf. .), and a homonym of Xenophon for a similarly single ‘Life of Epaminondas and Pelopidas’ (.).
; Primavesi and Luchner ). As the fullest surviving account of the lives and work of most of the figures it addresses, and the most comprehensive collection too, it provided the framework by default for early modern accounts of Greek philosophy as a whole. So popular was the quattrocento Latin translation by the Florentine monk Ambrogio Traversari (c.; Dorandi : –) that its first printing () preceded the editio princeps of the Greek text () by sixty years. And the Lives remained the foundation for histories of ancient philosophy through the nineteenth century: filled out with parallels, additions, and emendations from other sources, reconfigured to fit changing interests and agendas, but largely uncontested in its broader contours. When Hermann Diels produced his epochal Fragmente der Vorsokratiker in , he still organized his material along very similar lines—revised and refined, but still basically intellectual genealogy—and gave Diogenes pride of place as the first witness (under ‘Testimonien’) for every figure whose Life he had written. Even today, handbooks often follow the same path, giving more attention to theories and arguments to be sure, but presenting biographical data as an entry point for discussion of the influences on and of each figure’s thought. As it turns out, then, the collection has had an illustrious afterlife. For all the complaints registered over the past century or more—often more a token of a critic’s unrequited wishes than Diogenes’ failings in pursuit of his own aims—the influence of his work has been both lasting and profound. Its success, much though it owes to the loss or paucity of alternative accounts, depends also, and arguably more, on its answering to the needs and interests of its changing audiences, however feebly some may now see it serving their own. Nor is it idle, in the absence of any further enunciation of his own rationale, to consider Diogenes’ aims in terms of the audience he himself envisioned. To that end it is instructive to look at a tantalizing pair of addresses to an anonymous female reader, curiously embedded deep within the work at two strategic junctures within the only two books dedicated to a single philosopher (Gigante : –).13 The first appears midway through Book on Plato, at a key turning point. After completing his account of the philosopher’s life, and before appending the usual list of writings, addenda, and homonyms, Diogenes pauses to flatter his singular reader by way of explaining why he will say (much) more than usual about this particular philosopher’s writings, and rather more about his teachings too (.): For you, who are (ὑπαρχούσῃ) rightly an admirer of Plato and ambitiously investigating (ζητούσῃ) the teachings of this philosopher more than any other, I thought myself obliged to present an outline of the nature of his writings, the order of his dialogues, and his method of inductive reasoning, covering so far as possible only the fundamentals of the main points, so that my collection about his life (τὴν περὶ τοῦ βίου συναγωγήν) not be deprived of his teachings. For it would be owls for Athens, as they say, if I gave you a detailed exposition.14
Contested details aside, we may reasonably take this description as tailored to more than a single addressee, dedicatee, or honorand, and as targeting more generally an ‘ideal’ reader 13
Her gender has inspired speculation that Diogenes, like Philostratus in his Life of Apollonius, wrote for the Empress Julia Domna or someone in her ‘circle’ (VA .); see Levick (: ) for a balanced discussion. 14 All translations are my own.
that defines the wider implied audience for whom Diogenes conceived himself to be writing. Two points then deserve notice. Despite her special interest in Plato (ϕιλοπλάτων, even if only a courtier’s flattering hyperbole for ‘fond of Plato’, signifies something close to ‘devotion’), she is ‘ambitiously investigating’ his doctrines more than any other philosopher. With due allowance for exaggeration, the plain implication is that her familiarity with Plato’s works is either incipient or still superficial, only a modest acquaintance with his teachings via compendia or other indirect sources and little with his writings directly, which thus calls for the exceptionally detailed accounting that follows (.–). If that is even roughly right, interesting consequences follow. Diogenes presents enough to invite and guide his readers to further study, ideally direct encounters with philosophical texts, especially a classic philosopher’s own writings as here, or in any case, richer fodder than Diogenes himself supplies—in all but one case, to which we shall turn in a moment. The hypothesis can be corroborated on two fronts: both the immediate sequel, drawn from Thrasyllus (a Platonist favoured by the Emperor Tiberius: Tac. Ann. .), which presents a set of prolegomena for the study of Plato’s entire corpus (Tarrant ; cf. .– for Thrasyllus’ similar survey of Democritus’ corpus); and more broadly the general tenor of Diogenes’ work as a whole, which plainly presupposes an audience well versed in ‘encyclic’ studies, appreciative of rhetorical flourish and witty repartee, and attuned to the literary and historical reference and allusion, both common cultural coin and abstruse, that festoon his text—and yet not well read in the higher learning of philosophy. Diogenes’ other address to his singular reader appears at the end of the biographical section on Epicurus, immediately following a list of ‘the best’ of his ‘prolific’ writings, as Diogenes turns to his teachings (.–): The views he holds in these works I shall try to present by transcribing three of his letters, which summarize his entire philosophy. We shall also transcribe his Key Doctrines and any remarks of his we consider worthy of selection, so as to enable you to grasp the man from all sides and to discern that I know to be discerning.
Before transcribing the letters, Diogenes provides a brief introduction to Epicurean methods and terminology (.–), and again succinct summaries of Epicurean ethics before and after the last letter (.– and –). Otherwise he cedes the stage for the long final act of his Lives entirely to Epicurus himself in a unique tribute to the philosopher’s own accounts of his teachings. The gesture, filling more than two-thirds of Book with Epicurus’ own words, is all the more remarkable for being explicitly addressed to an avowed ‘admirer of Plato’ (.). This need not imply, as sometimes supposed, sectarian support for Epicureanism; even a dedicated Stoic like Seneca freely borrows from Epicurus throughout the opening books of his epistolary campaign to lead his readers—similarly figured under the name of an elusive ‘Lucilius’—steadily deeper into philosophy and its transformative inquiries (Graver ).15 More likely, the first and only sustained encounter with a philosopher’s own words that Diogenes offers his readers serves to provide a fitting close to a work conceived as an introduction to philosophical study and
Goulet Cazé (: ) reviews opinions about Diogenes’ own stance and finds no basis for assigning him any allegiance. 15
philosophical approaches to living. Consider the exhortation with which the third letter concludes (.–): Who do you think is superior to one who has pious beliefs about the gods, who is entirely fearless about death, who has fully appraised nature’s end, and who realizes that the limit of good things is easy to accomplish and obtain, whereas the limit of bad things has either little duration or little intensity? . . . And he [sc. the Epicurean philosopher just described] considers it better to be unfortunate when acting reasonably than fortunate when acting unreasonably; for it is better for a bad decision to be corrected that way. So ponder these and the related points day and night by yourself and with someone like yourself, and never will you feel anxiety either awake or asleep, and you will live like a god among men. For anyone living among immortal blessings bears no likeness to a mortal creature.
The ringing peroration has tempted some to see the entire sequence of letters, and especially this last one with its closing catechism, as an implicit endorsement of specifically Epicurean teaching and practice. Yet its claims and wording are markedly ecumenical, equally suited to an entirely non-sectarian exhortation to philosophical study generally. So too the ‘colophon’ or copestone, as Diogenes dubs it (borrowing a famous metaphor of Plato’s), with which he brings his collection of Lives to a close, ‘making our ending the beginning of happiness’ (.): an anthology of Epicurean maxims and insights that provide a veritable self-help guide to personal improvement for both his anonymous addressee and all the other readers she represents, whether new to philosophy or novices seeking thoughtful guidance, anyone in fact open to philosophical study and its rewards. In capping the entire work with these Key Doctrines, then, Diogenes gives this classic manual of philosophy (cf. Lucian Alex. ) the last words, closing finally with its seductive vision of collective peace and harmony (KD in .): ‘All who were most able to gain confidence from their neighbours thereby lived together most pleasantly, most secure in mutual trust, and by forming the closest affiliation they never mourned in sorrow over anyone’s untimely end.’ At whatever stage of the pax romana Diogenes wrote, earlier or later in the Severan reign, he ends on a triumphant note, depicting philosophy as a cornerstone of world peace; and the basis for that pacific vision resides in the lives—and much less the careers than the ways of living, all rooted in commitment to lofty intellectual standards and ethical ideals—on display in his gallery of philosophical Lives.
F R Dorandi () supersedes earlier editions of the Greek text and supplies abundant bibliography. Goulet Cazé () provides a meticulous French translation, detailed introductions to each book, and copious notes; English translations are Hicks () in the Loeb collection, Mensch and Miller () with essays by several scholars, and now S. White (). Mejer (), Gigante (), and Warren () are fundamental discussions of the Lives as a whole; Giannantoni () and ANRW II. vols. contain valuable studies of many sections and aspects. Hägg (a: ) provides a useful introduction to biographical issues illustrated with brief discussions of selected Lives. Remains of ancient authors of philosophical ‘successions’ are collected in Wehrli (), Gigante (), and Giannattasio Andria (); key sources for ‘doxography’ in Diels (); exhaustive prosopography in DPhA.
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’ Eusebius of Caesarea and the Life of Constantine ......................................................................................................................
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T H L
.................................................................................................................................. T Life of Constantine’s fame guarantees Eusebius of Caesarea a place in a Handbook of Ancient Biography. And he certainly deserves that place. But it is earned less on the basis of this text—which in fact makes no claim to be a bios—and more from a collected oeuvre that witnesses a consistent and innovative use of the biographical genre. The Life, in progress in the late s and possibly incomplete at his death in , represents the end of Eusebius’ authorial career. But Eusebius’ first tentative step on that fertile literary path was an apology for his intellectual forebear Origen of Alexandria, undertaken together with his mentor Pamphilus of Caesarea while the latter was in prison, and the sixth book of which Eusebius wrote alone (written –; see HE ..; cf. Phot. Bibl. , ).1 His first lone enterprise was the lost Life of Pamphilus (–; see HE ..). After the subsequent tabular experiments of the Chronicle, it was a work of collective biography, the Martyrs of Palestine (hereafter Martyrs), which provided the narrative bridge to his famed Ecclesiastical History (hereafter History).2 The latter is not easily generically defined, but has been most recently classed as a cross between biographical and national history (DeVore ). Certainly it tells its extraordinary tale of early Christianity under Rome via the exploits of its prominent protagonists. Even Eusebius’ non-narrative works occasionally employ biographical tropes (A. Johnson ). Though he was no model biographer, Eusebius provided some of the more interesting experiments with the genre to survive from Antiquity. The pervasive influence of biography throughout Eusebius’ writings makes it all the more extraordinary that the Life is so rarely read in the light of his other biographic literary The Defence of Origen survives only in Rufinus’ Latin translation of its first book; see Scheck (). For a timeline of Eusebius’ literary projects, see Carriker (: ). 2 On the chronology of the composition of the Chronicle, Martyrs, and History, see in particular Barnes (), Louth (), and the now largely accepted position of R. Burgess (), though this has been recently questioned by A. Johnson (). On reading the Martyrs as a prolegomenon to the History, see Corke Webster (). 1
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experiments. This is perhaps because the many undeniably unique features of the Life have dominated discussion. The Life is extraordinary in both its genre and content and in many ways does stand alone among the extant works of Eusebius and indeed of Antiquity more generally. But we can also read it as the culmination of Eusebius’ lifelong exploration with biography. Doing so, I suggest, adds an important layer to our understanding of Eusebius’ diverse purposes in this protean text, namely, Constantine’s relationship with the earlier, episcopal heroes of Eusebius’ vision of Christianity. In large part no doubt because of the historiographical, political and theological importance of its subject, scholarship on the Life throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries was concerned above all with its (oft-doubted) authenticity.3 The stylistic similarity of the text to Eusebius’ other works means Eusebian authorship is now rarely questioned, and the genuine nature of the Constantinian documents included in the Life has been established beyond reasonable doubt, largely because of the independent attestation provided by the discovery and identification of PLond (A.H.M. Jones and Skeat ).4 Wrangling over the Life’s authenticity naturally spawned a discussion of its genre. If the text was not significantly interpolated or otherwise interfered with, its universally recognized oddities, not least its extraordinary combination of biographical, historiographical, or panegyrical features, must be otherwise explained. Most scholars now accept Timothy Barnes’ argument that the Life is a hybrid, a narrative extension of the History begun after , later converted to a panegyric when Constantine died on May (Barnes ; , rehabilitating the hybrid theory of Pasquali , which had reversed the order of Eusebius’ experiment). Many, including Barnes and Pasquali, believe that this genre experiment remained incomplete at Eusebius’ death in (though this is more regularly questioned).5 As part of this genre analysis, close attention has been paid, in particular by S.G. Hall (a; b), to the Life’s (modified) reuse of the History (see also Drake ; Cameron and Hall : –). But the questions asked have more often been of source and form rather than content and meaning. This was because at stake was the Life’s reliability for historical purposes. The status of our main source for Constantine, and the perspective of its author, were considered necessary prerequisites before discussing, for example, the nature of Constantine’s conversion, the sincerity of his faith, and the extent of his ‘religious’ policies. This historical focus has left literary questions relatively neglected. It is only now that the dust has settled on these questions of form that attention is turning to the question of exactly how Eusebius wrote to achieve his context-specific goals. The influence of traditional panegyric on the Life’s picture of Constantine has received some attention, notably by
3
For a summary of the historiography, see Winkelmann () and the discussion in Cameron and Hall (: ); for the sceptical position, see e.g. Grégoire (). 4 Pietri () also demonstrates the similarities between the documents cited in the Life and those preserved elsewhere (and their divergences from Eusebius’ own style). For continuing scepticism, see T.G. Elliott (). 5 For example, Cameron (), Cameron and Hall (: , ), and M.S. Williams (: ). Drake () suggests instead that the Life was begun much later in .
Storch ().6 But scholarship on the influence of previous biographical writing has been less abundant, in part because of a relative lack of obvious parallels.7 Averil Cameron’s (Cameron : ) observation that the Life was understudied as a literary text, has thus been reiterated by Claudia Rapp (Rapp : ), and again recently by Peter Van Nuffelen (: ). The one significant exception to this oversight is Eusebius’ apologetic use of a Moses typology (perhaps dependent on Philo’s Life of Moses, on which see Chapter in this volume). In Books and of the Life in particular, Eusebius presents Constantine’s life as echoing the threefold breakdown of that of Moses—as a boy in a hostile court, as triumphant liberator, and as lawgiver. Michael Hollerich () has argued that this served an apologetic purpose, including the sanctioning of Constantine’s military killing that might otherwise have fallen foul of Christian ethics. Claudia Rapp () has argued that Moses provided a prototypical leader combining political and spiritual authority, and, in the same year, Anna Wilson suggested that Eusebius employed Moses to argue for a cooperative relationship between church and state (A. Wilson ). Sabrina Inowlocki () subsequently has argued that Eusebius was appealing to the implicit ambiguity of Moses in ancient tradition; Michael S. Williams (: –) claimed that he wished to root Constantine in sacred rather than secular history. Finn Damgaard () has stated that the impetus for the comparison came from Constantine himself—who focused on Moses’ political and military features—but that Eusebius appropriated it to his own ends, to argue for the benefit of Constantine’s sons that good kingship was based not on mere descent but on godliness. It is to this budding investigation of Eusebius’ careful construction of a model image of Constantine that I propose an understanding of his wider biographical oeuvre can contribute. To illustrate this I will focus on an aspect of the Life that has garnered attention throughout the history of scholarship, namely, the representation of Constantine as a bishop. The Life contains two such explicit assimilations. The first and more famous comes near the end, when Eusebius quotes Constantine’s own words to those bishops with whom he was dining, which included Eusebius himself, that ‘You are bishops of those within the Church (εἴσω τῆς ἐκκλησίας), but I am perhaps a bishop (ἐπίσκοπος ἂν εἴην) appointed by God (ὑπὸ θεοῦ καθεσταμένος) over those outside (τῶν ἐκτὸς)’ (VC ..). In the second and less commonly discussed, but I shall argue the more important, Eusebius writes that the emperor, ‘like a universal bishop (οἷά τις κοινὸς ἐπίσκοπος) appointed by God (ἐκ θεοῦ καθεσταμένος) convoked councils of the ministers of God’ (VC ..) to deal with disturbances within the church.8 These two occurrences bookend the Life. They have also always been at the centre of scholarly discussion. Their oddity meant they formed part of the case against the Life’s authenticity (Seston ; Winkelmann : –). They have also been seen as the early exemplars of caesaropapism (see e.g. De Decker and Dupuis-Masay ), as I discuss 6 Storch identified in particular the fourfold scheme whereby all success and benefit derive from divine favour, bestowed as a reward for piety, indicated in military victory and producing peace and unity in the realm. See earlier Pasquali (), and more recently the brief summary in Cameron and Hall (: ). 7 See M.S. Williams () on the Life as part of a category of ‘Christian biography’ distinct from the classical tradition as exemplified by e.g. Xenophon, Suetonius, and Plutarch. A. Johnson (: ), however, does suggest Plutarch as a model for Eusebius. 8 Translations of the Life from Cameron and Hall ().
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in more detail below. And it was an attempt to better explain these passages that prompted Rapp’s () seminal elucidation of the Moses typology. Since Moses was a key model of the combination of secular power and religious authority for Jews and pagans alike, Rapp demonstrates that the passages are not outliers but fit the overall parallel between Constantine and Moses. I suggest that these key phrases can again push forward our thinking on the Life, especially in the light of increasing attention recently paid to Eusebius’ skills as writer and editor rather than merely as compiler.9 The ‘episcopal equivalency’ has too often been read in isolation from Eusebius’ wider oeuvre. In particular, it is extraordinary that so little attention has been paid to what exactly being a bishop meant for Eusebius. The key to understanding these two hugely influential phrases lies precisely in reading the Life as the conclusion to Eusebius’ lifelong experimentation with biography.
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.................................................................................................................................. Eusebius’ Defence of Origen and Life of Pamphilus both heroicized significant churchmen of Christianity’s past. What these texts had done for individuals, the Martyrs did for a local collective and the History for a network stretching geographically across the Empire and chronologically back to three centuries previous. Most prominent among the History’s protagonists are its bishops—their lives are the struts on which Eusebius’ church is built and their interconnections the glue that hold it together. But Eusebius was not simply recording the deeds of great men long gone. He used these mini-biographies as an opportunity to construct and propose his own model of Christian authority to a new Christian generation in the early fourth century. It is here we find clues as to what Eusebius meant in assimilating his emperor to episcopal authority. Eusebius’ model of Christian leadership in the History is threefold: () Eusebius’ ideal bishops are intellectuals.10 Their authority is based on textual criticism, rooted in detailed analysis of scriptures and evidenced in speeches, treatises, and letters; () these intellectual qualities are not reserved in an ivory tower but put to work in the wider world, dedicated to pastoral care and defence of the Christian community against heresy and schism; and () Eusebius’ bishops act not in isolation but as part of an empire-wide network of fellow clerics connected by constant epistolary contact who support and regulate each other.11
9 See Hollerich (), Kofsky (), Inowlocki (), Schott (: ), Morlet (), Verdoner (), and A. Johnson (; ). The increasing attention paid to Eusebius’ writing is evidenced in two recent edited collections, Inowlocki and Zamagni () and Johnson and Schott (). 10 This contrasts sharply with the picture that emerges from independent sources. See e.g. Rapp (: ): ‘Beyond functional literacy, the church did not attribute much importance to the level of education of its bishops. Indeed, it did not foster the foundation of educational institutions, analogous to today’s seminaries, with the specific purpose of training future clergy.’ 11 I have discussed Eusebius’ treatment of Christian intellectuals in the History in my monograph (Corke Webster : ). I argue there that Eusebius inherited his model of intellectual authority from the third centutry thinker Origen of Alexandria, but moulded it to better fit his own fourth century circumstances.
I will take as a case study Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria for seventeen years (HE ..) in the mid-third century, and one of the stars of Eusebius’ History. First of all, his intellectual credentials are put front and centre. He had been educated as part of the hermeneutical tradition associated with the catechetical school of Alexandria, under Origen of Alexandria (HE ..). He later inherited that school from Heraclas, another pupil of Origen, before becoming bishop of the city (HE ..). He produced a lengthy bibliography including not just letters but treatises and commentaries (HE ..–; ..; ..–). His letters provide comfort (e.g. HE ..–) as well as repair schism (e.g. HE ..). Secondly, it is only via his intellectual capacities, specifically the text critical, that Dionysius can defend the community. When Nepos, a bishop of Egypt, goes astray in his teaching, Dionysius notes that it is precisely because Nepos has written down and published his errors, and is therefore leading ‘simpler brothers (τοὺς ἁπλουστέρους ἀδελϕούς)’ (HE ..) astray, that the orthodox bishop must engage with the work in detail and refute it on intellectual grounds (HE ..–; see similarly ..).12 This Dionysius does, via three straight days of detailed engagement with Nepos’ erroneous tome (HE ..–). This is the pattern of Dionysius’ activity throughout—bishop Xystus in Rome, for example, is saved from error by Dionysius’ in depth engagement (HE ..), and the Novatian controversy— at least in part—by Dionysius’ discursive missives (HE ..–).13 Thirdly, Dionysius does not act in isolation. Eusebius emphasizes how his intellectual activities, particularly against heretics, are endorsed by other clerics (e.g. HE ..–). He engages in an extensive epistolary correspondence, sending letters for pastoral, antiheretical, and anti-schismatic purposes (HE ..–; ..–; ..; ..; ..–; ..; ..–..; ..–; ..; ..). In the Nepos case discussed above, Dionysius does not work alone but summons the surrounding elders and teachers (HE ..). He also takes a prominent role in a number of the key third-century synods that achieved consensus often only thanks to his direct involvement (e.g. HE ..). This is true even when he was too ill to attend in person but writes instead (HE ..–..), and subsequently authors the official letter after the council (HE ..). Dionysius is a model of clerical authority for Eusebius—an academic born of a rigorous exegetical training school and grown into a supporter and defender of the community, bound by literary ties into a community of likeminded clerics all marshalling the Christian community with skills rooted in Scripture. Such was the ideal Eusebian bishop.
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.................................................................................................................................. Close attention to neglected aspects of the Life reveals that Eusebius consistently presents Constantine according to this model. Constantine’s mental prowess, for example, is much emphasized from the start. In keeping with most ancient biography, little attention is paid to Constantine’s youth. As part of the Moses typology, we are told how he was raised in the court of tyrants (e.g. VC .). Eusebius tells us that even in his youth he was ‘granted 12 13
Translations of the History and the Martyrs are my own. For the rhetorical qualities of Dionysius’ writings, see Miller ().
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highest honour among them’ (VC ..). Most discussion of this has focused either on the apparent fudge in stating Constantine’s age (e.g. Barnes : –; T.G. Elliott : –), or on Constantine’s presence at Diocletian’s right hand on their tour of Palestine (since this was the first occasion Eusebius himself encountered the emperor who would so capture his attention). But the neglected characterization that follows is equally interesting: In handsome physique and bodily height no other could bear comparison with him; in physical strength he so exceeded his contemporaries as even to put them to fear; he took pride in moral qualities rather than physical superiority, ennobling his soul first and foremost with self control (σωϕροσύνῃ), and thereafter distinguishing himself by the excellence of his rhetorical education (παιδεύσει λόγων), his instinctive shrewdness (ϕρονήσει τ’ ἐμϕύτῳ) and his God given wisdom (τῇ θεοσδότῳ σοϕίᾳ). (VC ..)
Nor does Constantine simply bear the traditional youthful education of the average elite Roman.14 Eusebius is clear that intellectual interests stayed with him beyond his formative years. After his famed visions of the cross and of Christ, Constantine summons Christian experts, who explain to him Christ’s coming and his incarnation. But Constantine ‘now decided personally to apply himself to the divinely inspired writings’ (VC ..). That this is the exegetical education familiar from the History is confirmed by the detail that the Christian authorities summoned are ‘those expert in his [God’s] words’ (VC ..). It is precisely such text-based research which defines Constantine’s own academic prowess. At home, Eusebius notes, the emperor ‘would take the books in his hands and apply his mind (προσανεῖχε τὸν νοῦν) to the meaning of the divinely inspired oracles’ (VC ..) even to the extent of staying up all night in study (VC ..). This is an intellectual emperor, dedicated to that same text criticism that forms the backbone of the History. Like Dionysius and the other bishops of the History, Constantine’s learning is not limited to private study but is evidenced in his extensive publications. Commentators have long noted the emphasis in the Life on Constantine’s own letters. Fifteen are quoted verbatim (VC .-; .; .-; .-; .-; .-; .-; .; .; .; .-; .-; .; .; .) but Eusebius refers to at least a further eight (VC .; .; .; .; .; .; .; .). Constantine, like Dionysius and the History’s other heroes, is a man of letters. Constantine writes other genres too, including orations—Eusebius famously promises to append to the Life Constantine’s speech ‘To the assembly of the saints’ (VC ..)—and treatises (e.g. VC ..).15 Such an output is characteristic of the Eusebian Constantine: ‘He also wrote countless other things of the same kind, and composed a great many letters. In some he gave instructions to bishops about what affected the churches of God; but on occasion he also addressed the congregations themselves’ (VC ..). And in a reference laden with parallels to the History’s lists of episcopal outputs, Eusebius even promises a
14
Eusebius does not place as much emphasis on Constantine’s education at the hands of his parents as he does for Origen of Alexandria in the History. But Constantine’s mother is praised for her wisdom (VC ..) and Constantine is said to have learnt about Christian piety from his father (VC .; . ; .). 15 For a recent edition of the appended Oration to the Saints, see Edwards ().
collection of Constantine’s output (VC ..).16 Constantine thus fits the model of literary leader established in the History.17 As with Dionysius and his episcopal peers, Constantine’s learning is celebrated not for its own sake but for the benefit it brings to the wider community. Constantine is both a teacher and a defender of that community against schism. He is repeatedly described as a teacher. He educated not only his own sons (VC .., both verbally and via letter) but also acts as ‘a tutor (διδάσκαλον)’ (VC ..) to the praetorians and the rest of the military (VC ..; ..). His writings ‘are full of helpful instruction (παιδεύσεως . . . ὠϕελείας πλήρεις)’ (VC .) and he ‘used persuasion (ἔπειθε) and pleading (ἀπελογεῖτο) in what he wrote to them’. When Constantine spoke, many flocked to hear his philosophy, in which ‘he would seem to be initiating the audience with deep awe in the inspired doctrine (τὴν ἔνθεον διδασκαλίαν)’ (VC ..). And in a striking parallel with Origen, another Christian intellectual of the History, Constantine is a Christian intellectual whose superiority non-Christian philosophers are prepared to admit (VC ..; cf. HE ..; ..). But the point is broader. Constantine’s learning underlies his entire approach to government: ‘he thought that he ought to rule his subjects with instructive argument (λόγῳ παιδευτικῷ), and establish his whole imperial rule as rational (λογικήν)’ (VC ..). Like Eusebius’ other bishops, Constantine’s imperial oversight is built upon his intellectual capacities.18 Similarly, Constantine employs his intellectual and literary skills to defend the boundaries of the Christian community. Much of the Life concerns Constantine’s correction of the church’s disunity and schism. Like Dionysius, Constantine is ready and willing to convene his fellow ministers to solve perceived problems of unity. Indeed, one of the programmatic statements of his acting like a bishop recalls just such a convocation ‘when some were at variance with each other at various places’ (VC ..). More significant is his role once these gatherings begin—as Eusebius presents it, he is not a mere organizer but an active participant: ‘He did not disdain to be present and attend during their proceedings (ἐν μέσῃ δὲ τῇ τούτων διατριβῇ), and he participated in the subjects reviewed (κοινωνὸς τῶν ἐπισκοπουμένων ἐγίνετο)’ (VC ..). In engaging in attempts to establish church unity, Constantine is engaging in standard episcopal practice. But more than this, just as in the History, it is precisely Constantine’s intellectual skills that render him effective. At the Council of Tyre, schism among the Egyptian churches is solved by a synod mobilized by Constantine (VC ..–) that ‘the Emperor personally vitalized (ζωπυρῶν) with his own intellectual effort (τῇ αὐτὸς αὐτοῦ διανοίᾳ)’ (VC ..). As with the letters circulated by significant participants like Dionysius after synods of the History, so such documents are here authored by Constantine (e.g. VC .; .). In fact, in some cases, Constantine is writing to denizens of the same heresies with which the church’s
Compare the references to Dionysius’ works (HE .. ; ..; .. ) discussed above, or Eusebius’ collection of Origen’s works (HE ..). 17 The Life makes no explicit link with, e.g. Marcus Aurelius, in line with its overall tendency not to compare Constantine with such classic heroes of late antique panegyric (see M.S. Williams : ). 18 In the History, Eusebius evidences an ambivalent attitude to asceticism, but praises it when it is moderate, intellectual, and intended to provide immediate benefit to the Christian community. Eusebius’ brief mention of Constantine’s own asceticism as enabling him to intercede with God in service of his ‘unsleeping care for the general welfare (τὴν ὑπὲρ τῶν κοινῶν ϕροντίδα)’ (VC ..) is reminiscent in particular of the description of James the Just that Eusebius had taken from Hegesippus (HE .. ). 16
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intellectual clerical leaders had dealt in preceding centuries (VC ..). The Life records how Constantine by means of direct intellectual and literary engagement ‘removed the divisions (τὰς διαστάσεις ἐκποδὼν ποιησάμενος) and brought the whole Church of God into harmonious concord (ὑπὸ σύμϕωνον ἁρμονίαν)’ (VC ..; see too ..). Constantine, like Dionysius and the History’s other churchmen, leads through a superior understanding built upon his intellectual engagement with Scripture. Finally, like his episcopal predecessors in the History, Eusebius’ Constantine does not act in isolation but as part of the collective clergy. Eusebius notes how at councils, ‘he took his seat among them as if he were one voice among many’ (VC ..; see too ..). Constantine also works collectively, as at Nicaea where Eusebius recounts how ‘The Emperor listened to all, without resentment, and received the proposals with patient flexibility (σχολῇ τ’ εὐτόνῳ); he took up what was said by each side in turn, and gently brought together (ἠρέμα συνήγαγε) those whose attitudes conflicted’ (VC ..; see also ..) until consensus is achieved (in this case, in part through his linguistic proficiency). This collectivity is characteristic of his behaviour in all spheres of life. Bishops accompany him on campaign (VC ..; ..–; ..–) and hold established positions in his court (VC ., see too ..). The more famous of the explicit statements of episcopal equivalency occurs while Constantine is dining with bishops (VC ..), a phenomenon referenced elsewhere too (VC ..; ..–; .). Indeed, Constantine calls himself ‘your fellow servant (ὁ συνθεράπων ὑμῶν)’ (VC ..; see too ..; ..). He is a bishop ostentatiously among bishops. Eusebius’ picture of Constantine is made in the mould he had already constructed in his History. Among his many attributes, Constantine counts all of those that elevated the church’s leaders over the last three hundred years. He is naturally intelligent and possessed of a scholarly drive that leads him to immerse himself in Christian texts and teachings until he has himself become the teacher. Like his episcopal predecessors, he puts his learning to good purpose, educating those around him and protecting the Christian community. His prominence at councils is, according to Eusebius, based not simply on his authority as emperor but upon his capacity to practically contribute to the discussions therein. In his characterization of the emperor his biographer has thus made him in nature and deed as much a bishop as those episcopal heroes who fill the pages of his valorizing History.
E B ( B B)
.................................................................................................................................. We can now return to the explicit assimilation of Constantine’s role to that of a bishop. Scholarship has here veered between strong and weak interpretations. The former is most famously represented by Peterson (), who articulated the view that Eusebius here validated a model of caesaropapism, that in turn proved the foundation for much later political theology (see Sansterre for a more moderate position).19 More recently, 19
For a survey of the modern development of the concept of caesaropapism, see Dagron (: ).
consensus has downplayed these comments. Barnes (: ) and Cameron and Hall (: ) all note that the more famous of the phrases (VC .) is a remark uttered at a dinner party: ‘he let slip the remark (λόγον ἀϕῆκεν) that he was perhaps himself a bishop too (ὡς ἄρα καὶ αὐτὸς εἴη ἐπίσκοπος)’ (VC ..), and the comparison, both in that phrase and in that of Constantine that follows, is made in the optative rather than the indicative mood. These scholars thus agree that it is better read as a casual equivalency than a formal assertion of status. It is certainly true that no explicit assimilation of religious and political authority is being made here. And without an invitation to that episcopal dinner party, one can only speculate as to whether Constantine’s original comment was intended as gentle humour, flattering self-deprecation or a barbed promise of imposition. But to obsess over that is to miss the more immediate opportunities offered to us by the other explicit episcopal equivalency in the Life. That at the Life’s end was in the voice of Constantine, but that at its start was entirely in Eusebius’ (VC .). Thus, whatever Constantine’s original intention, Eusebius has appropriated and deliberately included this idea.20 Clues as to how Eusebius intended the phrase are found in the changes he makes, and the context in which he embeds it. Most noticeably, Eusebius has changed Constantine’s phrase tōn ektos.21 Most scholarship agrees that Constantine was here referring to those within the empire but not part of the Christian church (see e.g. Cameron and Hall : ).22 And Eusebius used the phrase tōn ektos similarly elsewhere in the Life (e.g. VC ..). But his framing of the quotation from Constantine indicates a desire to appropriate the episcopal equivalency in a more universal sense. Before reporting Constantine’s comment, Eusebius discusses Constantine’s actions to ban idolatry, pagan sacrifice, etc. ‘for all those under Roman rule’ (VC ..) and afterwards frames it with the line ‘In accordance with this saying, he exercised a bishop’s supervision (ἐπεσκόπει) over all his subjects’ (VC ..). Most importantly, when it came to his own appropriation of the explicit episcopal equivalency, he replaced tōn ektos with the qualifying adjective koinos, changing ‘bishop of those outside’ to ‘universal bishop’ (VC ..). This all suggests that Eusebius intended to change the way in which this phrase was read. Exactly how is revealed by attention to context. Just before, Eusebius notes that Constantine aided not just the poor and needy of the Christian community, but ‘apart from them (τούτων δ’ ἐκτὸς) showed himself compassionate and beneficent to those outside (τοῖς ἔξωθεν) who approached him’ (VC ..).23 The reference there is again to non-Christians. 20 While I agree with Dagron (: ) that Eusebius is seeking to qualify the meaning of the phrase, and certainly not proposing any institutional sense to the words, Dagron’s suggestion that Eusebius has deliberately muted the title ‘universal bishop (κοινὸς ἐπίσκοπος)’ ignores the fact that the phrase is Eusebius’ own, and is not used in the version of the phrase in Constantine’s voice (VC ..). 21 Since the sixteenth century there has been debate over whether to take tōn ektos as the genitive plural of hoi ektos or ta ektos (see Seston : ). Most scholars now follow the latter position, but for recent advocates of the former, see Farina (: ) and Dagron (: ). 22 Contra Fowden (: ), who suggests Eusebius’ desire to interpret this as a reference to Rome’s subjects overlies Constantine’s intention to refer to nations beyond the empire’s borders (and acknowl edges the likely lack of consensus on the meaning of the phrase [n. ]). 23 I note too the intriguing parallel here with one Seleucus, whose martyrdom is described by Eusebius near the climax of the Martyrs. This Christian Cappadocian soldier is introduced in terms similar to the military emperor Constantine as excelling in physical characteristics but more importantly
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Eusebius then begins the next chapter (in which the episcopal equivalency is found) by broadening the recipients of that compassion with universal language: ‘Towards all people in general (Κοινῶς) he was such a man’ (VC ..; further cognates are found in .. and ..). But he then notes that ‘to the church of God he paid particular (ἐξαίρετον) personal attention’ before immediately making the episcopal equivalency that Constantine was ‘like a universal bishop’. In other words, Eusebius begins with Constantine’s behaviour towards non-Christians, for which the episcopal equivalency had originally been used, but then segues into a discussion of Christians, and repeats the episcopal equivalency at that point. And specifically, he repeats it in the context of Constantine’s interaction with other bishops. This is the key to Eusebius’ motivation here. After the statement of episcopal equivalency, Eusebius describes Constantine’s behaviour at church councils. In particular, we read that as he took his seat, he ‘dismissed his praetorians and soldiers and bodyguards of every kind, clad only in the fear of God and surrounded by the most loyal of his faithful companions’ (VC ..). Eusebius presents Constantine as explicitly laying aside his military protection when intervening among bishops. He has instead his fear of God, a phrase demarcating the characteristically Christian (and interestingly also used of the other Christian emperor in the History, Philip the Arab; see HE ..).24 The point is about the nature of Constantine’s authority. Eusebius indicates that Constantine’s authority here comes not because of his imperial office—which he sets aside at the door in the symbol of his guard—but because of his own episcopal authority. Eusebius takes such great pains to demonstrate how Constantine fulfils the criteria of a Christian bishop because his authority at councils is precisely as bishop rather than as emperor. The episcopal equivalency is thus evidence of Eusebius trying to define the terms of the new Christian emperor’s engagement with bishops. That is not, it is important to note, the same thing as Eusebius, imagined as court theologian, legitimizing Constantine’s usurpation of religious authority. Such a model lies behind both the concept of caesaropapism, and the pernicious view of Eusebius as Constantine’s episcopal lackey that has long dogged his legacy.25 But such views forget the chronology here. As discussed above, the Life was written at the end of Constantine and Eusebius’ lives. It is thus a retrospective— Constantine has already summoned councils, sat at them, and intervened in their decisions. Eusebius’ picture is a response to Constantine’s actions, not the basis for them. It is an in moral ones (DMP[RP] .; cf. VC ..). And Eusebius then notes that ‘like a bishop and steward (ἐπίσκοπός τις οἷα καὶ ϕροντιστής), he cared for destitute orphans and unsupported widows and those worn out by poverty and sickness, and in the manner of a father or guardian (πατρός τε καὶ κηδεμόνος δίκην) took onto himself the labours and miseries of all those cast aside (τῶν ἀπερριμμένων ἁπάντων)’ (DMP[RP] .). The episcopal equivalency here is based on the willingness and capacity to care for others. And in the passage preceding that same equivalency for Constantine, when describing his aid for the weak (VC .. .), Eusebius notes explicitly his care for orphans (who ‘he cared for in the father’s stead (ἐν πατρὸς ἐπεμέλετο χώρᾳ)’ (VC ..)), widows and the poor (et al.). 24 This is the phrase’s only appearance in the History in Eusebius’ auto composition; two others occur in his lengthy quotation of the letter relating the suffering of the Lyons martyrs (see HE ..; ..). Eusebius uses it of Constantine elsewhere in the Life (see also VC ..) and related phrases appear as self descriptors in quoted documents of Constantine (VC ..; ..). 25 Most famously expressed by Burckhardt’s (: ) uncompromising dismissal of Eusebius as ‘der erste durch und durch unredliche Geschichtsschreiber des Altertums’.
attempt to define and delimit the nature of Constantine’s past (heavy-handed) interventions in church matters. His ingenious solution was to suggest that the legitimation for such actions was not Constantine’s imperial authority, but his demonstration of precisely those skills that legitimated other bishops acting so. The motivation for such this picture is clear if we consider the Life’s audience. Averil Cameron (; restated in Cameron and Hall : ) has suggested that the Life was written primarily for Constantine’s three sons after the turbulent twists and murderous turns of their succession in summer , to ensure that they continued with policies beneficial to the church. This position has received widespread support. We can now take this a stage further. Eusebius’ definition of the legitimation for Constantine’s interaction with the church is a suggestion to the princes that their involvement with bishops must be on the same basis as their father’s—by virtue of demonstrable episcopal qualities rather than their imperial inheritance. Eusebius is thus shoring up the authority of the Christian church he had worked out so carefully in the History. There are more far-reaching consequences too. While Cameron is certainly correct that the Life is targeted at the petulant princes, they do not, I suggest, represent the extent of Eusebius’ ambition. The Life would have had a wider audience, even if only within the court in which it circulated, including elite Christian clerics.26 Such an audience would fit with that of the History (Verdoner ), which had presented models of authority for an elite Christian audience, with clerics prominent among them (e.g. HE .–). The same, I suggest, is true of the Life; indeed, Eusebius intimates as much twice at the Life’s start (VC ..–..).27 Close attention reveals that there is material in the Life that quite clearly has an audience other than the three princes in mind. For example, when discussing tragedies in Antioch that unsettled the populace and split the church into factions, Eusebius notes that Envy ‘perhaps hoped that the emperor would himself change his attitude to us in irritation (ἀποκναίσαντα) at our troubles and disorders (ταραχαῖς τε καὶ ἀκοσμίαις)’ (VC ..). This seems an obvious warning to the church that their failure to achieve harmony risks alienating their imperial benefactors. Similarly Finn Damgaard (: ) has suggested that Eusebius’ use of Mosaic imagery invokes not just Moses but his troublesome Israelites too, and thereby serves as a warning to Christian bishops about their divisive behaviour. Written for such an audience, the assimilation of Constantine to the great bishops of the church’s past acquires a slight edge. The celebration of Constantine’s success in the episcopal role contains an unspoken question about other bishops’ capacities to fulfil the role. As we have seen, prominent among Constantine’s episcopal triumphs is his repeated 26 A court delivery is suggested by Cameron and Hall (: ), noting the Life’s elevated style, its debts to biblical and panegyric models, its likely audience of mixed pagans and Christians, and comparing the similarly elite, mixed audiences of the Panegyrici latini (see e.g. ()) and the In Praise of Constantine. A wider court circulation is suggested too by classical publication models, which involved gradually widening concentric circles of copying and acquisition in elite communities, see Starr (). 27 See, in particular, Van Nuffelen (), building on Francis (), for the suggestion that the Life is the last image in a series of images of the divine cascading from God down to us. Thus participating in the increasing use of visual imagery of late antique biographical writing, it establishes a likeness of Constantine that also bolsters the text’s own authority as part of a cascade of images from the divine. More generally on Eusebius’ apologetic use of biography, see A. Johnson ().
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success in bringing unity to the church. This is, at one point, claimed as a quality unique to him: The parts of the common body were united together (ἡνοῦτο) and joined in a single harmony (ἁρμονίᾳ συνήπτετο μιᾷ), and alone the Catholic Church of God shone forth gathered into itself (εἰς ἑαυτὴν συνεστραμμένη), with no heretical or schismatic group left anywhere in the world. For this great achievement also, among those that ever were, only the Emperor who cared about God could claim responsibility (μόνος τῶν πώποτε τὴν αἰτίαν ὁ τῷ θεῷ μεμελημένος βασιλεὺς ἐπεγράϕετο). (VC ..)
Eusebius’ language here makes clear that Constantine’s achievement is the unity he brought about. But his unique success is of course a reminder that other bishops have demonstrably failed to achieve it. Many of Constantine’s triumphant successes at synods stem from the clergy’s failure to achieve and maintain harmony (e.g. VC ..). That failure too had long been a concern for Eusebius. Here again comparison of the Life with Eusebius’ earlier biographical efforts is instructive. A discontent with Christian leaders’ persistent fragmentation in the History seeps through what is otherwise a picture of universal harmony when Eusebius suggests that the tetrarchs’ persecution (–) was in part a divine punishment for the church’s fall into division (HE ..). The Life, which envisages a similar audience,28 contains, I suggest, the same festering unease. Eusebius’ own experiences between the publication of the History (final edition ; see R. Burgess ) and the Life can only have exacerbated his concerns. Eusebius had been formally condemned by an Antiochene synod in early before the Council of Nicaea later that year, and the Nicene position to which he eventually acquiesced stands in a not unproblematic relationship to his own theology. Interestingly, it had been Constantine’s intervention that had resolved matters in Eusebius’ favour, as Eusebius reports in a letter to his congregation (recounted in Athanasius, Defence of the Nicene Definition ). The decade since Nicaea had arguably been more divisive for the church than any before it, and had seen an increasing rivalry between Eusebius and anti-Arians like Athanasius of Alexandria and Marcellus of Ancyra (Barnes : –). In the latter case, it was again Constantine whom Eusebius credited with the downfall of Marcellus, who had explicitly targeted Eusebius (CM ..). Moreover, at least as Eusebius tells it, it was also Constantine who sided with Eusebius when he was proposed, against his will, for the Antiochene episcopacy (VC ..–..). Eusebius had experienced first-hand the church’s continuing infighting, and the potential benefits of imperial intervention. It is possible therefore that the Life contains not just a warning for Constantine’s sons, but one for Eusebius’ fellow clerics too, that a failure to achieve consensus opens the door to imperial intervention. That is not to say that Eusebius is opposed to imperial involvement in church affairs. Again, Eusebius’ earlier biographical experiments are helpful, testifying as they do to a long-held belief in the fundamental compatibility of Christianity and Rome. In the History good Roman emperors had always protected and even supported Christianity
28 Indeed, Eusebius’ On Biblical Place Names is also addressed to Paulinus, and the Preparation for the Gospel and Demonstration of the Gospel are both addressed to another bishop, Theodotus of Laodicea. I owe David DeVore thanks for this observation.
(see e.g. HE ..–..; ..–; ..–..; ..; ..–; ..); Constantine’s positive intervention in church affairs was simply a natural extension. And Eusebius’ own recent experiences, as shown above, might well lead him to be sympathetic to the intervention of a sympathetic emperor in the affairs of the church, especially one he could represent as being on his side. The crux for Eusebius though was the basis and manner of such intervention. Both statements of Constantine’s episcopal equivalency contain the same qualification that Constantine is like a bishop ‘appointed by God (ἐκ / ὑπὸ θεοῦ καθεσταμένος)’ (VC ..; ..). That might originate in Constantine’s own wish to validate his decision-making upon bishops; we might compare the evolution of his conversion narrative to provide him with direct contact with Christ, rather than indirectly through episcopal interpretation (see Van Dam ). But Eusebius’ insistence that Constantine was a bishop by action (rather than just by claim) asserts instead that such episcopal intervention was legitimate not for just any emperor, but only if and when it was based on the criteria of episcopal authority that Eusebius himself had delineated in the History. A final phrase used by Eusebius during his own appropriation of the episcopal equivalency makes clear these priorities: Then such as he saw able to be prevailed upon by argument (τῇ κρείττονι γνώμῃ πειθηνίους) and adopting a calm and conciliatory (εὐσταθῆ τε καὶ ὁμογνώμονα) attitude, he commended most warmly, showing how he favoured general unanimity, but the obstinate he rejected (τοὺς δ’ ἀπειθῶς ἔχοντας ἀπεστρέϕετο). There were even some who spoke harshly against him, and he tolerated them without resentment (ἔϕερεν ἀνεξικάκως), with a gentle voice (ἠρεμαίᾳ καὶ πραείᾳ ϕωνῇ) bidding them to behave reasonably and not be contentious. Some of them respected his rebukes and desisted, while those who were past curing and could not be brought to a sound mind he left in the hands of God, being unwilling himself to devise anything whatever to any person’s hurt. (VC .. ..)
This passage well demonstrates Eusebius’ twin priorities. The advantage of the emperor’s intervention is his ability to delineate between competing sides, and his ability to reject and rebuke ‘the obstinate’—those in the church who in its past and its present threatened to mar its unity, who were always Eusebius’ main concern. Eusebius’ imperial bishop is capable of achieving the consensus which had eluded the bishops proper throughout the church’s history. But Eusebius again suggests that Constantine’s successful interaction with bishops be on the basis of argument. This insistence on Constantine’s interactions with bishops as equals may be stretching the truth somewhat; Constantine’s own letters seem rather more forceful (see e.g. VC ..–). But that only makes more obvious Eusebius’ own insistence that an emperor’s touch when dealing with bishops be light.
C
.................................................................................................................................. The Life is an extraordinary example of ancient biography. This is in part because of its strange hybrid nature. But it is also, I argue, because it represents the culmination of a lifetime’s exploration in the biographer’s art, and I have suggested that there is much to be
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gleaned by reading it alongside Eusebius’ approach to his subjects in his earlier works. The Life certainly gives us an emperor in line with much earlier panegyric, and one that picks up the Moses typology of Philo’s Life of Moses and runs with it. But it is also the final stage in Eusebius’ musings on the role of the bishop in the Christian community. In recording and appropriating Constantine’s own passing claim to episcopal equivalency, Eusebius fits the new Christian emperor to the model of church leadership he had carefully constructed in his History. His Constantine demonstrates the intelligence of an academic cleric, and employs it as would the ideal bishop in pursuit of the pastoral support of the Christian community and the shoring-up of its boundaries. And he does so in communion with other bishops. But by painting a picture of an emperor doing so more successfully than those bishops or their predecessors of the preceding three centuries had done, Eusebius was also perhaps issuing a warning about such bishops’ behaviour. What we have in the Life then is Eusebius’ implicit endorsement of what it must have seemed would be inevitable imperial oversight of episcopal activity. Indeed, Eusebius celebrates the emperor’s intervention in church affairs, if nothing else for the good of the church (and himself). But by characterizing Constantine’s involvement at church councils as he has, Eusebius was also attempting to carefully define the terms of that engagement. Eusebius is clear that an emperor’s involvement with the church must be not as dominant emperor but as (more) effective bishop.
F R For a general introduction to current thinking on Eusebius, see A. Johnson (). The best translation of the Life is that of Cameron and Hall (), which includes an excellent introduction; there is also a more recent French translation by Pietri and Rondeau (). Both use the edition by Winkelmann (), which is unsurpassed. For early concerns over the Life’s authenticity, see Grégoire (), Seston (), A.H.M Jones and Skeat (), and Winkelmann (). For the debate over genre, see Pasquali (), Barnes (; ), and Cameron (). On the relationship of the Life with the History, see Drake () and S.G. Hall (a; b). On Eusebius’ access to earlier materials more generally, see Carriker (). On the Life and caesaropapism, see De Decker and Dupuis Masay () and Dagron (). For the influence of panegyric on the Life, see Storch (). On Eusebius’ use of a Moses typology, see Hollerich (), Rapp (), A. Wilson (), Inowlocki (), M.S. Williams (), and Damgaard (). Van Nuffelen () deals with the Life’s construction of its own authority.
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A M
.................................................................................................................................. A every author who writes on the Confessions of Augustine of Hippo feels an obligation to insist that this difficult and complex work is not an autobiography. This may perhaps be surprising in the light of Augustine’s own comments on the Confessions in the last years of his life. Thus, in his Retractationes, in which he revisited his own works and sought to explain his intentions and excuse his errors, he summarized the structure of the Confessions with a simple division of its thirteen books: ‘the first ten are about me (a primo usque ad decimum de me scripti sunt), the remaining three about the holy scriptures’ (Retract. ..). In saying this, he does not seem inclined to divide the work into two in terms of its purpose or its effect on the reader, which he describes both in terms of the pleasure others have taken in it and in terms of his own response as he wrote it, which persists as he reads it again: My Confessions . . . praise the good and just God through my acts both good and bad (de malis et de bonis meis Deum laudant iustum et bonum), and turn towards him human minds and hearts. At least, as far as I am concerned, they did this for me as I was writing them and they do it when I read them. (Retract. ..)1
If the purpose of the Confessions as a whole is to turn the reader towards God, as it would appear from Augustine’s account, it seems no less clear that the means is through narrating Augustine’s own life in all its aspects, both good and bad: de malis et de bonis meis. With this in mind, it has always been difficult to deny that the Confessions possess, at the very least, a profoundly autobiographical character. A commonsensical understanding of 1
Translations here and throughout are my own.
autobiography—which, if not the final word on the matter, might at least be a good place to start—would equally have difficulty denying a place in its purview to the Confessions. Augustine’s offers up an extended meditation of his life in more-or-less chronological order. If this is not the whole story of the Confessions, it is enough all the same to suggest that there may be value in approaching it as autobiography. Such an approach must begin by acknowledging that ‘autobiography’ is an elusive category, no less than is its parent ‘biography’. Like biography, it is a genre insofar as it is recognizable to a reader—as both were to an ancient reader—and raises certain expectations regarding content and style, even if these have remained difficult to identify and articulate (H. Lee : –; Hägg a: –). Yet both biography and autobiography are so readily combined with other, more rigidly codified genres that it is tempting to consider them instead ‘modes’ or ‘discourses’, and thus to speak of the ‘biographical’ or ‘autobiographical’.2 The recognition that autobiographical discourse may extend beyond the bounds of a clear and narrowly-defined genre has led some scholars to prefer to avoid the word ‘autobiography’ entirely, or else to confine its use to a small subset of writings produced as part of a specifically modern genre. But while it is certainly important to be aware of unexamined assumptions that might be imported along with this term of art, there is nothing inherent in the word ‘autobiography’ that makes it any more misleading than alternatives such as ‘self life writing’ (S. Smith and Watson : ). When it comes to Augustine’s Confessions, the desire to avoid labelling it ‘autobiography’ seems to derive above all from precisely this fear that to do so will make it seem too familiar. Recent scholarship has sought to play down the idea that Augustine was primarily engaging in an act of public moral accounting, or else in a very modern therapeutic process of selfanalysis and self-disclosure. Such exercises are indeed known from ancient philosophy, but, as Gillian Clark has pointed out, much of Augustine’s originality rests in his departure from this approach and his emphasis instead on his struggle ‘to live a God-centred life’ (G. Clark : , –). Similarly, Paula Fredriksen’s account of the Confessions as autobiography insists that it be understood as ‘more than an examination of his personal past’, and indeed that he is not to be thought of as interested in ‘autobiography as such’ (Fredriksen : , ; see also O’Donnell : –). Instead, she concludes that the work should be read as a ‘resolutely theological masterpiece’ in which the central character, if one is to be looked for, ‘is not Augustine himself, but Augustine’s God’ (Fredriksen : ). This stance has been reinforced by an increasing attention to the structure of the Confessions. It is clear both that Augustine regarded the Confessions as a unified whole, and that readers have tended to follow his own division of the work in the Retractationes into ten books about himself—sometimes further subdivided into the more obviously autobiographical Books –, which begin with infancy and end with the death of his mother (G. Clark : ), and a more problematic Book —and a final three books about the scriptures. The preference in recent scholarship, however, has been to emphasize the importance of all thirteen books to the overall design of the Confessions (O’Donnell : .xxxii; G. Clark : –; see also Kotzé : –), and indeed even to suggest that the final three or four books provide the intended focus of the work as a whole
Thus, Van Uytfanghe (: ) speaks of a ‘discours hagiographique’; see also Edwards (b) and Swain (), who offer ‘the biographic’ as an alternative to ‘biography’. 2
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(O’Donnell : .; Fredriksen : ). On this basis, autobiographical readings have come to be regarded as over-simplifying a work which must be understood as a whole and as sui generis (Crosson : ; Kotzé : –; C. Conybeare : ). There is undoubtedly much to be gained from reading the Confessions as a unified work in thirteen books, and this practice has been a valuable corrective to the previous tendency to separate out the first nine or ten books from the rest. Nor is it to be disputed that Augustine’s Confessions, taken as a whole, is a work sui generis, or that his innovation consisted in far more than simply turning his attention to his own self and development. Yet it is clear that a significant part of Augustine’s achievement does indeed lie in the way in which he offers in the Confessions an intellectual or spiritual autobiography (G. Clark : –; accepted also by Crosson : and Kotzé : –). This is not simply a matter of modern misreadings, but was an approach acknowledged and even encouraged by Augustine himself. Thus, late in his life, two years after his Retractationes, he responded to praise from the imperial official Darius by making him a present of the Confessions, and asked that they be read charitably—but nevertheless as autobiography: Examine me there, so that you do not praise me as more than I am; there believe nothing about me but what I have shown; follow me closely there, and see what I have been in myself, and by myself; and if anything in me pleases you, praise there with me him whom I would wish to see praised on my account, and instead of me. (Ep. .)
Augustine’s purpose was not to provide an account of his life for its own sake, and here he offers his autobiography as a means of drawing his reader into praising God. Yet it remains the case that he is inviting Darius to read and to learn about his life. That the work serves a higher purpose does not make it any less autobiographical.3 In the end, the anxiety surrounding any reading of the Confessions as autobiography perhaps derives from a sense that the question to be asked is definitional: ‘What is the Confessions?’ To answer that it is an autobiography is clearly unsatisfactory. But there is no need to define the Confessions as belonging to one or another genre in order to recognize that it is openly and substantially autobiographical. The question might therefore be ‘How autobiographical is the Confessions?’—or even, ‘How is the Confessions autobiographical?’ Certainly it contains things other than autobiography, and a comprehensive understanding of the Confessions must take these into account. But there is value too in an approach which concentrates on the autobiographical elements and which sets out to understand their contribution to the whole. To read the Confessions as autobiography is not to insist that it can only be read that way. Nor is such a reading necessarily simplistic or naive. It is important to recognize that even the more autobiographical Books – are far from straightforward in the account they provide of Augustine’s life, and that they must be read with an eye to his overall purpose in the Confessions. Yet the allusiveness and complexity on display in the Confessions are in no way foreign to autobiography—which, like other forms of biography, cannot
3 Hence recent identifications of the Confessions as protreptic in purpose as in Feldmann (), Mayer (), and Kotzé () in no way preclude its acceptance as autobiographical in form, as is observed of protreptic in general by Jordan (: ).
be supposed to deal only in narrative and historical truth. Neither biography nor autobiography is ever innocent of rhetoric and artifice, not least since they are predicated on the infinitely complex task of reconstructing and representing a life in literary form. Thus, the point of reading the Confessions as autobiography is not to discover the ‘true story’ of Augustine’s life, or to come up with a full and sufficient account of his personal, intellectual, and spiritual development. It is rather to trace the ways in which Augustine made use of the methods and assumptions of autobiography in assembling and reflecting on his own experience of God, humanity, and the world. The Confessions is indeed, among other things, ‘a life-history revealing the inner feelings and self-awareness of the writer’ (G. Clark : ). In order to understand Augustine’s purpose in the work as a whole, we must ask why he adopted this as his chosen form.
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.................................................................................................................................. The most sustained effort to define autobiography as a genre with distinctive features and conventions of its own has been made by Philippe Lejeune (). He proposes as a working definition that autobiography should be considered ‘the retrospective narrative account in prose that a real person makes of his or her existence when putting the emphasis on his or her individual life, and especially on the history (or story) of his or her personality’ (Lejeune : ; cf. S. Smith and Watson : ). This definition keeps autobiography separate from closely related modern genres such as the diary or journal, or the autobiographical essay; but the majority of its features do little to distinguish it from biography. If we are to focus on this difference, then there are, as Lejeune recognizes, two essential claims made in autobiography: firstly, that the retrospective narrator is to be identified with the protagonist of past events; and, secondly, that this narrator is to be further identified with the author (Lejeune : –). If we are to consider Augustine’s Confessions in relation to biography and autobiography, it is on these elements that we must concentrate. This definition can be stated more simply: autobiography is biography written about oneself. Nor is such a definition overly misleading, especially when it is kept in mind that biography is itself a rather protean form; and moreover, that such an apparently simple change has highly significant implications. The second aspect in particular—the identity of the author and narrator—depends on information brought to a work from outside the text, and so introduces questions of authority and authenticity. In modern works this information is generally provided by paratextual means: by the title given to the work or by the name of the author on the title page—insofar as that name is taken to correspond to a real individual (thus, Cohn : ). That this also applied in the ancient world, even though texts often circulated under various titles and with various attributions, is made clear by Augustine himself, who expressed in his City of God the belief that the account of magical transformation in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses was intended to be read as autobiographical (Aug. Civ. Dei .). Since the events portrayed in the Metamorphoses were of a grotesque and fantastical nature, Augustine was able to accuse Apuleius of lying, but it is important to note that Augustine’s misreading is not as naive as we may like to imagine. For modern readers, the judgement that Apuleius was writing a novel, despite his use of his own first
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name for the protagonist, is assured by the sheer implausibility of the events. For Augustine, it was possible (and also convenient) to believe that Apuleius himself had deliberately misrepresented them as the truth. This, after all, is what Augustine had done in relation to his Confessions. He will have offered it personally to its earliest readers, who could scarcely have doubted that what they were reading was intended (at least in part) as autobiography; and we have seen that Augustine continued to present the Confessions as an account of his life, as in his letter to Darius. The very project of his Retractationes, moreover, was to guide others in identifying and reading his works, and again we have seen that Augustine described the first ten books of the Confessions as being about himself. The guarantees of authenticity offered by Augustine to his readers, moreover, are more than simply a matter of establishing the authorship of the work: in the case of an autobiographical work, they enable the identification of author with the narrator and with the chief protagonist and so promise a more extensive kind of authenticity. Augustine’s open acknowledgement of the Confessions as autobiography entails an implicit claim regarding the truth of its contents, just as he was able himself to hold Apuleius to a standard of truth on the supposition that he had made similar claims. And Augustine too has had his critics and has even been accused of misleading his readers, on the basis that some of the events he records in his Confessions may be doubted as having happened exactly as he tells them. This is perhaps to misunderstand the kind of truth that an autobiography guarantees. It may be seen instead as a claim to honesty and authenticity: not a matter of verifiable facts but of a privileged and otherwise unobtainable perspective (Cohn : ). The identity of the author and narrator implies that the work records authentic experiences, but this authenticity is supplemented by the identification of the narrator with the protagonist, which enables the representation of a certain kind of experience. Whereas a biographer necessarily observes his or her protagonist from the outside, an autobiographer has the advantage of being able to claim access to inner states, responses, and motivations unavailable to others. The representation of these aspects is therefore a powerful reinforcement of the authority and authenticity of an autobiographical account. Although it is not an indispensable element—examples may be found of autobiographies which record only public achievements, such as the Res Gestae of the emperor Augustus—there is a definite tendency for autobiography to focus on private states of mind, beliefs, and feelings where a conventional biography might offer public appearances and actions. What Lejeune calls ‘le pacte autobiographique’ may be understood as a promise along these lines: that an autobiography is an authentic account of a real past experience, which may be represented from a perspective available to the protagonist alone (Lejeune : ). Any work offered as autobiography will therefore raise these questions of authenticity, authority, and perspective; and an unusually self-conscious autobiographer is likely to place them at the heart of the enterprise. We are fortunate in the case of Augustine that we possess not only the Confessions but also a Life of Augustine by his fellow bishop Possidius of Calama (on which see also Chapter in this volume). Possidius prefaces his Life with an account of the purpose of Augustine’s Confessions highly reminiscent of Augustine’s own in the letter to Darius, and with the promise not to go over the same ground. But it is unlikely that this was ever any great temptation to Possidius, whose biography conforms in its focus and structure to a
highly conventional model. The absence of any extended narrative account of Augustine’s childhood, for example, would have struck few contemporaries as strange: it was far more frequent for biographies to focus on public life and ‘the mature achievement’ (Burridge : , ). Possidius appended a catalogue of Augustine’s writings, which may suggest that he wanted to offer a monument to a famous scholar, but in fact his Life of Augustine portrays the life of a working bishop: preaching, administering justice and church property, and interceding with the secular authorities (Vessey : ; Hermanowicz : –). The more scattered anecdotes in the second half of the work sometimes derive from a more intimate context, but even this was scarcely private: for Augustine had established an ascetic community at Hippo, and his table manners were accordingly open to public inspection. The emphasis in Possidius’s Life is ultimately on Augustine in his public role as champion of his faith and his community, and earlier biographies of Christian holy men, and perhaps even classical biographies in the manner exemplified by Suetonius, were sufficient to serve as a model (Weiskotten : –; Elm : –; but cf. Hägg a: –). Augustine’s Confessions, of course, is a work on quite a different scale, but the difference in its concerns is clear from the chronological and narrative span covered by even its more openly autobiographical books. Thus, Books and offer accounts of Augustine’s infancy and early childhood respectively; Book finds him heading to Carthage as a -year-old, and together with Book take him to age , including nine years as a Manichee ‘hearer’; Books – then cover together a period of five or so years, in which Augustine travels from Carthage to Rome and then on to Milan, leading up to his baptism at the age of , his mother’s subsequent death, and his return to Africa. Book , the last of the books ‘about me’, presents Augustine as he writes the Confessions, after a gap of around ten years. If the first seven books are organized in accordance with the conventional stages of human development (Chadwick : ), the Confessions as a whole nevertheless focuses disproportionately on the years surrounding Augustine’s Christian conversion (Misch : .). Conversely, the narrative gap between Books and elides the whole of his progress in the institutional church, from his ordination as priest to his accession as bishop of Hippo—important public events in which Possidius took a definite interest (O’Donnell : ; Fredriksen : ). It is unlikely to be accidental that Augustine’s own account of his life concentrates on the years in which he was absent from Africa. Part of his purpose was undoubtedly to explain the apparently abrupt transition from the convinced Manichee he had been as a student and teacher in Carthage to the ascetically-inclined Christian he was on his return—a challenge made more urgent by the fact that there was much in common between Manichaean beliefs and Christian asceticism (P. Brown : ; O’Donnell : –). Such suspicions might have been of particular concern, given the attempts by rivals in Africa to draw attention to irregularities in the appointment of Augustine to his position as bishop: certainly Possidius was later at pains to emphasize Augustine’s innocence of any wrongdoing in this respect and to his subsequent efforts to regularize the situation (Chadwick : xi–xii; Poss. V. Aug. ). Possidius’s concern for such institutional matters, and his particular interest in Augustine’s uncompromising stand against heresy and schism, can also be explained in part by the context in which he was writing. The Life
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was a bid to affirm Augustine as a defining figure in the North African church to which Possidius belonged, which not only had long represented the minority in a society riven by schism, but which also now faced a Vandal invasion which threatened to place in power a group Possidius and his allies regarded as heretics (Elm : ; Hermanowicz : –). Biography, with its emphasis on the public life, preaching, and achievements of its episcopal hero, therefore suited Possidius well; just as autobiography, which permitted the portrayal of beliefs, motivations, and intellectual development, suited Augustine. The particular circumstances in which Possidius was writing thus make sense of his desire to supplement Augustine’s account of his own spiritual and intellectual development in the Confessions with a more conventional biography that represented him chiefly in his public role as a bishop. And yet we should not draw too sharply the contrast between the apparent authority and authenticity of Augustine’s Confessions and the inevitable limitations of the external perspective on offer in the Life of Augustine. Possidius was evidently an intimate of Augustine and had shared his communal life in Hippo before becoming a bishop himself; he must also be supposed to have been a frequent visitor to Hippo and a regular collaborator with Augustine (Weiskotten : ; Hermanowicz : –). His account of Augustine’s ascetic life and precepts was accordingly that not only of an eyewitness but of one who had shared that life; and so too had he shared in Augustine’s struggles against the rivals of his church in North Africa. Indeed, in describing the actions taken against the Donatist majority, Possidius incorporates into his portrait of Augustine an incident from his own life: an incident of violence against him which he was able to turn around into a successful suit, and managed to obtain a declaration from the imperial authorities that the Donatists were to be regarded as heretics (Poss. V. Aug. ; Hermanowicz : –). Here we have not only autopsy but an element of autobiography: Augustine’s achievements against the Donatists are found to be more properly the achievements of the community as a whole, and Possidius records them not as a spectator from afar but as an actor on the same stage. The authority and authenticity with which Possidius is able to present his Life of Augustine thus go beyond the claim in his final paragraph to have been a friend and intimate of Augustine for almost forty years (Poss. V. Aug. ). It enables a sense that the Life presents not only a biography of Augustine as an unassailable individual, but also, at least up to a point, the autobiography of a community. Moreover, and despite the inevitable bias of an autobiography towards the representation of an individual, the Confessions may be read as exhibiting a somewhat similar perspective. It may be detected in Augustine’s explicit attention to the inescapable problem of providing an autobiographical account of a period beyond the reach of memory: in particular, that period of early infancy which remains a total blank. Augustine goes further than most in probing the period before he was born: For what do I wish to say, Lord, except that I do not know whence I came to be here, in this mortal life . . . ? I do not know. . . . [T]ell me whether my infancy followed on from an earlier period of my life, now dead and gone? Or is it that which I spent in my mother’s womb? . . . Was I anywhere, or anyone? For I do not have anyone who can tell me this for neither can my father nor my mother, nor the experience of others nor my own memory. Or do you smile at me for asking and order that I praise and confess you only on the basis of that which I know? (Conf. .. ..)
His eagerness in raising the question is matched by his willingness to leave it undecided—a failing, perhaps, in a systematic theologian or philosopher, but characteristic of Augustine’s attitude to this problem in general, and of his scrupulousness in the Confessions in particular.4 The difficulty, after all, is one of access to memory and experience, and not of dogmatic or theoretical principles; and it finds an echo in another autobiographer closely attentive to the problem of memory, Vladimir Nabokov, who in Speak, Memory reports his ‘colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life’ (Nabokov : ). But where Nabokov’s solution in this work was to indulge as far as possible the vivid glimpses of his infancy that his memory allowed him, Augustine adopted an almost entirely opposite approach. Instead of disconnected fragments of an individual childhood, Augustine assimilates his own life to the life of every infant at an equivalent stage. This represents a remarkable refusal to deliver on the implicit promise of an autobiography to provide an authoritative, authentic, and individual account of a life. Indeed, it is a strategy which could have been designed to draw attention to that promise and to the impossibility of ever fulfilling it. Hence, after Augustine has begun his account of his infancy with apparent confidence in what he has described, he issues a blunt reminder: ‘Later I also began to smile, first while sleeping, and then while awake. So at least it has been related to me, and I believe it (hoc enim de me mihi indicatum est et credidi), since we see it in other children: for I do not remember this for myself ’ (Conf. ..). He continues to follow this practice throughout his account of his infancy, passing over any and all individual impressions until he finds himself a boy somehow able to talk. Everything he experienced before that is represented on the same authority as before: as derived from his observations of infants and young children, in their desires and frustrations, and rages, who ‘have unwittingly taught me more about what I myself was like than have those who knew me and nursed me’ (Conf. ..). Augustine takes his own infancy out from the picture and substitutes a generic image of childhood, provided by his own researches and supplemented only occasionally by the testimony of those who were there. The autobiographical narrator is here no longer uniquely authoritative, nor is offering any outstandingly authentic access to his earlier self. The stance is consistent with the cynical adage that ‘it’s a wise child that knows its father’: in matters such as these, there is no special status accorded to autobiography, and a biographer can be just as informed and no less reliable. Augustine’s acknowledgement that in regard to his infancy he believes what he has been told, and indeed he praises God ‘that you have granted to man the capacity to apply to himself the experience of others and also to understand much about himself from the testimony of mere women’ (Conf. ..). This handing over of knowledge to the domestic sphere inhabited by women is of a piece with the acceptance of uncertainty Augustine makes his theme throughout the Confessions: not only in his willingness to leave open the question of the origin of the soul, but even in his transition from Manichaeanism to acceptance of the propositions of the Christian faith:
4 Thus, O’Donnell (: .) refers to the ‘disturbingly scrupulous examination of conscience’ in Book of the Confessions, and in regard to the first nine books emphasizes (at .) ‘the complexity of the confessional mode, the allusiveness, and the indirection of the text’s construction’.
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I considered what innumerable things I believed (quam innumerabilia crederem) which I had not seen nor had been present when they were done, so many events in human history, so many matters concerning places and cities which I had not seen, so many things I accepted from friends, doctors and so many other people which, unless we believed them (nisi crederentur), each of us would do nothing in this life. Finally I considered what unshakeable faith (fide) I possessed regarding the parents from whom I was born, which I could not know unless I had believed what I was told (nisi audiendo credidissem). (Conf. ..)
Augustine explicitly disclaims self-knowledge, a knowledge of the facts of his own life; and if he can be ignorant in a matter so personal and fundamental, it is clear how much else must be taken on trust (O’Donnell : .xviii, .; cf. Aug. De fide rerum invisibilium .). His Confessions does not consistently offer what an autobiography seems to promise: an authentic, authoritative account of individual experience. Instead, it expresses a radical acceptance of the difficulty of obtaining certain knowledge, of oneself as much as of God, and in both respects insists instead on the necessity of faith.
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.................................................................................................................................. Augustine’s Confessions therefore begins by representing him as a generic figure rather than as a historical individual. But ultimately this impersonal account of his infancy is a special case within the work as a whole: it represents a period ‘dead’ to him, one which seemed not to belong to the same Augustine who lived his later childhood and adult life (Conf. ..). He makes the distinction clear as the narrative leaves this age behind: Therefore this period, Lord, in which I do not remember having lived, and regarding which I have believed what others have said and have applied to myself what I have learned from other infants and although I believe this to be firmly reliable I am reluctant to include it as part of this life which I am living in the world. For it is lost in the void of forgetfulness, just as is the life I lived in my mother’s womb . . . And so I will pass over this time: and how can it concern me, since I recall not the slightest trace of it? (Conf. ..)
Augustine takes no responsibility for any sin that might have belonged to this unrecoverable infancy, and so marks a break between what he was then and the individual he became. The Confessions becomes truly autobiographical, therefore, as it begins to deal with Augustine as an individual, and begins to engage wholeheartedly with the effort to reconstruct the past. As a result, we encounter again the familiar questions of authenticity and authority, but also an element present in any autobiographical narrative. An autobiography is told in retrospect, by a narrator who is to be identified with the protagonist. This simple condition leads inevitably to a feature of all autobiography: that every event will be seen, implicitly or explicitly, from a dual perspective. The point of view of the protagonist who acts and responds in the course of the narrative is supplemented by that of the narrator, who from a vantage point far in the future can reflect on both the experience and the response (S. Smith and Watson : , –; cf. Lejeune : –; Grethlein : ).
It may be seen that this feature of autobiography does not depend on the status of the author: it is present in fictions that may adopt an autobiographical form, but in which the author is not to be finally identified with the narrator-protagonist—the way that Apuleius’s Metamorphoses is now more commonly read. Equally an autobiographer can decide not to draw attention to the issue, and privilege the perspective of either the protagonist or the narrator over the other. The more self-conscious, however, may make this dual perspective a central theme, whether in dwelling prominently on the process of reconstructing the past—from memory or from other sources—or by playing up the ironic disjunction between the hopes, ideas, and motivations of the protagonist and the subsequent viewpoint of the narrator in the present. Nabokov, for example, draws attention in multiple ways to the central role of memory in his autobiography: in the title itself, and the revision of the text to take account of corrections put forward by others; in the open acknowledgement of gaps and uncertainties; and more subtly, as when in the first chapter he records a particularly vivid childhood memory of his father in dress uniform, only to note that his father’s military service was by that time long in the past (Nabokov : –, ).5 The difficulty of reconstructing the past and the competing perspectives at stake in an autobiography are also thematized prominently in Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, in which each chapter of narrative is followed by admissions from the narrator, from ‘There are several dubious points in this memoir’ to ‘This account is highly fictionalized’ (McCarthy : , ). While part of the effect of such open acknowledgement of the perils of autobiography is to cast doubt on the reliability of the narrative, at the same time such strategies put on display a conspicuous honesty and scrupulousness which make the account seem all the more authentic. The Augustine who narrates the Confessions from his vantage point ten years later is no less of a nagging presence than are these modern narrators. Scarcely any of his experiences are represented from the point of view of his earlier self without some comment on it from his present vantage: this applies not only to the defining sins of his narrative, such as his enthusiastic participation in the theft of a neighbour’s pears, or his sexual desires and attachments, but also to more minor episodes and events, such as his childhood reluctance to read Homer, or his strictly professional motives for attending the sermons of Ambrose of Milan. Augustine as narrator not only distances himself from the actions and motivations of his younger self, but actively interrogates and interprets them for the reader: ‘His constant refrain . . . is that he did not understand, while living it, his own experience’ (Fredriksen : ). It is impossible, reading the first nine books of the Confessions, to ignore that it provides a retrospective account from the point of view of a Christian convert and a powerful theologian—although it is notable that his status as a junior bishop in an embattled minority church is not nearly so evident (Chadwick : xii; G. Clark : ). The conspicuous presence of this dual perspective, however, can easily lead to an exaggeration of the division between Augustine as past protagonist and as present narrator, 5 The subtitle of the edition (An Autobiography Revisited) advertises the revisions of the work since its first publication; Nabokov (: ) explains that ‘[w]hile writing the first version in America I was handicapped by an almost complete lack of data in regard to family history . . . Numerous other revisions and additions have been made . . . For the present, final edition of Speak, Memory I have not only introduced basic changes and copious additions into the initial English text, but have availed myself of the corrections I made while turning it into Russian.’
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as if Augustine were viewing his life before his conversion and baptism into Christianity from a smug, secure, and static position as one of the ‘saved’ (S. Smith and Watson : ). It is true that the narrative portion ends with Augustine at a ‘decisive moment’ in his life (and one followed immediately by the natural marker of his mother’s death), but we should not imagine that the story is thereby firmly concluded, and the rest merely aftermath and update (Misch : .; G. Clark : ). Certainly, as we have seen, the autobiographical form relies on the separation of protagonist and narrator, and may present itself as offering emotion recollected in tranquillity. This may even be linked to an idealized understanding of religious (especially Christian) conversion, in which the old (and sinful) self is dead, replaced by the new, narrating, and even saintly self (Freccero : –; O’Donnell : ). Yet Augustine openly rejects this model of conversion as an absolute discontinuity between past and present self, at least in his own case: for whereas he calmly disregards his forgotten infancy as dead and gone, he insists by his very presence in the text on the continuity between his sinful, earlier self and his present state. Indeed, the contrast is instructive: it is precisely because his past self is alive to him, and because he has been and to some extent remains the person he was, that his life is worth narrating at all. Of course, Augustine does not deny the salutary effect of his conversion and baptism, but rather than take it for granted, he openly addresses the inevitable tension between the change these brought about and the persistence nevertheless of his former life, desires, and pleasures. This is the theme of Book , which adds to the retrospective self-examination of Books – with an equally close inspection of the figure who sits and writes: ‘the man who has told the story and who is still wrestling with temptation and confusion’ (G. Clark : ). Augustine implies that Book is a response to the likelihood that readers will want to know not only about his past life but about his present lifestyle: What benefit is there, I ask, that in your presence I confess to human readers through my writings what I still am, and not what I was? For the benefit of the latter I have seen and kept in mind. But what I still am at this time (quis adhuc sim ecce in ipso tempore) when I am making my confessions, many desire to know, both those who are familiar with me and those who are not, but who wish to hear something from me or about me; but their ear is not there at my heart, which is where I am, whatever I am. (Conf. ..)
Augustine admits that his self-assessment will have to be taken on trust: it does not have even the guarantee of truth that clings to a retrospective narrative, which might be checked against other sources. But he does not pretend to be inhabiting a phase of his life at which his journey has been definitively concluded. He openly makes the point that readers will find only an account of his progress so far (adhuc), and that they will see him most clearly who wish simultaneously to take pleasure in his progress, achieved by the gift of God, and to pray for him as one still held back so greatly by his burdens (Conf. ..). Augustine offers himself as anything but a colourless narrator, who had securely achieved the life he had sought and was setting it forth ‘in its typical form’ for the edification of others (Misch : .; Freccero : ). On the contrary, Augustine emphasizes his continuing struggle with temptations—pride, lust, and a love of sensory pleasure—which are not to be written off as merely a self-consciously pious man parading his minimal vices. These are
things he knows he cannot overcome on his own: he is no less dependent on God to guide him now than he was before. Augustine thus continues to be the person he was before, aware that he has chosen his path but has not yet completed it: Since I am not filled with you, I am a burden to myself. Pleasures I ought to be weeping over struggle with regrets in which I ought to take pleasure, and I do not know which will win the day. Regrets at my wicked acts struggle with pleasure at my better ones, and I do not know which will win the day (ex qua parte stet uictoria nescio). (Conf. ..)
In this respect, Augustine’s powerful memory is both a stimulus and a solution. Although he notes that he can recall past pleasures without succumbing to them, in dreams he is more vulnerable to images (e.g. of sexual pleasure) stored in his memory (Conf. ..; ..). But more than this, even though experiences lose their savour in the recollection, they remain a link to his former self: past pleasures are still to be acknowledged as pleasures, even if they should now be rejected (Conf. ..). By means of his memory Augustine thus discovered ‘a continuity in his life that, reproduced in his narrative, made him the same person in his youth as in his maturity (and old age)’ (Olney : ). As we have seen above, the Confessions had this effect on Augustine even as he re-read them, as he reveals in the Retractationes. This is not, of course, the sort of serene indulgence in memory we find in, for example, the final chapter of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, addressed to his wife Véra in the present tense and calmly recalling moments of their life together along with their son (Nabokov : –). On the contrary, Augustine in Book and throughout the Confessions— even in his interpretation of the scriptures—maintains a ‘predominant tone . . . [of] weakness and uncertainty’ (G. Clark : ): an awareness not just of the possibility of sin but of the unreachability of any final conclusion. Augustine’s disquisition on memory in Book analyses the nature of the search for God: is he more like something lost and forgotten, to be recovered, remembered, and recognized, or like something previously unknown—and if the latter, how can we know where to look or understand when we have found him? Augustine does not know, but trusts instead to God to take the lead and show him where he is unable to go himself: ‘all my hope lies only in your great and powerful mercy’ (Conf. ..). What conclusions he has reached for himself remain uncertain and provisional: Augustine still does not understand God’s place in the world or in his own life, and an interpretation of either must remain as open to multiple readings as his readings of the Book of Genesis in the final books of the Confessions (Mathewes : –; cf. Fredriksen : –). The judgements of Augustine the narrator are thus revealed, in Book if not before, to be no less provisional than were those he attributes to his earlier self. This is not to say that he has any real doubt regarding the general direction of the path he has chosen; but the irony that applies to his more obvious missteps—his enthusiasm for astrology or Manichaeanism—is present as well in the account of the very events which encouraged his Christian faith. Even the central—and for many, climactic—scene of his conversion in a garden in Milan is told with rather less certainty than such a momentous experience might seem to warrant. This is not to say that the essential truth, or authenticity, of the scene is to be doubted, even though it may be to some extent stylized (O’Donnell : .–;
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J.J. O’Meara : –). Yet Augustine’s use of indefinite and distancing language—he throws himself down under ‘a certain fig-tree’, and the prompting phrase ‘pick up and read’ is left with its origin undecided—permits an ironic edge to his confidence at the time that this was a moment of divine intervention (Conf. ..; M.S. Williams : –; Grethlein : –; cf. Turner : –). Here the narrator Augustine corrects—or at least backs away from—his earlier understanding of events, not because he is now in a position to grasp their proper meaning, but precisely because he is now less certain of the vantage-point from which that meaning might be revealed. The difficulty is one necessarily shared by all autobiographies: the narration is coming from inside the life. The result is that certain perspectives, from which meaning might emerge, are unavailable: we have seen this in the case of Augustine’s lack of access to his own infancy, but it is no less true at the end than at the beginning of an individual’s story. As Gillian Clark points out, it remains an open question whether there can be a definitive account of any life, and whether autobiography is the means by which it can be achieved (G. Clark : ). And Charles Mathewes has applied the point directly to Augustine’s Confessions, noting that it is the story of ‘a life still in vivo’, and of which ‘its meaning remains, for us and for Augustine, unknown’ (Mathewes : ). Life is lived forwards and understood backwards, but until it is over, any judgement about its overall shape must be postponed. A biographer may have the advantage over an autobiographer here, although it is not clear—and was certainly not to Augustine—that any life can be fully understood from any human perspective, since, unlike God, we are stranded in time. The only solution he offers is the one he exemplifies throughout the Confessions: to accept that the desire for perfect knowledge will remain unsatisfied, even if that is not sufficient reason to abandon the search. Memory may not be up to the job of giving a satisfactory account of a life, but within it or beyond it Augustine had faith in finding God: See how far I have wandered in my memory looking for you, Lord, and I have not found you to be outside it. For neither have I found anything regarding you which I have not remembered from when I learned of you, for since I learned of you, I have not forgotten you. Where I found the truth, there I found my God, truth itself, which, having learned, I have not forgotten. Therefore since I learned of you, you have remained in my memory, and there I find you when I remember you and delight in you. (Conf. ..)
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.................................................................................................................................. As James O’Donnell has helpfully pointed out, the Confessions presents itself as ‘a book about God, and about Augustine: more Augustine at the beginning, more God at the end’ (O’Donnell : .xl). Augustine as narrator and interpreter retains the centre of the stage throughout, but his explicit self-representation comes to an end at the end of Book : and it is marked by a repeat of the scriptural quotation which had appeared in the first paragraph of Book : ‘They will praise the Lord who seek him’ (Psalms :). Although the first book takes its time before Augustine emerges as an individual, and although Book embarks on a detailed discussion of the workings of memory in amongst the account
Augustine gives of his present predicament, we may readily take these ten books as autobiographical inasmuch as they give us a history of an individual life, told mostly as a retrospective narrative from the perspective of the one who lived it. O’Donnell further suggests that Augustine ‘does not disappear in the work’ but in Books – becomes instead, or offers himself as, ‘representative of all humankind’ (O’Donnell : .xli). Interpreting the scriptures is an act which belongs to the Christian community as a whole, and Augustine provides his readings without being concerned to insist upon them. In this way he completes the development which began with his emphatically generic infancy: his complete dependence on others to satisfy his needs and desires, and indeed his reliance on them to tell him who he was, find their recapitulation and fulfilment in the conscious and voluntary submission to an absolute dependence on God. If we are disappointed that Augustine here vanishes as an individual, we may be satisfied by accepting, along with Georg Misch, that Augustine ‘did not, as the moderns do, find the truly essential element of life in a man’s individuality and its stages of development’ (Misch : .). Or we may recognize that even if Augustine aspired, or thought he should aspire, to efface himself in communion with God, nevertheless he remains a conspicuous presence throughout the remainder of the Confessions and in all his subsequent writings. But the fact that the Confessions is openly autobiographical does not mean it was mere selfcelebration: autobiography can be that but need not be, and it may be many things besides. Augustine had plenty of opportunities to write theology: that he chose to cast the Confessions in an autobiographical mode should remind us that autobiographical writing is not necessarily to be taken lightly. To understand Augustine’s Confessions as autobiography is therefore to follow his path towards a closer understanding of Augustine—and, he would add, of God.
F R At present, the standard translation of Augustine’s Confessions is that of Chadwick (); possible alternatives are Boulding and Meconi (), Sheed, Brown, and Foley (), and Outler and Vessey (). The latter two editions reprint or revise earlier translations but are especially valuable for their introductory essays, by Peter Brown and Mark Vessey respectively. O’Donnell () provides an incisive and comprehensive commentary on every aspect of the Confessions, and is indispensable for any serious study: fortunately the author has made the entire commentary available online. Kotzé () offers a detailed discussion of the purpose and audience of the Confessions, which deliberately dispenses with an autobiographical reading. The best single book on the Confessions as a whole, and perhaps the most judicious account of the various issues it raises, is G. Clark (). Modern biographies of Augustine must all take their cue from P. Brown (), which revisits and expands the hugely influential original. It may be supplemented by J.J. O’Meara (), which focuses its biographical investigations on the narrative of the Confessions, and by the more sceptical inquiry of O’Donnell (). Recent assessments of Augustine’s life and works are compiled in Vessey (), while Fitzgerald () is a reference work devoted to all aspects of his time and legacy. Augustine’s ancient biographer, Possidius, has also begun to receive some attention of his own: primarily as a biographer in Elm () and primarily as a bishop in Hermanowicz (). Finally, Lejeune () and S. Smith and Watson () examine the forms of modern autobiog raphy. The study of autobiography in Antiquity still awaits a successor to Misch (), but some valuable perspectives are offered in the collections of Baslez, Hoffmann, and Pernot () and Reichel (a).
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.................................................................................................................................. S poses particular problems to the biographer. How can we depict someone else’s solitary experience? Modern biography has certain advantages over its ancient equivalents in that respect, simply because of the greater prevalence of autobiographical self-reflection in modern culture. Modern biographers are able to draw on first-person accounts of solitary experience—for example, in diaries—which are common now but were almost non-existent in ancient culture. They have learned from autobiographical and psychoanalytic habits of thinking how to speculate about the intellectual or emotional inner life of their subjects. And they are influenced by images of the self-contained, bounded individual which on some accounts became widespread only in the Romantic writing of the early nineteenth century, where solitude was often viewed as a state which was crucial to the formation of self-knowledge and identity: William Wordsworth’s autobiographical portrait in The Prelude is a classic example1 (e.g. Prelude .–: ‘When from our better selves we have too long / Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop, / Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, / How gracious, how benign, is Solitude’). And yet even in the modern world, biography still tends to focus above all on relationships, on acts of communication (particularly as revealed through letters), or on public behaviour. Sustained accounts of solitary experience in modern biography are relatively rare. Extended descriptions of solitude are even harder to find in Graeco-Roman biography. There are several different but intersecting reasons for that. One is simply the fact that solitude tended to carry negative connotations in ancient culture far more often than it does for us. There are plenty of exceptions. There are heroes of solitude in classical literature: one might think of Achilles brooding by his ships (e.g. Hom. Il. .–), or Socrates, standing 1
See Mellor ().
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rapt outside Agathon’s door, in Plato’s Symposium (a–b). There are also images of solitude as a state that enables intellectual and philosophical contemplation. Iamblichus claims that the followers of Pythagoras would start their day with a solitary morning walk (Iamb. VP .–). Pliny the Younger describes his villas as place of withdrawal from society, during times of otium (leisure), where he can make progress with his scholarly and literary work in peace (e.g. Ep. . and .;2 also . and .). However, these are relatively rare examples. There is nothing to match Wordsworth’s idealization of solitude as an opportunity for experiencing and acting out identity. Even writers who leave space for positive views of solitude often turn out on closer inspection to be ambivalent. Seneca is a case in point: he sees the attraction of solitude, which allows one to withdraw into one’s own thoughts, with the goal of self-improvement, but he also worries about withdrawal from day-to-day social interaction.3 And of course there is a wide range of much more unequivocally negative portrayals of living alone. The most famous and monstrous is the Cyclops Polyphemus in Odyssey Book (‘there a huge man used to sleep; he pastured his flocks alone and far off, nor did he spend time with others, but he stayed aloof and lived a lawless life’: .–).4 That ambivalence is one reason for the absence of solitude in ancient biography, which usually has encomiastic goals. Most of the obvious examples of biographical solitude come in the minority of biographies that take a less flattering view of their subjects. Satyrus’ Life of Euripides, which may have been composed in more or less its current form as early as the second century , is a good example. Satyrus’ biography is not unequivocally negative, but it clearly forms part of a tradition of derogatory Lives.5 Satyrus tells us that ‘in Salamis he furnished a cave that had an opening on the sea and that he spent his days there in order to avoid the public. Because of this, he drew most of his comparisons from the sea. His looks were melancholy, thoughtful and severe; he hated laughter and he hated women.’ We hear too that Euripides presumably ‘was also somewhat arrogant and kept away from ordinary people and had no interest in appealing to his audiences’ (POxy. ).6 Satyrus is typical here of the way in which isolation and exile and hatred due to envy were often linked to prodigious talent in Greek literature, partly in response to the statements the poets themselves made about their own separateness from their peers.7 We find another, bizarre example in Diogenes Laertius’ Life of Heraclitus: ‘at last becoming a misanthrope, he withdrew from society into the mountains and spent his life there, eating grasses and plants’ (Lives of Eminent Philosophers ..). Other cases have even more unequivocally negative connotations. In Suetonius’ Life of Domitian, for example, that emperor’s solitariness is an index of his morally dubious character: ‘He used to give banquets frequently and generously, but one might almost say in a hurry; certainly they did not go on beyond sunrise, nor did he follow them with drinking; for up to the hour of sleep he did nothing apart from walking alone and apart from others’ (Dom. ). There solitude is a state associated with the monstrosity and misanthropy of the tyrant. 3 See D. Webb (: ). See ibid: . All translations are my own, except where otherwise noted. 5 Hägg (a: ). On this Life, see Chapter in this volume. 6 Translations from Lefkowitz (: ), who also notes parallels with other accounts of Euripides’ life. 7 See ibid.: . 2 4
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In other cases, criticism of the solitude of the biographical subject comes from his peers rather than from the biographer. Eunapius’ Lives of Philosophers and Sophists, written in the fourth century , celebrates a model of wisdom that is, in some respects, highly traditional, based on intensely social, public, competitive styles of self-presentation. One passage, in Eunapius’ account of the great Neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichus (whose approving account of Pythagorean practice I quoted above), hints at the development of new, more positive attitudes to solitude (perhaps a pagan version of some of the developments within early Christian culture that I outline below), but also at the same time shows how difficult they were to reconcile with traditional modes of intellectual self-presentation based on interaction between teacher and pupils: he had a great number of pupils, and those who desired learning came to him from everywhere . . . Occasionally he did perform rites on his own, apart from his friends and pupils, in worshipping the divine. But for the most part he spent time with his companions . . . And they, desiring this pleasure unceasingly and insatiably, never gave him any peace, and appointing the most eloquent as spokesmen they said to him, ‘Why, most divine teacher, do you do some things alone and by yourself, rather than sharing with us your perfect wisdom?’ (VPS )
Also striking is the cursoriness of all these descriptions. Here we need to take account of another issue, which is the fact that ancient biography focused more or less exclusively on the depiction of words and deeds, and found very little space for private activity,8 let alone for the portrayal of inner mental experience. The lack of interest in going beyond public behaviour in ancient biography is connected with the fact that habits of autobiography were not yet firmly enough entrenched to have any sustained influence over biographical practice, of the kind they sometimes have in modern biography. That is not to say that the assessment of character, of virtue and vice, was unimportant—on the contrary; just that human character was thought to be revealed above all through action and speech, which were taken as external signs of inner nature. Xenophon is a key figure in the early development of biography, and it is striking that that pairing of words and deeds is important to him already. In the opening words of his Symposium, for example, he claims that ‘it is not just the deeds (ἔργα) of good and noble men performed in serious moments that are worth recording, but also those performed at times of play’ (Smp. .). His Memorabilia (like the Socratic works of Plato) characterizes Socrates above all through his conversations: ‘he was always in the public eye. Early in the morning he would go to the walkways and the gymnasia, and then when the agora was full he would be visible there, and for the rest of the day he spent his time wherever he could encounter the biggest number of people’ (Mem. ..). And his Agesilaus similarly gives us a very public hero: ‘The Persian king prided himself on being rarely seen, whereas Agesilaus delighted in being always visible, believing that invisibility was appropriate to shameful conduct, whereas the light of day added ornament to a life dedicated to noble things . . . One prided himself on being unapproachable, the other took pleasure in being accessible to all’ (Ages. .–).
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Cf. Hägg (a: ).
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In the centuries following, that focus on words and deeds was maintained, both within philosophical-intellectual biography, with its love of anecdote and its interest in interactions between teacher and pupil, for example, in the Peripatetic biographical tradition represented by Aristoxenus among others,9 or in later authors like Diogenes Laertius,10 and in biographies of military-political figures. Plutarch, for example, goes further than most in his desire to expose the inner soul of his subjects to view in all its complexity, but even he does that above all through attention to the external signs of character: most famously in his preface to the Alexander and Caesar, which echoes Xenophon in its emphasis on the value of throwaway expressions or jokes, as well as deeds, as vehicles for uncovering the inner man (Alex. .).11 He looks inside the soul, but he does it in the context of analysing public acts, and he is accordingly not at all interested in showing his characters spending time alone.12
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.................................................................................................................................. Early Christian life-writing at first sight seems a more promising place to look for extended portrayals of solitude. Already in the Old Testament we see holy men inhabiting the desert and living alone, most obviously Elijah (e.g. Kgs –), or communing alone with God in places outside civilization, as Moses does on Mount Sinai (e.g. Exod ). In the gospels, John the Baptist and Jesus are both in different ways heroes of solitude, for example, in Jesus’ temptation in the desert, or in his solitary anguish in Gethsemane before his arrest (see esp. Luke :–). Later Jewish writing also occasionally makes reference to solitary heroes.13 But the portrayal of heroic solitariness reaches its peak in the outpouring of early Christian hagiographic writing produced from the late fourth century onwards. The holy men who populated the deserts of Egypt and Syria and Palestine were appropriating landscape usually associated with outcasts and bandits, transforming them into places of Christian identity. They were viewed as inspiring role models, whose solitariness gave them special authority and special access to the divine. Even within early Christian culture, however, solitude was widely viewed as problematic, especially when it could be thought to be excessive. Basil of Caesarea lived in isolation himself for some time, but his monastic Rule argues for the superiority of communal over solitary asceticism, on the grounds that living in community protects one from the dangers of pride that are more likely to arise in solitude, and on the grounds that Christian life See Momigliano (: esp. ) and Hägg (a: ). Ibid.: . 11 See Hägg (a: ), with further reference to Plutarch’s ‘signs of the soul’ at Alexander ., although he also suggests that the focus on anecdote may be a comment relevant especially to the challenge of writing about Alexander and Caesar, as much as a statement about the writing of biography more generally. 12 Cf. Halliwell (: esp. ) on the way in which Isocrates in his Evagoras depicts his subject’s character via the portrayal of action, with an almost complete lack of ‘inwardness’ (). 13 See Weingarten (: ) on the Talmudic stories about Rabbi Shim’on bar Yohai, who is said to have lived hidden in a cave for thirteen years, as a possible model for Jerome’s Life of Paul. 9
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requires the service of others (e.g. see Longer Responses , ‘That it is necessary to live together with those who have the same goal of pleasing God and that the solitary life is difficult and dangerous’).14 Palladius, in his early fifth-century Dialogue Concerning the Life of John Chrysostom, feels the need to defend his subject at length from the charge that he used to eat alone (), and from the charge of haughtiness, derived from his habit of avoiding crowds (). Even in texts primarily designed to praise ascetic solitude, we often encounter worries about the risks and dangers. In Palladius’ Lausiac History, for example, a collection of brief Lives of Egyptian ascetics written in the early fifth century, there are many examples of saints who are praised for their solitary devotion. Macarius the Younger, for example, commits a murder by mistake as a youth, and goes out to the desert, where he lives alone for many decades and is granted special powers as a sign of his holiness: he is described as ‘delighting in his solitude’ (Palladius HL ). However, there are other Lives in the work which draw attention to the dangers of solitude. A monk called Ptolemy is said to have lived for fifteen years in a place which was usually thought uninhabitable because it was so far from a water supply, surviving by collecting dew with a sponge from the rocks during the months of December and January. Palladius tells us, however, that he eventually ‘became a stranger to the teaching and company of holy men, and to the benefit those things brought’ and turned aside from the straight path so that he is now ‘wandering in Egypt, having given himself over to gluttony and drunkenness, conversing not at all with anyone’ (HL ). Ptolemy fails to maintain his ascetic solitude precisely because of his isolation from any advice and support, and is plunged into a very different kind of solitude, the solitude of the outcast. Other early Christian texts seem to be holding back from lengthy and extravagant accounts of solitude out of an awareness that they are unrealistic: in other words, not so much because they view idealized extremes of solitude as undesirable, but instead (or as well) because they view them as implausible, at odds with the realities of ascetic experience. Jesus in the gospels is again an important precedent, for example, in the feeding of the ,, where Jesus goes off alone with his disciples, but the crowds follow him (e.g. Mark :–, who specifies twice that they have withdrawn ‘privately, to a deserted place’).15 In later hagiographical writing we repeatedly see similar scenes where the solitude of great holy men is disturbed by supplicants. That is a prominent theme in the Life of Antony, which is generally taken to be the first work of Christian hagiography, and which was much imitated. Antony withdraws from society as a young man. He lives alone among some tombs where he undergoes violent torture at the hands of the devil. Later he retreats further and further into the desert, where he lives on his own in an abandoned fort, shutting up the entrance with stones, and receiving a six-month supply of bread through the roof twice a year, without conversing with those who delivered it, and battling against demons. In the end, however, the world breaks in: ‘he spent nearly twenty years in this way on his own living an ascetic life, neither emerging nor being seen by anyone except occasionally’ (V. Ant. .), until a great crowd of suffering people manages to tear the door down. It is also a very common pattern in early hagiography that the holy man will return to a more community-minded form of asceticism later in life, after an initial period of extreme
14 15
Silvas (: ) for translation; Barbour (: ) for brief discussion. See ibid.: .
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solitude: again, Antony is a case in point. That motif acknowledges the realities of day-today asceticism: it has become increasingly clear in the scholarship of the last few decades that the celebration of extreme solitariness in some hagiography is exaggerated: the vast majority of ascetics lived in monastic communities, often interacting closely with surrounding towns and villages; even those who lived as solitary ascetics tended in practice to be regularly involved in some forms of communal monastic life.16 Finally, early Christian life-writing struggles with the representation of solitude just because it shares with its Graeco-Roman equivalents a tradition of focusing on words and deeds. There are exceptions. The rise of Christianity in the early centuries went handin-hand with new ideas of selfhood and the individual which in some respects prefigure their modern equivalents (although many scholars also argue for parallel developments within pagan culture during the same period).17 Augustine’s Confessions, written only a few years after Jerome’s hagiographies, feels astonishingly modern in some respects in its autobiographical account of inner mental and spiritual experience. Solitude is important for Augustine. He shares some of the same worries as Basil and others about excessive solitude, beyond normal human capabilities, but he values some forms of solitude very highly, for example, as a state that can allow the resolution of spiritual turmoil (such as in his famous conversion scene, where he describes going off alone), and as a state that enables the act of writing, which is consistently represented as an enactment of solitary, selfreflective experience.18 However, one of the most striking things about this text is that there is nothing quite like it in earlier Graeco-Roman or Christian literature, even in other first-person life tales, let alone in third-person biographical writing:19 there was no strong tradition of the representation of inwardness in autobiography which could flow out to influence biographical writing. Once again, it is words and actions that are dominant. Jesus in the gospels is characterized above all by his deeds, especially his miracles, and by his speech: there seems to have been a tradition of ‘sayings of Jesus’ lying behind the gospels,20 which was closely comparable to the wisdom sayings collections associated with GraecoRoman sages; similar collections survive for many of the Desert Fathers. The strength of those traditions goes some way towards explaining the fact that the portrayal of solitude in early Christian writing, from the gospels onwards, is often surprisingly cursory, summarized briefly (even when it takes up the bulk of a saint’s life in chronological terms) before a much more extensive account of miracles and teachings. And when solitary experience is represented at length, it is often reimagined in ways which make it compatible with the traditional focus on action: inner spiritual struggle is represented in scenes of conflicts with demons, so that the holy man’s hard-won spiritual victory becomes a series of concrete deeds rather than the product of abstract, internal contemplation. In the Life of Antony, for example, the time Antony spends alone is not completely unrepresentable for Athanasius (see Chapter in this volume for details on this text): the image of battling against demons is a way of envisaging the long months and years of spiritual struggle, but it is striking that it reshapes Antony’s inner life of contemplation and reflection into the language of deeds, the language of victory and defeat, which is central to so much of Graeco-Roman biography
16 17 19
See Chitty (), Rousseau (: ; ), and Goehring (: esp. ). 18 For example, see Swain (). See Barbour (: esp. ). 20 See Chapter in this volume. Hägg (a: ).
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too. And it is striking that the vast bulk of the Life focuses on the years after his emergence from the fort. At times he tries to shut himself away from the world again, but always his supplicants break in on his solitude in order to request healing, and it is these incidents of healing, rather than the solitary time that they interrupt, which attract most of Athanasius’ attention. To summarize—I have sketched out three closely related reasons why so many ancient biographers, both Graeco-Roman and Christian, stop short of extended representations of solitude: first, because solitude was widely thought to be problematic and even dangerous, at least in its more extreme forms; second, because images of extreme solitude were sometimes viewed as unrealistic, at odds with the day-to-day realities of ascetic and philosophical experience, both of which in practice valued interaction with pupils and the public very highly; and third, because ancient biography was so dominated by the tradition of recording words and deeds that it lacked the resources to represent solitary inner experience. Those three reasons have different weight for different texts. As we shall see, all three of them, and the second especially, influence Jerome’s Life of Hilarion.
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.................................................................................................................................. They are relevant to Jerome’s other life-writing too. In Jerome’s Life of Paul of Thebes, the first saint’s Life in Latin, the young Paul retreats from civilization into the desert, and finds a hidden chamber inside a cave in the middle of the desert. The many decades he spends there are compressed into a single short sentence: ‘Falling in love with this dwelling place, as if it had been offered to him by God, he spent his whole life there in prayers and solitude’ (VP ). The bulk of the Life deals with the final days of his life, when he finally receives a visit, at the age of , from the -year-old Antony (the text is in some ways a response to the Life of Antony, contradicting Athanasius’ characterization of Antony as the first to colonize the far reaches of the desert—although it is not at all clear whether Paul was a real person). Once again, it is as though the many decades the saint spends alone are simply not open to the biographer: it is only at the moment of this final social encounter that we can rejoin Paul’s story, gaining a view of his words and his deeds. Later, Jerome’s Life of Malchus takes a rather different approach: it is not a biographical account of solitude in the same sense. Malchus lives as a monk, but never alone; he is captured by Saracens on returning for a visit to his family and maintains his chastity during long captivity, and within a forced marriage, before finally escaping. Given that storyline, the challenge of depicting ascetic seclusion is much less relevant here, although paradoxically this is the nearest Jerome comes in any of his biographical works to an image of solitary contemplation: ‘After a long interval, as I was sitting alone in the desert, seeing nothing but the sky and the earth, I began to mull things over silently and to remember among other things the companionship of the monks’ (VM ); Malchus then sees a column of ants, which bring him comfort, reminding him of the shared community of the monastery he has left. This is a striking and memorable example of the way in which even ancient biography can occasionally capture and preserve the emotional and intellectual processes experienced in solitude. But it is striking that this kind of passage is so rare in
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hagiography generally and in Jerome’s hagiographical writing specifically (it is made possible here only by the fact that we are hearing Malchus’ voice in the first person here—as reported by a narrator who claims to have heard the story from him when he was an old man); also that this isolated example has nothing to do with the challenge of depicting the day-to-day experience of the kinds of heroic, ascetic solitariness that we see in the Life of Antony and the Life of Paul of Thebes. Jerome’s Illustrious Men moves away from an Athanasian obsession with ascetic solitude even more determinedly than the Life of Malchus. It draws heavily on the Graeco-Roman biographical models of collective biography that focus on the listing of deeds. To be more specific it focuses especially on cataloguing the works of a wide range of Christian scholars, adapting and Christianizing the traditional values of pre-Christian literary biography, whereby worth and renown are tied to one’s publication list rather than one’s ascetic feats. Jerome could perhaps have focused on the day-to-day practices and virtues of the great scholars and theologians he celebrates, depicting scholarship as a process of solitary dedication (of precisely the kind he himself was renowned for in the medieval world and the Renaissance), but he is more interested in representing their works as products and achievements. Finally, we need to take account of Jerome’s writing of his own life, especially the accounts of his own time as an ascetic in the deserts of Syria. It is clear that total solitude was not something he ever experienced or even aimed for: he had servants with him, he had to spend valuable energy navigating through theological disagreements with his fellow ascetics, and he was in constant communication with friends in the outside world by letter. It is also clear that he struggled with the experience and found that it did not bring him the spiritual growth he had hoped for. Reading these letters, in other words, can leave us in no doubt that Jerome had a very ambivalent relationship with the ideals of ascetic withdrawal that were given such prominence in the Life of Antony and in so many later texts: clearly they continued to hold a great attraction for him, but he was also acutely aware of their impossibility and even their undesirability, and that ambivalence surely exercises a formative influence over the Life of Hilarion and his other biographical writing.21
The Preface The Life of Hilarion opens with a preface of several hundred words. The very opening lines, where Jerome calls for divine inspiration, hint at an ideal of solitary spiritual devotion: ‘Being about to write the life of the blessed Hilarion, I call upon the holy spirit who dwelt in him, that he who bestowed virtues on Hilarion might grant to me the speech I need to describe them, so that his deeds might be equalled by my words’ (VH . ()).22 Striking here is the fact that Jerome equates his own experience with that of his subject: equations between biographer and subject are common both in ancient and modern biography.23 In this case, the implication is that writing itself is a devotional activity equivalent to the See M.S. Williams (: ). For translations from the Life of Hilarion, I follow the numbering of Morales and Leclerc (), with references to the numbering of C. White () (from the edition of P. Vallarsi in PL ) in brackets. 23 See Hägg (a: ). 21 22
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rigours of asceticism: that assumption too is quite widespread in early Christian hagiography.24 We might even conjure up for a moment an image of both men absorbed in solitary contemplation and in a painstaking process of intellectual and spiritual development: Hilarion in his cell; Jerome at his desk. It is also striking, however, that that image is never made explicit; in fact, the second half of the sentence focuses on the traditional biographical language of virtue revealed through words and deeds. By that image, Jerome’s writings are products rather than processes, just like the writings of the men he memorializes in the Illustrious Men (where he devotes the final paragraph to a list of his own achievements and his own research). In much the same way he will stress Hilarion’s ascetic deeds in the rest of the work, rather than his ascetic experience. Jerome in fact draws attention to the scarcity of solitude in the text, in the second half of the preface: those who once disparaged my Paul will now perhaps disparage Hilarion (qui olim detra hentes Paulo meo nunc forsitan detrahent et Hilarioni), having criticized Paul unfairly for solitude, and charging Hilarion with sociability, thinking that someone who always stayed out of sight did not exist, and that one who was seen by many should be regarded as worthless. Their ancestors the Pharisees once did the same, disapproving of the fasting of John in the desert and the crowds, eating and drinking of our Saviour. (. ())
The criticism he imagines here is, on one level, criticism of Hilarion, but the word ‘my’ (meo)—which qualifies ‘Paul’ (Paul) but might also be taken by implication with ‘Hilarion’ (Hilarioni), to mean ‘my version of Hilarion’ or ‘my Life of Hilarion’—hints at the possibility that he is also anticipating criticism of his own biographical procedures. It suggests that one might tell the story of Hilarion’s life differently, in a way that gives more attention to solitude. In what follows, Hilarion is repeatedly prevented from being alone. But it is Jerome too, as biographer, who is prevented by the realities of his subject’s life from projecting the image of a solitary ascetic hero that some of his readers might expect.
Early Life The first half of Hilarion’s life, as reported by Jerome, closely follows the model of Athanasius’ Life of Antony, particularly in the sense that it includes a lengthy period of solitude, which is described in quite cursory terms before Hilarion finally embarks on a career of miracle-working. Hilarion leaves his family and seeks out Antony in the desert, where he pays close attention to Antony’s ordinem vitae (. ()): the primary meaning is his ‘routine of life’, but the phrase might make us think also of the ‘order of his life’ or ‘the order of his biography’, reminding us that both Hilarion and also Jerome as biographer are leaning on the model outlined in Athanasius. Eventually he leaves because he cannot endure the crowds of people flocking to ask Antony for healing. This is the first of many attempts on Hilarion’s part to flee from visitors and supplicants, but at this stage at least he Krueger (: esp. ) on this passage; and M.H. Williams () on the equation between scholarship and asceticism for Jerome specifically. 24
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seems to be motivated by a sense that he is not ready for that kind of public attention: ‘saying that he must rather begin as Antony began, and that Antony was like a hero winning the prizes of victory, whereas he had not yet begun his military career’ (. ()). It is as if he needs several decades of solitude to charge his spiritual batteries before he begins the deeds which will make him so widely revered. The same thing is implied when he finally begins to heal and work miracles (a moment which is equivalent to Antony’s emergence from the fort): ‘He had now spent years in solitude, and was known to everyone by reputation only, and talked about throughout all the cities of Palestine, when a woman from Eleutheropolis . . . was the first to dare to intrude on the blessed Hilarion’ (. ()). She asks him to do something about the difficulty she is having in conceiving; he prays and a year later she gives birth; this is described as ‘the first of his miracles’ (. ()). How, though, are those twenty-two intervening years of solitude represented? There are occasional small details of Hilarion’s routine: ‘And so he used to sustain his weakened life with the juice of herbs and with a few dried figs, praying frequently and singing psalms, and digging the earth with his hoe, so that the labour of his work might increase the labour of fasting’ (. ()). This is a vivid image of the day-to-day experience of Hilarion’s solitude: we are invited to imagine him, surrounded by the harsh desert, endlessly and repetitively scratching at the earth and reciting, racked by physical suffering. And yet these details are once again very brief; the bulk of Jerome’s description of his solitude focuses on the language of deeds and the language of victory; it also repeatedly envisaged as a set of interactions. The empty desert at night becomes peopled with vast crowds of demonic tempters and disrupters, human and animal: ‘one night he started to hear the wailing of babies, the bleating of sheep, the lowing of cattle, a sound like the weeping of women, the roaring of lions and the rumbling of an army’ (. ()). Naked women appear before him; a dying gladiator, begging for burial, and even a figure who leaps on Hilarion’s back and starts to beat him and taunt him like a donkey. Later, a set of real-life robbers comes looking for him in the night; they find him only when daylight comes, and are so astounded by his fearlessness and his faith that they promise to live reformed lives. Jerome’s preference for representing solitude paradoxically as a series of encounters is surely due at least in part to the continuing influence of classical models of biography. He and his contemporaries seem not yet to have developed techniques of representation that break free of those conventions.
Flight From then on, Hilarion’s peace is shattered. Vast numbers of people come to him for help—as they had to Antony or to Jesus before him—and the narrative moves rapidly from one miracle to the next. A monastic community grows up around him. Eventually, at the age of , Hilarion has had enough, but he is kept there by the other monks and especially by his follower Hesychius: ‘Bishops and priests came to him, and flocks of clerics and monks and also—a great temptation—of Christian women, the common people came from all directions from the cities and the fields . . . But he thought of nothing but solitude’ (.– ()). Finally he gets hold of a donkey—‘for he was too much wasted away by fasting and could hardly walk’ (. ())—and tries to set off, only to be surrounded by a
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crowd of , people who have gathered to stop him from leaving; only a threat of a hunger strike persuades them to disperse. That theme of fame followed by flight is repeated over and over again. Hilarion is never allowed to settle for long, just as the narrative is never free to settle into a detailed description of his devotions. In the deserts of Aphroditon, Hilarion’s fame soon spreads to bring crowds of desperate people, praying for rain. He departs again, and from then on we see a bizarre chase unfolding. He spends a year at the oasis, but his holiness once again makes it impossible to find the kind of solitude that made possible his holiness in the first place and he boards a ship bound for Sicily (.–. (–)). There he lives once again in obscurity, selling wood to buy bread, but once again his cover is blown: in Rome, a man possessed by a demon cries out that Hilarion is in Sicily, and then sails to Sicily himself to be healed; and then once again he starts to be visited by huge crowds (.–. ()). A little later, most remarkably, we see his follower Hesychius tracking him right across the Mediterranean world. Even in the earlier chapters of miracle-working, Hilarion’s inner experience is hard to reconstruct, to such a degree is the narrative crowded by incident, but that is all the more true in – (–), where we actually lose sight of Hilarion completely: now the action is focalized through Hesychius, and we travel with him for several years, asking everywhere for news of Hilarion, until finally he gets the clue he needs. After they are reunited, Hilarion asks Hesychius to take him somewhere with a barbarian population; they go to Epidaurus in Dalmatia; Hilarion performs another miracle, and then has to slip away in a tiny boat at night to escape (. ()). In Paphos, in Cyprus, he lives for about days before a crowd of people possessed by unclean spirits intrudes upon his solitude (.– ()). Even in death, solitude is hard to maintain. Antony in the Life of Hilarion is aware of that: Jerome tells us that he ordered the site of his tomb to be kept secret, so that the wealthiest man in the neighbourhood, Pergamius, cannot move the body to his estate and build a shrine for it (. ()). At the very end of the Life of Hilarion we actually see Hilarion’s body being snatched away—again by Hesychius—and carried away back to Gaza. The final glimpse we get of Hilarion is of his body, still perfectly preserved even many months after his death, being accompanied by ‘whole crowds of monks and townspeople’ (. ()) to its new resting-place: an odd ending for one of the great heroes of ascetic solitude. Over and over again, then, Jerome confronts us with images of flight which are almost comical (he drew heavily for the Life of Hilarion on Apuleius’ novel the Metamorphoses, where the main character encounters an enormous range of comic-grotesque situations and characters).25 Jerome tantalizes us with the prospect that the narrative will settle, along with Hilarion himself, and show us something of the devotion that has brought Hilarion to a state of holiness in the first place, but again and again he frustrates that expectation, allowing us to share Hilarion’s frustration. Jerome, in other words, strives to fit Hilarion into the newly popularized stereotypes of the solitary holy man, but he also knows that those stereotypes are unrealistic, at least when they are activated in their most extravagant form: both he and Hilarion keep on coming up against the realities of early Christian
25
See Weingarten (: , ).
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culture, with its expectation that the holy man should be engaged and accessible even as he stands apart from society.
Landscape One other striking feature of the text is the way in which it links solitude with particular types of landscape experience. We might see this as a particularly modern feature of the text. Hagiography is obsessed with the image of the solitary human confronted with the grandeur of the natural world in the face of wild landscapes, which spur one to particularly intense forms of contemplation or discipline. That image is a distant ancestor of the celebration of human immersion in wild landscape that is so common in writing on mountains and other wilderness landscapes in the nineteenth century and after. There are also differences, however. Most importantly, it is striking once again that the ancient material has very little focus on inner experience. There is nothing here to match Wordsworth’s Prelude, where time spent alone in the mountains is represented as an opportunity for self-reflection which is formative to the poet’s sense of his own identity and autonomy (e.g. see Prelude .–: ‘compassed round by mountain solitudes / . . . which now I range, / A meditative, oft a suffering, man’). The idealized image of wild landscape as a place for solitude of course has many parallels in early Christian and Jewish writing. Elijah is once again an important precedent, as are Jesus and John the Baptist in the desert. Athanasius’ Life of Antony goes into even more depth: Antony’s final place of settlement is ‘a very high mountain, and beneath the mountain was a very clear stream, which was sweet and very cold; outside there was a plain and a few neglected palm trees’ (V. Ant. .). There are many similar examples in the History of the Monks in Egypt, an anonymous collective hagiography written probably in the early fifth century. For example, the home of the ascetic Elias is described as follows: No report can describe that harsh desert in the mountain as it deserves, in which he sat, never going down to the inhabited region. The path taken by those who went to him was a narrow one, so that even those who pressed themselves forwards could only just get along it, because of fierce rocks on either side. He used to sit beneath a rock in a cave, so that even the sight of him was greatly terrifying. (Hist. Mon. . )
Basil of Caesarea describes the mountain retreat in Pontus where he lived with a small monastic community in similar terms: ‘It is a high mountain covered with dense woodland, watered by cold and transparent streams on its northern side . . . It is not far from being an island, since it is shut in on all sides by defences. Deep ravines drop away on two sides . . . ’ (Ep. ). In the Life of Hilarion too, one of the most powerful features of the description of Hilarion’s very earliest years of ascetic experience is the way in which it conjures up an image of his immersion in a solitary landscape removed from human civilization: Hilarion enters the wilderness which lies to the south of Gaza, the home of brigands, and there he ‘found pleasure in the vast and terrible desert’ (. ()). And when Hilarion visits Antony’s retreat, he finds a ‘tall and rocky mountain’ (. ()), with palm trees and a garden and a steep winding path up to the summit. Once again, the typological
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influence of the Life of Antony is strong in all of these passages, especially in the motif of mountainous inaccessibility. In the closing pages of the Life of Hilarion, however, Jerome draws our attention to the fact that the ideal of mountain solitude is in some respects a fantasy or a mirage. Hilarion’s final place of escape, after living for two years in Paphos beleaguered by supplicants, is another steep mountain retreat, deliberately crafted to echo Antony’s dwelling place. This seems at last to be an impregnable place of solitude. The place is in ‘the secluded and rough mountains, a place one could barely climb up to even crawling on hands and knees . . . a remote and frightening place’ (.– ()). The mountain (like Antony’s) has water flowing down from the hill top, and fruit trees and a garden, all of which draw on the locus amoenus traditions of Greek and Latin verse. Side-by-side with those features is a ruined temple, full of demons for Hilarion to battle against. Only Hesychius dares or is able to visit him. And yet even here, one final time, Hilarion is disturbed. The first visitor is a paralysed man who has somehow made it up the path. Hilarion heals him, and from then on ‘the necessity of many people overcame even the difficulty of the place and the inaccessible route up to it, and all those in the surrounding villages were interested in nothing other than watching to make sure Hilarion did not slip away’ (. ()). That narrative of intrusion, even here in the text’s most lonely and inaccessible landscape, suggests that Jerome is being self-conscious, not only about the difficulty of maintaining and narrating solitude, but also at the same time about the constructed, idealized nature of the landscape description he is offering us. He seems to be acknowledging that the solitary, inaccessible landscapes, which are so central to ascetic biography, are products of the human imagination, at odds with the realities of day-to-day ascetic experience.
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.................................................................................................................................. I have argued here that the Life of Hilarion draws attention to the fact that solitude is hard to achieve; also at the same time to the fact that it is hard to represent. In some passages of course there is no particular reason to think that Jerome is being self-conscious about the second of those problems. When he describes Hilarion beleaguered by hallucinations, and solitude as a series of victors over demons, he is being dragged back perhaps without even quite realizing it, and just like Athanasius and many of his contemporaries, to longstanding assumptions about the importance above all of words and deeds for the biographer. But when he shows us Hilarion fleeing from his supplicants, pursued from one temporary resting place to the next so that it is almost impossible to settle, it is hard to avoid the impression that he is drawing attention to another difficulty the biographer faces in trying to fit his subjects into a new model of ascetic, solitary heroism, which is simply the fact that it was in its pure form an idealized and unrealistic image, almost inevitably disrupted in practice by many different kinds of communal engagement.
F R There is, to my knowledge, no sustained survey of the representation of solitude in classical Antiquity, or more specifically in ancient biography. However, D. Webb () and Barbour () both cover a
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range of Graeco Roman and early Christian texts in their opening chapters. Hägg (a) includes regular discussion of the importance of words and deeds for the revelation of character in ancient biography. See also Hodkinson () on the absence of ‘psychic omniscience’, where the biographer offers us glimpses inside the mind of his subject, in most ancient biography. Rousseau () and Finn (: ) are good starting points (among many others) on early Christian practices of asceti cism, and on the balance between communal and solitary monasticism. On the motif of secret retreat from society, which recurs over and over again in the hagiography of the fourth and fifth centuries, see A.G. Elliott (: ). M.S. Williams () addresses the importance of typology for ancient hagiographical writing. For an introduction to Jerome’s life and work, see Kelly (: esp. on Jerome’s time in the desert). Weingarten () offers a wide ranging account of Jerome’s hagio graphical writing and its cultural and literary context. For text of the Life of Antony, see Bartelink (); for text of the Life of Hilarion, see Morales and Leclerc (); and for an English translation of both, see C. White ().
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TRACING BIOGRAPHEES .............................................................................................................
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T author of the Iliad and the Odyssey only makes fleeting appearances in his works in the form of first-person pronouns (e.g. Il. .; .; Od. .) and tells us nothing about himself. As the Greek novelist Heliodorus has one of his characters say: ‘He never mentioned his name, his country or his family.’1 This is the reason why many Lives and biographical epigrams, acknowledging the disagreement in the sources concerning his parentage, place of origin, and date, begin with an admission of ignorance2. However, ancient scholars and modern critics from Westermann (), the author of the first compilation of the Lives of Greek writers, to Raddatz (), von Wilamowitz (), Jacoby (), Schadewaldt (), and Latacz (; ), convinced that the knowledge of an author’s life was a necessary prerequisite for a correct interpretation of his works, have attempted to extract some historical ‘facts’ from the tradition about Homer’s life. In recent years the focus has changed. On the one hand, Fairweather (; ) and Hunzinger () have paid much attention to the various types of fictions and marvels of the Lives, and Lefkowitz, in her influential book on The Lives of the Greek Poets, openly hoped ‘to show that virtually all the material in all the lives is fiction’ (: viii). On the other, under the influence of the works of Foucault (), Barthes (), and Nehamas (), ‘the concept of authorship has come under close scrutiny in recent years’ and ‘audiences expectations—rather than authorial intentions—are seen in contemporary scholarship as driving impulses which shape the text’ (B. Graziosi : , ), as demonstrated by titles such as ‘The making of Homer in the sixth century : rhapsodes against Stesichorus’ by Burkert (), ‘The invention of Homer’ by West (), ‘Inventer l’auteur, copier l’uvre: des Vies d’Homère au Pétrone de Marcel Schwob’ by Rabau () and, last but not least, Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic by B. Graziosi (). In this chapter, after a brief presentation of the making of Homer and the corpus of the Lives, I attempt to read them as a construction from his work and a reliable source for the history of its reception, looking at his name, place of birth, parents and genealogies, date and personality.
1 Hld. .. See also Ps. Plu. Hom. ..; D. Chr. .; Ps. Lucian, Dem.Enc. ; Eust. Comment. ad Il. . ; Procl. Chr. . 2 Contest and ; Ps. Plu. Hom. .; Procl. Chr. ; Hesychius/Suda ; Vit. Rom. ; Lucian VH ..
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.................................................................................................................................. The name of Homer appears perhaps for the first time in the seventh century with Callinus, the earliest writer of elegiacs that we know of (if the sixteenth-century emendation of Sylburg for the kalainos in the manuscripts of Pausanias at .. is correct). More certainly, in the last third of the sixth century, Homer is mentioned and fiercely attacked—an indirect tribute to his special status—by Xenophanes (DK B) and Heraclitus (DK B, , ). These mentions coincide with the emergence of interest in the poetic creation and identity of the author which grew in the last decades of the fifth century.
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.................................................................................................................................. According to the early Christian writer Tatian (second century ), the interest in Homer’s biography began in the sixth century with Theagenes of Rhegium, a contemporary of Cambyses, followed in the late fifth century by Stesimbrotus of Thasos, Antimachus of Colophon (fl. ) and Herodotus (orat. .–). But the so-called Lives of Homer, whose origin can be traced back to oral traditions transmitted by the rhapsodes, are all several centuries later (Jacoby : ). The most detailed Life of Homer, which was attributed to Herodotus in Antiquity (and is still referred to as the Vita Herodotea, even if the attribution is false beyond any doubt), belongs to the end of the Hellenistic era at the very earliest and may well belong to the second century . Two treatises entitled On the Life and Poetry of Homer, which were included among the works of Plutarch collected by Maximus Planudes in the thirteenth century, were perhaps written by a contemporary of Maximus of Tyre or Numenius (end of the second century ). The compilation known as the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, which harks back at least to the Mouseion of the fourth-century sophist Alcidamas—as confirmed by two papyri of the third and second centuries —dates from the time of Hadrian (West ; Richardson ; Uden ). The date of the Life of Homer included in the Chrestomathy of Proclus is unclear, since this Proclus has been identified either as the second-century grammarian or as the fifth-century philosopher. The tenth-century encyclopaedia known as the Suda also contains a lengthy article on Homer derived from an epitome of the Index of Famous Authors by Hesychius of Miletus, a sixth-century writer. Finally, three anonymous Lives (the Vita Romana and two Vitae Scorialenses) are included in manuscripts of the ninth to the eleventh centuries. All these Lives were published with an English translation by West (), who only includes in his collection the four first chapters of Pseudo-Plutarch’s On the Life and Poetry of Homer devoted to his life and works. The three short Byzantine biographical narratives are included in the commentaries of the Iliad and the Odyssey by Eustathius and in the Chiliades of Tzetzes published by T.W. Allen (). In this chapter I systematically refer to the texts and translations of West and Allen, complemented (for Chapters – in PseudoPlutarch) by the edition and translation of Keaney and Lamberton ().
With the exception of the Vita Herodotea and the Contest, they are mere compilations of conflicting claims concerning the origins of the poet (place, genealogy, and date), the meaning of his name, and his personality.
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.................................................................................................................................. The name of Homer, which appears in the oldest testimonies and the Lives raises questions. Indeed, it is a real name, but, as West (: ) rightly points out, ‘no other person so named is known from before Hellenistic times’. In the Lives, ‘Homer’ is always treated as a nickname given to a poet whose first name was Melesigenes, Meles, Melesagoras or Melesianax,3 which all suggest a Smyrnean origin. But the Contest also calls him ‘Auletes’, which has been corrected into ‘Altes’ by Welcker (–), a name supported by a scholium relating that this was the name given to Homer by a certain Athenocles (cf. schol. T. ad Il. .c Erbse –). In Antiquity, Homēros had two interpretations: ‘blind’ or ‘hostage’. On the one hand, according to the compiler of the Contest, ‘he [Melesigenes] was renamed Homer later, after becoming blind, from the ordinary term applied to that condition among the Smyrneans’,4 an explanation echoed in many Lives.5 On the other, according to Proclus, ‘after being given to the Chians as a hostage [homēros], he was called Homer’6. According to Ps.Plutarch, he was so named because ‘he wanted to accompany [Homēreuein] the Lydians when they were under pressure from the Aeolians and decided to abandon Smyrna’ (Ps.Plu. Hom. .). There is also one attempt, attributed to the historian Ephorus, to combine the two explanations: ‘his name was changed to Homēros after he lost his sight, this being what the Cymeans and Ionians called those with an ocular disease, because they need homēreuontes—that is, companions’ (FGrHist F , as quoted by Ps.-Plu. Hom. .). Because the invention of fanciful etymologies is boundless, Heliodorus proposed as a joke a third explanation: ‘because one of his thighs was covered with a shaggy growth of hair . . . he was given the name “the thigh” (ho mēros)’ (Hld. ..). Modern scholars have tended to favour etymologies that support their own theories about the composition of Homeric poems as a collective enterprise (B. Graziosi : ). Welcker (–: .), recently followed by Nagy (: –), was the first to derive Homēros from homou and ararisko, which he interpreted as ‘compiler’ (‘Zusammenfüger’). Later, Durante () linked Homēros to the words *homaros or *homaris, which ‘may have been an ancient word in Greek for “an assembly” of the people, with which poetic contests were associated’. The name would thus refer to the performance context of the rhapsodes. Relying on Durante, West (: –) suggests that ‘Homer’ was a fictitious person who got his name from the Homeridae. The same suggestion is made independently by Foley (: , as quoted by B. Graziosi : ), who provides illuminating parallels Melesigenes: Contest ; Ps. Hdt. Vit. Hom. ; Ps. Plu. Hom. . and .; Procl. Chr. ; Suda ; Vit. Rom. ; Vit. Scor. .. Meles: Contest . Melesagoras: Vit. Rom. . Melesianax: Vit. Scor. .. 4 Contest : Homēros was interpreted as ho mē horōn: ‘the one who does not see’. 5 See Ps. Hdt. Vit. Hom. ; Ps. Plu. Hom. .; Procl. Chr. ; Vit. Rom. . 6 Procl. Chr. . See for variants also Hesychius/Suda , Vit. Rom. , Lucian VH ., and Contest . 3
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with the mythical ‘best bards’ both in ancient Greece and the South Slavic tradition: ‘Homer may be more an eponym than a name, it may designate the tradition of ancient Greek epic poetry by construing it as a single supremely gifted individual.’
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.................................................................................................................................. Given that the Iliad and the Odyssey quickly became foundational texts of Greek literature, the reputation of the poet spread, together with Hellenism, all over the Roman Empire and many cities laid claim to him, a fact acknowledged by the Lives and the epigrams on his biography.7 The search for an answer, which began in the sixth century , was still going on at the time of Lucian (VH ..), and Heliodorus more than two centuries later in his Ethiopian Story has the Egyptian priest Calasiris acknowledge that his contemporaries had made no progress ‘for different nations make different claims about Homer’s origins’ (..). For this reason, Homer was sometimes considered to be ‘a man of many countries’ (polypatris), a ‘citizen of the world’ (kosmopolitēs), or even a god whose fatherland lies in the heavens, where the Muses sent him.8 Attempts to arrange these various conjectures about Homer’s origins into a chronological order, such as those of Jacoby (: –) and, more recently, B. Graziosi (: –), demonstrate that Homer was originally considered to have been Ionian or Aeolian. The author of the Homeric hymn to Apollo (probably composed in ), Simonides (fl. ), Heraclitus (fl. ), Damastes (fifth century ), and Anaximenes of Lampsacus (c.– ) all considered him to be a citizen of Chios. According to Stesimbrotus, he was Aeolian and came from Smyrna while Pindar (b. ) hesitates between Chios and Smyrna (B. Graziosi : ). Antimachus (fl. ) claims that he was born in Colophon (AP .), where he went according to the Margites, a fun poem ascribed to Homer, which cannot be later than the mid-fifth century . Ephorus, in turn, places his birth in Cyme while Aristotle in Book of his On Poets places it on Ios (Ps.-Plu. Hom. .). Even the two biographies which clearly take sides, the Contest (which makes him an Ithacan) and the Vita Herodotea (which associates him with Smyrna), allude to other traditions. The compiler of the Contest acknowledges that ‘with Homer . . . practically all cities and their inhabitants claim that he was born among them’ () and mentions Smyrna, Colophon, and Chios. Moreover, ‘his theory of [an Ithacan] paternity () is contradicted in the Contest () by Hesiod’s references to Homer as son of Meles’ (Uden : ), which makes him a Smyrnean. The Vita Herodotea (–) closely associates him with two places: Cyme (where he was conceived) and Smyrna (where he was born). But the author includes other cities in his narrative of Homer’s many travels: his Homer went to Ithaca (), Colophon (), Neonteichus, a Cymean colony (), Cyme (), Phocaea (), Erythrae (), Chios (–), Samos (), and Ios where he dies (–). He also intended at some point to voyage to mainland Greece () and especially to Athens (). Modern scholars have 7 For example, AP .. acknowledges that it does not find any secure polis as his homeland and AP .. states: ‘Practically all cities and their inhabitants claim Homer as their own.’ 8 Eust. Comment. ad Il. .; AP .. , .., ..
proposed similar solutions, starting with von Wilamowitz (: ), who suggests that Homer was born in Smyrna, taught at Colophon, and settled on Chios where he raised a family. The list of Homeric birthplaces continued to grow in Antiquity. To the four canonical cities (Chios, Colophon, Cyme, and Smyrna), Proclus in his Chresthomathy () added Ios. The number increased to six in an epigram of Antipater (AP .) quoted by Ps.-Plutarch (Hom. .), who omitted Cyme and added Ios, Salamis, and Thessaly, and by Ps.-Lucian, who in his In Praise of Demosthenes () added Ios and Egyptian Thebes. It then further increased to seven in another epigram (AP .)9 with the addition of Pylos, Argos, and Athens; to eight in Ps.-Plutarch’s On the Life and Poetry of Homer . with the addition of Ios, Salamis, Argos, and Athens, and in an epigram of the Palatine Anthology (AP .); and to nine in the Vita Romana (). It finally reached twenty in the Suda (). These additions may be explained either by the presence of these cities in Homer’s poems (Ithaca, Argos, Mycenae, Pylos, and Kenkreai, a city of the Troad), by their status as an outpost of Hellenism in the fourth century (Cyprian Salamis; cf. Isoc. Evag. – and Nic. ), or, in the case of Athens, by their major role in the transmission and the fixation of the Homeric text with the institution of rhapsodic competitions at the Athenian Panathenaic festival—in the time of Pisistratus’ son Hipparchus (Ps.-Pl. Hipparch. b). Moreover, with the expansion of Hellenism throughout the Roman Empire, the poet’s identity was reshaped: he became ‘Roman’ with the first-century grammarian Aristodemus of Nysa (Ps.-Plu. Hom. .; Vit. Rom. ), ‘Egyptian’ (AP .; Ps.-Lucian Dem.Enc. ; Hld..; Contest ; Hesychius/Suda ; Vit. Rom. ; Eust. Comment. ad Il. .) or ‘Syrian’ (Ath. .b; Lucian VH .). The choice of Homer’s birthplace often reflects the local pride of their authors or narrators: Antimachus and Nicander of Colophon, Ephorus of Cyme, Meleager of Gadara, Lucian of Samosata, and the Egyptian priest Calasiris in Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story all made Homer into a compatriot.10 To support these contentions, ancient authors sometimes appeal to arguments external to the Homeric poems. The compiler of the Contest () who considers the answer of the Pythia to Emperor Hadrian as ‘the most trustworthy given the identity of the enquirer and the responder’ also quotes the Smyrneans and the Chians who relied on genealogy or descent: ‘First of all the Smyrneans say that he was the son of their local river Meles . . . and that he was formerly called Melesigenes. The Chians again produce evidence that he was a citizen of theirs, saying that some of his descendants actually survive among them, known as the Homeridae’ (Contest ). Others point to places, monuments, and cults still existing in their cities, using an argument often used by historians such as Diodorus, Livy, and Pausanias to guarantee the credibility of a legend (Gabba : ). For instance, according to the compiler of the Contest (), the inhabitants of Colophon showed their visitors ‘the spot where they say Homer, as a teacher of reading and writing, started his poetic career and composed the Margites as his first work’. Some rely on various arguments drawn from the content or the dialect of the Homeric text. To support his claim of an Ithacan Homer, the compiler of the Contest () relies not only on the Pythia but also on the Odyssey since ‘the poet so magnificently glorified his
9 10
See also Tz. Chil. .. Colophon: Ps. Plu. Hom. ... Syria: Ath. .b. Samosata: Lucian VH .. Egypt: Hld. ..
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paternal grandfather in his poetry’. The Aeolian or Ionian birthplaces which appear first in the list of Homer’s fatherlands may also be deductions drawn from the Homeric dialect which is predominantly Ionic with a high proportion of Aeolic features. As pointed out by B. Graziosi (: ), ‘[t]he geographical area defined by the early places associated to Homer, Chios, Smyrna, Colophon and Cyme tallies remarkably well with the Homeric dialect whose overall flavour is Ionic with an important Aeolic element’. Indeed, Homer is explicitly said to be Aeolian because it is only in the Aeolic dialect that homēros means blind (Contest ; Procl. Chr. ; Ps.-Hdt. Vit. Hom. ). The many atticisms found in the vocabulary and grammar of his poems and mentioned by Ps.-Plutarch in the On the Life and Poetry of Homer (.–) may also have been used by the grammarians Aristarchus and Dionysius Thrax (Ps.-Plu. Hom. ., Vit. Scor. .) to support an Athenian origin of Homer, since we know from a scholium (schol. A ad Il. ., quoted by Heath : ) that Aristonicus’ work on Aristarchus ‘related Homer’s use of dual (seen as a distinguishing feature of Attic dialect) to the question of Homer’s patris’. As demonstrated by Heath (: ), ‘ancient scholars also tried to correlate distinctive customs portrayed in the poems with those of candidate homelands of their author’, assuming that these customs ‘are likely to be his own ancestral ones’ (Ps.-Hdt. Vit. Hom. ). To prove that Homer was Aeolian, the author of the Vita Herodotea (), after quoting the description of sacrificial ritual in Iliad .–, points out two uniquely Aeolic sacrificial practices: the loin is not burnt and the entrails are roasted on fivepronged forks. According to the Vita Romana (), ‘others have said that he was Egyptian, because he introduces the heroes kissing each other on the mouth, which is customary for the Egyptians to do’. The Egyptian priest Calasiris, in the Ethiopian Story, also relies on far-fetched similarities between ‘the Egyptian statues with two feet connected and carved virtually as one form’ and the Homeric description of the gods in human guise and ‘their method of locomotion: which . . . is accomplished by a sort of smooth, gliding motion, and without touching the ground, so that they cleave rather than walk through the circumambient air’ (Hld. .– quotes Il. .–). According to the Vita Romana (), ‘Aristodemus of Nysa argues that Homer was a Roman from certain customs that occur only among the Romans, first, from the game of draughts (pessoi) played by the suitors in the Odyssey (.) and, second, from the practice of inferiors rising from their seats when superiors arrive (Il. .), customs which are still preserved among the Romans’. Eustathius also claimed that Homer’s poetry was dense with Roman customs (Comment. ad Il. .). Meleager of Gadara made him a Syrian because his heroes, like the Syrians, do not eat fish (Ath. . b), and Zenodotus supported a Chaldean origin on the basis of the knowledge of astrology to be found in the poems (schol. AT ad Il. .b).
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.................................................................................................................................. With the exception of the Vita Herodotea, the Lives collected by West () and T.W. Allen () often acknowledge that ‘for his parents there is again much disagreement in all the sources’ (Contest ) and propose a compilation of various traditions, without
choosing between them. On the one hand, Homer, like his heroes, is often given divine parents or ancestors. His father is said to be Meles, the river of Smyrna11 (usually in support of a Smyrnean origin), Apollo (Hesychius/Suda ), or more vaguely an anonymous daimōn who danced with the Muses (Vit. Rom. ; Ps.-Plu. Hom. ., quoting Aristotle). His mother is a nymph called Critheis (Contest ; Hesychius/Suda ; Vit. Scor. .) or left anonymous (Ps.-Lucian Dem.Enc. ), the muse Calliope (Contest ; Ps.-Plu. Hom. ., quoting AP .; Hesychius/Suda ) or Metis (Contest ). In the Contest (), his lineage, which is traced back to Apollo and Thoosa, the daughter of Poseidon, includes a nymph called Methona, the muse Calliope, and mythical poets such as Linus. Orpheus (Procl. Chr. ) and Musaeus, the Attic alter ego of Orpheus, are also mentioned as his ancestors. These mythical genealogies are to be interpreted as a translation into genealogical terms of the superhuman nature of his achievement. They are in line with expressions such as ‘divine singer’ (θεῖος ἀοιδός), which appears as early as the Margites (F . West ), ‘divine verses’ (θεσπέσια ἔπεα, Pi. I. .), and ‘divine nature’ (D.Chr. Or. (‘On Homer’), ). The ‘divine Homer’ (θεῖος ῞Ομηρος: Ar. Ra. ) is supposed in the Contest (, , ) to be an inscription engraved on the tripod celebrating Hesiod’s victory, on his statue set up by the Argives and on his tomb at Ios. Among the biographers, Tzetzes is alone in explicitly excluding any mythical descent (Chil. .). The ‘human’ genealogy may sometimes appear as a rationalization of the mythical one: the river Meles becomes, like Homer’s mother Critheis, a human being or is mentioned as the site of his birth.12 The human fathers ascribed to Homer are Dmasagoras (Contest ), Daemon (Contest ), Crethon, Alemon (Vit. Rom. ), and, most frequently, Maeon.13 But Maeon’s identity is floating: according to Ephorus, Hellanicus, Damastes, and Pherecydes, he was the brother of Hesiod’s father,14 but according to Aristotle he was a Lydian king who ‘accepted Homer and brought him up as his own’ (Ps.-Plu. Hom. .). Some genealogies also translate into biographical terms the relations perceived between Homer’s works and other epic poems. Homer and Hesiod, who were jointly responsible for the theogony of the Greeks (Xenophanes DK; Hdt ..), were often related by birth: they are said to be first or second degree cousins or more distant relatives.15 Even when the two poets are separated by two generations, all these genealogies allow them to compete with each other at Chalcis. The tradition concerning this competition relies on Hesiod’s Works and Days – where Hesiod says that at Chalcis ‘he was victorious in poetry and won a tripod with ring handles’ (), which he dedicated to the Muses of Helicon. This tradition was influential enough to find its way into the text as demonstrated by a scholium
Contest , ; Ps. Plu. Hom. .; Hesychius/Suda ; Vit. Rom. ; Vit. Scor. .. Ps. Hdt. Vit. Hom. ; Ps. Plu. Hom. .; Procl. Chr. ; Hesychius/Suda . 13 Contest , quoting Hellanicus and Cleanthes; Ps. Plu. Hom. .; Procl. Chr. ; Hesychius/Suda , quoting the historian Charax; Vit. Rom. , quoting Stesimbrotus; Vit. Scor. .. Homer is often called Maeonides in the epigrams of the Palatine Anthology (eleven occurrences). 14 Ephorus is quoted by Ps. Plu. Hom. .; Hellanicus, Damastes, and Pherecydes are quoted by Proclus Chr. . 15 Unlike Proclus (Chr. ; see above), Ephorus says that Appelles, the brother of Hesiod’s father Dius, was the father of Homer’s mother Critheis (Ps. Plu. Hom. .). According to Charax, he was the father of Maeon, Homer’s father (Hesychius/Suda ). And Contest states that Appellaeus, the brother of Dius, was the father of Homer’s father Maeon. 11 12
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to Hesiod’s line : ‘others write the divine Homer having won in song at Chalcis’ (B. Graziosi : ), an interpretation harshly criticized by Proclus (Chr. ), together with the legend of a family tie between Homer and Hesiod: And there are some who have written that he was the cousin of Hesiod: they are no expert in poetry, for Homer and Hesiod are as far from being related by birth as their poetry is different. In any case, they were not even contemporaries, and those who made up this dedication were pitiful wretches: ‘Hesiod dedicated this to the Muses of Helicon, having defeated in song at Chalcis the godly Homer’. They were led astray by Hesiod’s Days the passage [ ] means something else.
In Proclus’ Chrestomathy (), Homer is also said to have spent time with Creophylus at Ios and to have given to him The Capture of Oechalia, which is now current under his name. He is also said to have given to Stasinus, who married his daughter, the Cypria as a dowry (Tz. Chil. .–; Ael. VH –). The life of Homer is often reconstructed straight from his works. In its list of Homer’s fathers, the Contest () includes Thamyras, a variant of Thamyris, the bard of the Iliad (.). It also mentions as his mother ‘an Ithacan woman sold abroad by Phoenicians’, as was Eumaeus in the Odyssey (.–), and supports the genealogy that makes him the son of Telemachus and Polycaste, the daughter of Nestor. According to the Vita Herodotea (), Ithaca was also visited by him in his travels and the Vit. Scor. . stresses that ‘he spent a long period’ there. The link between Homer’s biography and the Homeric poems is even openly acknowledged in the Vita Herodotea (): When he turned his hand to poetry, he rendered his gratitude, firstly to Mentor the Ithacan in the Odyssey, for having tended him so assiduously when his eyes were ailing in Ithaca: he found a place for his name in the poem, making him a comrade of Odysseus and writing that when Odysseus sailed to Troy he entrusted his household to Mentor, as the worthiest and most upright of the Ithacans. In many other passages of the poem too he honored him by making Athena take Mentor’s form when she entered into conversa tion with someone. He also repaid his teacher Phemius for his upbringing and education in the Odyssey, especially in these verses (Od. . ). He also recalls the shipowner with whom he sailed out all over and saw many towns and countries his name was Mentes in these verses (Od. . ). He rendered thanks also to Tychios, the cobbler who received him at Neonteichos when he came to his shop, by embodying him in these verses of the Iliad (. ).
Convinced that the poems’ world reproduces the poet’s real one, the author of the Vita Herodotea infers the humble facts of Homer’s life from the glorious Odyssean fiction: Mentor was an Ithacan who took care of him (); Phemius, the bard who sang against his will for the suitors in Ithaca (Od. .–) was the ‘teacher who gave boys instruction in reading and writing’ () and adopted him; Mentes was ‘the lord of the Taphians’ (Od. .), the educated and knowledgeable shipowner who persuaded him to sail with him and discover countries and cities (); and Tychius was ‘the finest of leather-workers’ who made Ajax’s shield (Il. .–).
D
.................................................................................................................................. The date of Homer’s birth was as controversial as his place of birth. Speculations about it, which began in the fifth century, were expressed at intervals usually reckoned from the epoch of Troy, the return of the Heraclidae (eighty years after the Trojan War), the Ionian migration (sixty years after the return of the Heraclidae) and, more rarely, the establishment of the Olympic Games from which the dating by Olympiads is computed, and Xerxes’ crossing of the Hellespont. The Vita Herodotea claims to calculate it ‘accurately and truly’: From the expedition to Ilion which Agamemnon and Menelaus organized it was a hundred and thirty years to the settlement of Lesbos by cities . . . After the settlement of Lesbos it was twenty years to the foundation of the Cyme known as Aeolian or Phrikonian. Eighteen years after Cyme, Smyrna was founded by the Cymaeans, and that was when Homer was born. From Homer’s birth it is six hundred and twenty two years to Xerxes’ crossing . . . Homer was born a hundred and sixty eight years after the Trojan War.
All the other Lives list a number of possible dates without adjudicating between them (B. Graziosi : ). There are in fact two main options. Those who say that Homer lived at the time of the Trojan War or close enough to the sack of Troy, before the return of the Heraclidae make him either an eyewitness of the war (Ps.-Plu. Hom. .; Vit. Scor. .) or allow him to have known those who took part in the expedition, a view adopted at the Hellenistic time by Crates and his school (Ps.-Plu. Hom. .; Procl. Chr. ; Vit. Rom. ), obviously in order to support the historical reliability of his narrative of the Trojan War. Others reject such an early date. This is the case for Thucydides, who says that ‘Homer lived long after the Trojan War’(..). According to the author of the Vita Scorialensis, who relies on the introduction to the Achaean catalogue, ‘this is implausible, for Homer himself shows that he lived long afterwards, when he says: “But we (the poets) only hear report, and have no vision” (Il. ..)’ (.), as opposed to the Muses who know everything since they have the ability to be present everywhere. Accordingly, Homer is dated later: , , , , , , or even years after the Trojan War.16
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.................................................................................................................................. The most pervasive feature of Homer is his blindness but even this is not undisputed. One may discard as ‘surprising and implausible’ (B. Graziosi : ) the passage of Lucian’s True Histories (.) which questions his blindness. But Proclus (Chr. ) also firmly denies Ps. Plu. Hom. . ( years), ., and Procl. Chr. ( years); Ps. Plu. Hom. . ( years); Ps. Plu. Hom. . ( years); Vit. Scor. . ( years); Hesychius/Suda ( years); Hdt. .., .. and Ps. Plu. Hom. . (according to West : n.) ( years); Tatian orat. .. and Clem. Al. Strom. . ( years). 16
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it: ‘those who have stated he was blind seem to me to be mentally blind themselves, for he saw more clearly than any man ever’. The Suda () also interprets Homer’s blindness as a metaphor: ‘the true version is that he did not succumb to lust which begins with the eyes and for this reason was reported blind’. When his blindness is asserted, it is sometimes explained by natural causes such as eye ailment (Ps.-Hdt. Vit. Hom. -) or old age (Tz. Chil. .). Already in the Vita Herodotea, the beginning of Homer’s blindness happens to coincide with his becoming a poet. In the Vit. Rom. (), blindness twice becomes the price to be paid for poetic genius: When Achilles appeared to him, Homer was blinded by the dazzle of the armour; but Thetis and the Muses took pity on him and honored him with the gift of poetry. Others, however, say he suffered this disability as a result of the wrath of Helen . . . the soul of the heroine actually appeared standing before him in the night, advising him to burn his poems, as he would be if he did so; but he could not bear to do it.
This story has been rightly interpreted as an inference from the Palinode of Stesichorus, who was deprived of his sight because of his blasphemy to Helen and was cured after his recantation (G. Graziosi : –). Ancient and modern scholars ‘have rather argued that his blindness was invented by ancient audiences who modelled their image of Homer on that of Demodocus, the blind bard of Odyssey ’ (ibid.: ). The introduction to the catalogue of ships (Il. .–) opposing the bards who know the past only by hearsay, and the Muses, who are granted the possibility to be there and become eye-witnesses, may also have suggested the portrait of a blind Homer. The story of Thamyris who dared to compete with the Muses and lost both his poetic genius and his sight (Il. .–) may be read along similar lines. However, the portrait of Homer has often nothing to do with the Homeric world. In the Odyssey, the song was always ‘an adornment of the feast’ (Od. ., .) and the bards Phemius and Demodocus performed in the palaces of the kings Odysseus and Alcinous. The ‘Homer’ of the Lives is closer to the rhapsodes, the wandering performers of epic poems who moved from town to town and made their living by participating in public competitions. Before looking at the Contest and the Vita Herodotea, where this portrait is developed, it is worth collecting some indications in the other Lives which follow the same line, with Homer sailing to Thebes for the Cronia (a musical contest), or ‘going around from town to town to make a living’ and reciting his poems in scattered form.17 The Contest (, ) also alludes to Homer’s recitations of his poems ‘from town to town’, especially at Athens, Corinth, and Argos and the honours granted to him there (, ), his composition of an inscription on Midas’ tomb at the invitation of his sons (), and his sailing to Delos for the Panegyris (). But of course the main emphasis is placed on the contest organized for the funeral of Amphidamas and the wonderful performance he put up there together with Hesiod (). The Vita Herodotea (, , , –, , ) gives the same information in a much lower key. In this text, Homer travels for a wage and full board with a shipowner, then recites his verses in a cobbler’s shop and comments on them—as did the rhapsods—at Neonteichus, 17
Ps. Plu. Hom. .; Hesychius/Suda ; Vit. Scor. ., ..
making his living from his poetry. At Cyme, he displayed his poems ‘in the old men saloons’ before attempting without success to be supported there ‘at public expense’. At Phocea, he was again performing his poems in saloons, before being supported by Thestorides. At Samos, he joined the festival of the Apaturia and received something for singing his verses in the most well-favoured houses. In the Contest (), he is said to have taught reading and writing at Colophon. Similarly the Vita Herodotea tells us that after the death of his adoptive father Phemius, ‘who gave boys instruction in reading and writing and the other humanities’, Homer ‘was established as a teacher and earned the admiration both of the local people and of those foreigners who came in’ (–, , ). Later, at Bolissos, when a wealthy Chian urged him to stay and take care of his children, Homer accepted. At Chios, he set up a school and began teaching his poems to boys. This surprising portrait is undoubtedly to be explained as a reflection of ‘the authority of Homer as educator par excellence’ (Cribiore : ).
C
.................................................................................................................................. The Homer of the Lives is a construction from the Odyssey. But his portrait is also a major document concerning the reception of his poems. Their panhellenic status combined with the local pride of Greek cities accounts for the vast number of his birthplaces. Later on, when Hellenism was appropriated by the Roman Empire, he was claimed by Rome, Egypt, and Syria which were part of it. His portrait was also influenced by the rhapsodes who performed his poems and his primary role in Greek and Graeco-Roman paideia (Cribiore : –).
F R It has been generally recognized that the ancient Lives of literary men contain much that is of doubtful historicity. From Lehrs () to Stuart () and Fairweather (), scholars, convinced that the knowledge of the author’s life was a prerequisite for the interpretation of his work, have attempted to identify the fictitious elements in order to extract historical facts. The epoch making book by Lefkowitz (), The Lives of Greek Poets, convincingly showed that virtually all the material in all the Lives is fiction. Later, papers by West () and Burkert (), and a collection of papers edited by Dubel and Rabau (), and especially the chapter by Rabau herself (Rabau ), illustrate this change of focus. B. Graziosi () is, to my knowledge, the best evidence for this new reading. She maintains that ‘ancient (and indeed modern) discussion of the figure of Homer can be seen as testimonies to the significance and meaning of the Homeric poems for specific audiences’ ( ). Kivilo (), for her part, examines biographical traditions about six early Greek poets other than Homer. For ancient Lives of Virgil, see Brugnoli and Stok ().
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.................................................................................................................................. L many literary genres in Antiquity, political biography was never systematically defined.1 A first possible indication of the biographical slant of a text is of course the use of an individual’s name as title (with or without a preposition like peri, eis, de, etc.), often in combination with explicit reference to ‘life’, or ‘education’ (bios, vita, agōgē, paideia vel sim).2 If the name is that of a statesman (as is the case in the Lives dealt with in Chapters – in this volume) or category of statesmen (as in Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars, discussed in Chapter ) it is likely that we are dealing with political biography. But many of these titles are of uncertain origin and date, and so tell us little about ancient perceptions. As regards the substance, we may expect an enumeration (chronological or otherwise) of the individual’s political or military actions, and some attention to specific character traits (virtues and vices), habits (discipline, love life, talents), and personal experiences (e.g. concerning childhood, family, relations, and death). But even in the presence of such elements, the boundaries of political biography in Antiquity are blurred. In Chapter in this volume, for example, Christopher Pelling discusses a few extended biographical sketches of statesmen in historiography (Herodotus, Thucydides) and in the Latin tradition there are of course Sallust’s monographs on Catilina and Iugurtha (on which see Chapter and Chapter in this volume in passing). But to what extent is Xenophon’s obviously fictionalized account of Cyrus the Great’s education and reign a political biography? What can we say about biographical encomia, or Pliny’s
See, on this issue in particular, Momigliano (: ), Geiger (: ), T.E. Duff (: ), and Hägg (a: ). 2 On the inclusion of an individual’s ‘education’ as distinguishing biography from historiography, see Momigliano (: ). Examples include: Onesicritus, Marsyas of Pella, and Lysimachus, who all wrote about the education (agōgē/paideia) of Alexander. 1
panegyric of Trajan read alongside Tacitus’ Agricola by Whitton in this volume (Chapter )? How do autobiographies by statesmen fit in? Broadly speaking, all of these writings perhaps come under the heading of ‘biographies of statesmen’, along with uncontested samples of the genre, most of which receive separate treatments in this book: Nepos’ On Foreign Generals and Atticus, Nicolaus of Damascus’ Augustus (Chapter ), Tacitus’ Agricola (Chapter ), Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (Chapter ), Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars (Chapter ), and finally the Historia Augusta and the Epitome de Caesaribus.3 Comparing several borderline cases of political biography with ones that are undisputed, this chapter will attempt to give a clear idea of what biographies of statesmen were held to be in Antiquity, and so determine which features deserve special attention.4
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.................................................................................................................................. Chronologically speaking, it is natural to begin with biographical sketches of individual statesmen in historiography, such as we find in Herodotus and in Thucydides.5 These passages, of course, do not and were never meant to exist for their own sake (see Chapter in this volume on the importance of the bigger picture in these narratives). Precisely the fact that the sketch of ‘what kind of man X was and what his deeds were’ is understood to be instrumental to comprehending the development of the Persian Empire, or, as the case may be, the vicissitudes of the Peloponnesian Wars, shows that we are not dealing with biography per se. The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for historical monographs of the kind Sallust wrote: these focus on a political event of some historical significance (conspiracy, war) which stands in close causal relation to a certain individual, rather than studying such an individual for his own sake (cf. Momigliano : –, Geiger : , and Hägg a: ). In that sense they are truly different from, say, Tacitus’ Agricola, which focuses on the individual life of Agricola as an example of integrity under duress, or from Plutarchan biographies. Indeed, rather than writing a comprehensive history of the late Republic in its transition to the early Principate, Plutarch wrote the separate biographies of Cato Minor, Cicero, Brutus, Pompey, Caesar, and Antony (juxtaposed, moreover, with their Greek ‘counterparts’).6 3
To list only the (substantially) extant samples. Most Hellenistic biographies have been transmitted in a state that makes judgement of their qualities practically impossible (see Chapter in this volume). On the Historia Augusta, see Galli Milić and Hecquet Noti () and Syme (, ). On the Epitome de Caesaribus, see Festy (). 4 Examples will often be drawn from Plutarch and Suetonius, because these authors arguably represent the most influential, best known and best preserved ancient biographies of statesmen. 5 Herodotus on Cyrus: . ; ; ; and on Cambyses: . ; Thucydides on The mistocles: . ; and on Pericles .. Homeyer (: ) calls attention to the biographical element in Herodotus; Leo (: ) regarded Thucydides’ appraisal of Themistocles as the first genuinely biographical account in literature, cf. Hägg (a: ). 6 And a now lost biography of Augustus in a series of emperors’ biographies, of which those of Galba and Otho survive (see Chapter in this volume).
It has been argued that the political changes of the early Hellenistic period, in particular the shift from democracy and small city-states and their rivalries to the great imperial ambitions of someone like Alexander, influenced the turn from comprehensive histories (on topics like the Peloponnesian Wars) to biographies of individuals who had become the prime movers of great political events (Geiger : ). Neat though such an explanation may sound, it seems contradicted by the existence of the early political encomia on Evagoras and Agesilaus, which likewise focus on the political significance of a single individual—although it must be admitted that such encomia are not truly historiographical in scope or purpose, but rather have an epideictic function; they establish a canon of virtues and demonstrate how well a particular individual measured up to them (Rewa : ). Studying the development of political biography, Friedrich Leo ()7 identified two strains: the chronological or Plutarchan strain and the Suetonian strain. This latter type of biography was ordered in rubrics and only partly worked along chronological lines (usually in the narration of the beginning—childhood and youth—and end of the life of the biographee). Leo assumed that this structural choice was the result of a ‘mistake’: since Suetonius had begun by writing the biographies of poets and intellectuals (the non-extant Poets, and the partially transmitted Rhetoricians and Grammarians), he had adopted this ‘Alexandrian’ scheme, which scholars previously used for intellectual biography, and had then simply ‘forgotten’ to replace it by the more fitting chronological order that informed peripatetic biography, fit for great statesmen, when he started on his Lives of the Caesars. However, as Hägg (ibid.: ) observes, in a series of emperor’s Lives, it would soon become tedious and chaotic to read a strictly chronological account. The Suetonian ‘system of drawers into which facts can be stored conveniently’ (Luck : ) is in fact more likely to have been a deliberate choice, a structure that makes comparison between the various emperors easy and insightful. The rubric system, rather than deriving wholesale from Alexandrian examples, was moreover partly influenced by a certain ‘Roman’ way of looking at public achievements, also apparent in pre-literary funeral orations, where the categories used to praise the dead are usually family descent, honores, dignitas, res gestae, and mores. The Plutarchan, or peripatetic, kind of political biography, on the other hand, was understood by Leo to have developed from historiography and to be therefore ordered chronologically. In reality, the evidence is against the existence of just two types of biography before Suetonius and Plutarch. The rigid taxonomical genealogy has been rejected by most scholars in the second half of the last century, even if the observation that the Suetonian and Plutarchan approaches of political biography are very different remains valid and interesting in its own right (Momigliano : ; T.E. Duff : –).
T A P B: I M
.................................................................................................................................. Historiography shares with political biography a sense that lessons can be drawn from the past (e.g. Th. ..; Plb. ..–): history teaches political lessons, and political biography 7
For a discussion of the controversy, see e.g. Weizsäcker (), Steidle (), Ziegler (), Momigliano (: ), Geiger (: ), T.E. Duff (: ), and Hägg (a: ).
teaches ethics.8 A well-known passage illustrating this aim is, for instance, Plutarch’s preface to the Aemilius Paullus and Timoleon, . (cited in Chapter in this volume; see also T.E. Duff : –). This of course sheds light on Plutarch’s positive approach to his biographees throughout, and his tendency to exclude as much as possible ‘negative’ examples. His Lives of Demetrius and Antony appear to be the only undisputedly ‘negative’ Lives; more disputed are the pairs Nicias-Crassus, Coriolanus-Alcibiades, Pyrrhus-Marius. In the proem to Demetrius-Antony (.–), Plutarch explains his choice to nevertheless include negative examples by analogy with a famous flautist, who exhorted his pupils to listen to bad players as well as good ones in order to learn by the comparison what good musicianship meant. But of course the moral agenda is not always so explicit, and a division between descriptive (indirect) versus protreptic (direct) moralism is useful (Pelling : –; T. E. Duff : –, ). If biography provided models of ‘exemplary lives’, we may ask to what extent a Greek reader of Plutarch’s age had the practical ability to become ‘like’ the great statesmen of the past. Were not the achievements of great men of the past inseparably bound to their unique historical situation (Schneeweiss : ; T.E. Duff : )? Plutarch provides an answer to this question in his Demosthenes (Dem. .), to the effect that aretē can exist anywhere, provided that someone has a noble nature (ϕύσεως . . . χρηστῆς) and a spirit that loves exertion (ϕιλοπόνου ψυχῆς). As Hägg (a: ) notes: ‘The object is not imitation of accidental details of the deeds, but of the essence of virtue (courage, justice, self-control, etc.) as exhibited in these historical circumstances.’ For Suetonius (and to some extent the Historia Augusta), on the other hand, the intention seems on the whole different. The question a reader of these works is meant to meditate upon is ‘What makes a good emperor?’ (And of course, quite prominently, ‘What does not?’, cf. e.g. his Lives of Nero and Caligula). This does not mean that the work was meant for emperors-to-be, but rather for all who had the day-to-day experience of an emperor and his rule, meaning the majority of the male Roman elite, and in particular the Senate and the equites. This explains the large amount of attention generally allotted to the emperor’s relationship to these governing classes. In intellectual biographies, moral exemplariness is not usually the focus (see Chapter on Homer, Chapter on the sophists, and Chapter on philosophers). People did not read Satyrus’ biography of Euripides to learn how to become a poet like him (they could study his plays for that), but rather because they were curious about the man behind the plays; details from personal life were held to enlighten literary works and vice versa (Geiger : ; Lefkowitz ). Philosophical biographies, and especially the writings of the Socratics (notably Xenophon and Plato), often do quite emphatically include an ethical and exhortatory dimension in their sketches of philosophers and their ways of life.
T.E. Duff (: ) helpfully points to the parallel agenda of Plutarch’s Moralia, cf. Barthelmess (: ) and Valgiglio (b). 8
E P B
.................................................................................................................................. Encomiastic political biography (and its negative counterpart, psogos, blame, which occurs less frequently)9 have some distinctive features worthy of attention. In the first place encomia naturally tend to focus on the praiseworthy details of a life that is told entirely to recommend it rhetorically, or even exalt it, not necessarily with the aim of understanding or deeply probing it. This can be linked to the fact that authors of encomiastic biographies often knew their laudandi personally (e.g. Nicolaus of Damascus and Augustus), or were even related by family ties to their subject (e.g. Tacitus and Agricola). The biographee is often recently deceased, or not even that (e.g. Nepos’ Atticus, Nicolaus’ Augustus), when the encomium is written, which means that the attitude towards him must be more coloured by personal memories or political partisanship than it would be towards a historical figure.10 Not only because of the position of the author vis-à-vis his subject, but also because of the audience he is addressing, which may similarly consist of family members, political followers or rivals of the man in question (see e.g. the proem of Tacitus’ Agricola – on the political dangers of praise). At the same time it is salutary to remember that even ‘historical’ biographies are often projections of current political or ethical ideologies upon political figureheads of the past. This is not always easy to see, especially if certain narratives have come to represent the dominant discourse about a certain historical figure (e.g. Plutarch’s Solon or Suetonius’ Nero). The promise of praise is also used as a protreptic for the audience, as in Agesilaus , where Xenophon professes the hope that the virtue (ἀρετή) of Agesilaus may become an example (παράδειγμα) for those who want to practise male excellence (ἀνδραγαθίαν) (.). A similar sentiment speaks from Isocrates’ praises of Evagoras (addressed to Evagoras’ son Nicocles): ‘youth will strive harder to achieve virtue knowing that they would be praised (εὐλογήσονται) more highly than those whom they have excelled in merit’ (Isoc. Evag. ). The biographical account of Tacitus’ Agricola, which stands in the same tradition, also focuses on the enduring power of the written monument to transmit the virtue of the individual (.), and thus exhorts readers to similar behaviour: All that we have loved in Agricola, all that we have admired, abides and will abide in human hearts through the endless procession of the ages, by the fame of his deeds (fama rerum). Many of the men of old will be buried in oblivion, inglorious and unknown; Agricola’s story has been told for posterity and he will survive (Agricola posteritate narratus et traditus superstes erit). (Tac. Agr. .)
9
For example, the non extant writing of Stesimbrotus of Thasos On Themistocles, Thucydides, son of Melesius, and Pericles (cf. Schachermeyr ), written several years after the death of Pericles. The ‘negative’ Lives of Plutarch (Demetrius Antony, Nicias Crassus) are written with so much empathy that it is hard to see them as outright psogos. The Suetonian Lives of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero do have explicit aspects of blame. 10 Many autobiographies of statesmen and rulers too were compiled during their lives, with the express purpose of serving as material for later encomiastic biography; cf. Momigliano (: , ).
S E
.................................................................................................................................. The Agricola of Tacitus, the Atticus of Nepos and the Augustus of Nicolaus of Damascus are all single biographies of great or at least remarkable political individuals. But there also existed a strong tendency towards serialization of all sorts of biographies (poets, philosophers, and also statesmen), which, as far as can be established, seems to have started with the Hellenistic Neanthes of Cyzicus’ Lives of Illustrious Men.11 (On this text, see Chapter in this volume; on individual and collective Lives, see Chapter .) Whereas modern biography tends to focus on the uniqueness of the individual, Antiquity often looked rather for the exemplary (Geiger : ). Exemplariness is easier to bring out if one can compare samples of a species, as Suetonius or Plutarch do.12 Plutarch’s parallelism moreover enhances the impact of such juxtaposition, and he adds explicit syncrises at the end of numerous of his paralleled Lives (T.E. Duff : –). Serialization reveals a clear educational agenda: to teach readers how to become virtuous by comparing the examples these past men had set, and to avoid their setbacks where possible, or perhaps, alternatively, take courage from the thought that they too had their faults. It is of interest to note that the serialization or parallelism sometimes seems to imitate reality: many great statesmen or rulers are said to have looked to heroic predecessors to emulate, as was the case famously with Alexander and Achilles, and in turn Caesar and Alexander, but also Cicero and Demosthenes (ibid.: –). Very few political biographies, serial or otherwise, of ‘great women’ are known,13 whereas there might have been some scope for this, since figures like Cleopatra, Octavia, but also Zenobia, Semiramis, or Artemisia were acknowledged in historiography as politically significant. An explanation of this omission may perhaps be sought in the fact that for the intended readership of political biography (the educated male elite) it was hard to take a woman as a moral example, when the customary virtues of women were considered to lie in chastity, obedience and self-effacement.14 This is not to say that remarkable women play no part in the biographies of statesmen (Cleopatra and Octavia in Plutarch’s Life of Antony are prominent), or that they did not receive commemoration for their deeds (think of the funeral orations for famous Roman women). But even if Plutarch sketches their personalities with a substantial amount of psychological detail, which betrays the interest they must have held for the author (and his readers), they still function mainly as props to illustrate the inability of a man like Antony to deal with women, and rein in his erotic desires.
In PHaun. (datable to late Hellenistic times) moreover, fragments of a series of biographies of Ptolemaic monarchs have become available. 12 Plutarch also wrote four Lives that stand apart from the serialized treatments in the Parallel Lives (Artaxerxes, Aratus, Galba, and Otho, on which see Chapter in this volume) and one double parallel Life, comparing the Gracchi with Agis and Cleomenes. 13 See Gera () on the anonymous (probably late) biographical treatise On Women. An interesting example is found in Plutarch’s Virtues of Women. 14 Although Plutarch pointedly disagrees with this (Thucydidean) idea in the opening of his Virtues of Women, but he seems to be the exception confirming the general rule. 11
P B S G?
.................................................................................................................................. Several passages from ancient political biography seem to discuss boundaries between ancient historiography and biography. They have somewhat misleadingly been used to argue that Antiquity drew a clear divide between the two. The most influential passage is no doubt Plutarch’s opening of the Alexander (.–., on which see Chapter in this volume), saying that he is writing ‘Lives, not histories’, and may therefore be excused if he focuses more on personal details (‘a slight thing like a phrase or a jest’) than on great military acts (‘battles where thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities’), since like a portrait painter, he wants to devote himself to ‘the signs of the soul’ and ‘by the means of these . . . portray the life of each, leaving to others the description of their great contests’. As T.E. Duff (: –) has demonstrated, as convenient a programme for ancient political biography as these lines may appear to be, the real issue here is that Plutarch is creating a recusatio for the fact that he will not replicate what others had already done in their treatment of Alexander: to relate in detail his battles and sieges. It is not a programmatic statement for the Parallel Lives as a whole, much less for ancient political biography in general. And, indeed, even in the subsequent Life of Caesar the historically oriented narration of political and military events actually takes precedence over the illumination of Caesar’s character through significant anecdotes and jests or sayings, as has been widely recognized. Even more explicitly contradictory is the prologue of Plutarch’s Nicias, where it is stated that especially great deeds reveal the cast of someone’s character, following Duff ’s reading of this difficult passage (ibid.: ). Significantly, Plutarch here explicitly addresses the difference between his own account of Nicias and that of others (by Thucydides and Philistus). Since it would be foolish to attempt to rival these authors on their own ground, Plutarch will concentrate on lesser-known and neglected facts and deeds. But there is no sense that this entails an exclusive focus on personal details, in order to create a difference between his biographical account and the historical ones of his admired predecessors. As we can see quite clearly when perusing the Parallel Lives, Plutarch adapts his prefatory remarks to the specific qualities of the Life he happens to be writing. The other oft-cited passage in this context derives from the preface of Nepos’ On Foreign Generals (see Chapter in this volume), which explores the idea that some will think it too frivolous to hear about the musical talents of Epaminondas. It seems attractive to assume that this is a defence of political biography’s right to dwell on such things, as opposed to historiography (Geiger : ), but in fact the point Nepos continues to make is that such activities are highly regarded among Greek but not Roman intellectuals—and that this is why he needs to speak about them. What this passage illustrates, then, is a difference between Greeks and Romans as regards the significance of the (musical) arts in the lives of great men. Interestingly, Nepos does formulate something of a biographical programme at the beginning of his Pelopidas (.), where he says that he fears an account of Pelopidas’ achievements may read more like history than a description of a life (vitam enarrare); but that if, on the other hand, he treats the high points only cursorily, readers will not
understand how great a man (quantus) Pelopidas was (cf. Tuplin : –, Krafft and Olef-Krafft : –, and the discussion by Stem in Chapter in this volume). The passage does betray a clear sense, then, that biography was separate from historiography in that it concentrated on an individual for its own sake, rather than to illuminate the political consequences of his deeds on a larger historical canvas. It was often, but by no means always, the case that this entailed a greater focus on personal habits of an individual statesman in order to understand better what kind of person he had been, and, in particular, how this had influenced his abilities to conceive and execute deeds of great political significance.
T I P D
.................................................................................................................................. The extent to which the details of personal life are included in political biography and the quality of these details in fact differ greatly among various authors. Encomiastic Lives as a matter of course avoid bad habits. Plutarch, and especially Suetonius and the Historia Augusta, do, on the other hand, include a great amount of highly personal, certainly not exclusively praiseworthy, details. As might be guessed, it is practically always the case that Plutarch tries to find the most positive approach to or version of ‘telling anecdotes’ about his heroes, without, however, blindly praising them. His Alexander reveals markedly less tyrannical traits than that of Curtius Rufus, but his tendency to boast and his vulnerability to flatterers (Alex. .), and the eventual suspicion turned towards former friends (Alex. .; .–) are still sketched in a rather negative light, illustrating Plutarch’s belief that absolute power corrupts. Similarly Solon, whom it would be easy to cast as a monument of sōphrosynē, gets more relief by the admission of his erotic passion for young men, in particular, Peisistratus (Sol. .–, cf. Hertzoff : –; Klooster ). Solon’s self-restraint is hard-won, or so the implication appears to be. Of course, this only makes the sage-lawgiver more admirable and likeable, and explains even better why he was so well placed to rein in the excesses of his fellow citizens by his laws, e.g. by his regulation of prostitution. An intriguing rubric employed to deliver indirect judgement on the moral stature of an emperor in Suetonius is the chapter on his studia, which describes his education (or lack thereof) in the artes liberales, his interest in literary pursuits, and his style in eloquence (Klooster forthcoming). It is easy to link this with the pervasive idea in Antiquity that ‘style is the man’ (cf. Sen. Ep. , on Maecenas; cf. Worman and Möller ). Augustus is controlled, clear, and ‘classicistic’ in his taste and style (Aug. ), while Tiberius is deliberately ambiguous and overly archaic, and has a preference for erotic elegy in the style of obscure poets like Euphorion and Parthenius (Tib. ). Claudius, on the other hand, is so scatter-brained and lacking in decorum as to shame ‘even a private citizen, let alone an emperor of some erudition’ (Claud. ). As these examples demonstrate, to call inclusion of personal details ‘sensationalist’ is in most cases a wrong evaluation of their structural importance in the composition of the image of biography’s subject. Such details are not just included ‘because they were out there’ but are often meant to send a strong ethical message.
P B F
.................................................................................................................................. In the intriguing category of political, biographical fiction, as represented by Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (Chapter in this volume) or Pseudo-Callisthenes’ Alexander Romance (Chapter ), we encounter another, related issue: if the story of a man’s life is—even though partially based on historical facts—to a large extent the result of the fantasy of the author, can it then be considered a ‘biography’, or is it something else, e.g. a novel, or a mythical tale? What exactly constitutes the boundary between historical fact, on the one hand, and myth, or fiction (often indicated with the term plasmata) on the other, and how and why does it matter to ancient political biographers (cf. Momigliano : )? This is a far from otiose question. On the one hand, the (non-extant) epic of Panyassis (Herodotus’ uncle, sixth century ) about Heracles is sometimes argued to have been the first Greek biography, while, on the other, the biographies of Alexander incorporate several fantastic, mythical stories, often reminiscent of Achilles’ or Heracles’ myths. Similarly interesting is the fact that the pair of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives that purports to describe the earliest statesmen of Greece and Rome is dedicated to the mythical figures of Theseus and Romulus. It seems, then, that the interest in the lives and characters of the heroes of myth was one of the strands in Greek intellectual curiosity that was to lead to the biographical turn in literature. In his Life of Theseus (.–), Plutarch himself explicitly calls attention to the fact that he is treating material from ‘the land of poets and fabulists, of doubt and obscurity’, i.e. one might say, of the legendary and fiction. But whereas Plutarch strives to ‘purify fable, and make it submit to reason and take on the semblance of history’ (Thes. ),15 we can see that the author of the Alexander Romance actually seems to be working in the opposite direction, and mythologizes his subject to such an extent as to have him become the son of an ancient Egyptian sorcerer-divinity, and be carried off by a pair of griffins, to cite only the most outrageous examples. Somewhere in between we encounter Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, which, though not fantastic in the sense of the Alexander Romance, clearly has a fictional, mythologizing bent, and idealizes Cyrus as a veritable hero of philanthrōpia, justice, and courage, by means which we more readily associate with works of fiction such as the novel rather than historiography or biography. Detailed dialogues that Cyrus, aged , had with his grandfather, have clearly been crafted with an eye to revealing signature character traits of the just ruler Cyrus was to become: his simplicity, his modesty, and his sincerity in speech. This feature can be explained by the aim of this work, namely, to show by example how an ideal statesman should behave. The Cyropaedia shares this trait with both the encomiastic tradition, and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, but certainly not with the Alexander Romance. In the Cyropaedia, the virtually complete lack of reference to identifiable sources makes it clear from the outset that what Xenophon purports to present is not a historically verifiable account of the life of the great Persian ruler, but rather a didactic meditation in the form of a narrative on what made the Persians great, and what it means to be a just ruler and a great
15
Cf. the rationalizing approach in Thes. to the myth of the Minotaur.
general.16 In that sense, his work is a Princes’ Mirror, which takes the form of a kind of Bildungsroman. On a smaller scale, we see the same mechanism (i.e. that unverifiable elements are included for moral purposes) operating in other political biographies. Plutarch once more provides some interesting examples. In an oft-cited passage of his Life of Solon (.) he recounts the famous story, best known to us from Herodotus, of how Solon met Croesus, and recounted the story of Tellos the Athenian as an example of moderation, and an illustration of the fact that one can only assess a man’s happiness with knowledge about his end. (On the Herodotean version, see Chapter in this volume.) Plutarch acknowledges that chronologically speaking the story about the meeting cannot be true, but states that he has nevertheless chosen to include it, because it is such a well-known and beautiful story, and, moreover, one that so excellently captures the character of Solon the sage. It seems paradoxical that a false story might capture the essence of a historical individual’s character. But that is precisely the issue here: what the story captures, rather than historical reality, is the significance of Solon and the anecdotes that accrued to him, which made him into a paragon, and indeed paradeigma, of sōphrosynē in the Greek world. It is insightful to compare this with a similar source-critical passage in Plutarch’s Life of Alexander. Whereas Solon had lived approximately years before Plutarch, the temporal distance between the latter and Alexander was much less, and Alexander’s life had been much better documented.17 Still, uncertainty remained even here. At Alex. Plutarch recounts how some have related that Alexander met the Amazon Queen Thalestris on his campaigns in Hyrcania, while others claim that this is not true.18 It seems clear that this story was included by some historians to heighten the exotic appeal of Alexander, and perhaps construct an even more pronounced parallelism with his acknowledged mythical forebears Heracles and Achilles (whose erotic encounters with the respective Amazon Queens Omphale and Penthesilea were well known). But Plutarch, focused as he is on the moral edification of his readers, remains blind to any such allure, accepts this story as false (arguing that otherwise Alexander himself would have mentioned it in his digests or correspondence), and dismissively indicates his disinterest in such fabrications as follows: ‘If one disbelieves this story, one would not admire Alexander less, nor would one admire him more if one believes it’ (Alex. .). Again then, we see that the primary aim of political biography, its moral dimension, can turn out to be a dominant factor in determining the inclusion of ‘facts’ or conversely acknowledged ‘fictions’ in the biographies of ancient statesmen. This seems to carry more weight, in certain instances, than the recognition that a story may not be historically valid. In some cases, as in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, the ethical agenda becomes so predominant as
Cf. Cyr. ..; Momigliano (: ) and Schulte (: ) give bibliographical references. See also Hägg (a: , ) and Stadter (: ). 17 There are numerous references to the Ephemerides (official digests of Alexander’s campaigns), the correspondence of Alexander and of course the many histories written by contemporaries (e.g. Ptolemy, Lysimachus, Callisthenes, and Onesicritus). 18 Plutarch cites five authors who vouch for the truth of this story and nine who consider it untrue. Moreover, he includes the anecdote that Onesicritus once read this story in the presence of Lysimachus, the former general of Alexander, who remarked while smiling ‘Well, now, where could I have been at that time?’ 16
to determine the entire structure of the work, without any true consideration for historical facts. The much later Alexander Romance could be said to take over Xenophon’s preference for fictionalizing the life of a prominent and indeed legendary ruler, but it does not share his moralistic outlook. It would be truly hard to point to any exemplary character traits in the Alexander of the Romance, except perhaps his intelligence, since he is otherwise arrogant and prone to anger—in what little characterization we do find of him. The main aim of the Alexander Romance is clearly to amaze and amuse the reader with exotic adventures of a quick-witted legendary king. In this sense, we are closer to the realm of folktale than that of political biography.
C
.................................................................................................................................. What is the nature of ancient political biography? It is the description of the life and deeds of a significant political player of the recent or remote past, individually told, or in a series, with the intent of edifying the readers. This means that such a work often has an (openly) encomiastic, or at any rate evaluative cast, and may even employ certain acknowledged untruths in order to bring out the characteristic significance of a certain political personage. This too is the aim with which intimate details or certain gossiping tales are told: so as to structure a clear image of what kind of man Solon, Demosthenes, Augustus, or Nero was, and how this influenced his career and his deeds, and hence necessarily our evaluation and emulation of them.
F R The seminal work on Greek and Roman biography is of course Leo (). For a discussion of his thesis on the difference between Plutarchan and Suetonian biography, see in particular the references in Hägg (a). The classic, and still valuable, treatment of ancient Greek biography, which pays generous attention to political biography, is Momigliano (). The Introduction by Geiger (), on Nepos, has many useful remarks on the development and particular features of ancient political biography. It treats in detail some of the programmatic passages from Plutarch and Nepos. On Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, T.E. Duff () is excellent, as is the work of Pelling (a; a) and Russell (), and the companion by M. Beck (). Hägg (a) has ample information on the development of biography in general in the manner of an excellent and readable handbook. For an introduction to Suetonius, see in particular Wallace Hadrill (). The interesting, and under theorized subject of Princes’ Mirrors in Antiquity is treated by Schulte (), who pays ample attention to Isocrates and Xenophon as initiators of the genre. Panegyrical biography more broadly is analysed as a genre by Rewa ().
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T collective biographies of Imperial sophists, Philostratus’ Lives of Sophists (VS), probably written in the s, and Eunapius’ Lives of Philosophers and Sophists (VPS) (after /) are the focus of this chapter.1 The VS records the careers of ten Classical and forty-one Imperial figures ‘properly called sophists’, along with eight ‘philosophers with a reputation as sophists’ (). Eunapius improves on Philostratus, as he sees it (VPS .. []), by combining Neoplatonist philosophers, sophists, and rhetorically skilled physicians in a single work. As these summaries suggest, sophists made an awkward subject for collective biography. The term is notoriously protean, and the proper relationship of sophistic to other forms of paideia was hotly disputed; disagreement between Philostratus and Eunapius surfaces already in their titles. Unlike rhetoric and philosophy, sophistic had never had a discrete history, and it is unlikely that Philostratus’ subjects thought they belonged to a coherent ‘Second Sophistic’ movement. For both authors, writing biographies of (a selective, idiosyncratically framed set of) sophists is a charged intervention in the cultural politics of their day. This chapter starts by examining how the cultural histories of sophistic—and, by implication, sophists—produced by each collection work to position sophistic within and against the political history of the Roman Empire, map its outer limits, especially vis-à-vis philosophy, and authorize the author himself. The second half explores two related clusters of motifs that advance those definitional goals: depictions of professional life, and the fraught intersection of sophistic speech and political power, as these evolve in the shifting intellectual, political, and religious conditions of the second to the fourth centuries.
On the date and addressee of the VS, see most recently Kemezis (a: ), contra Jones () (Gordian III). Banchich (; ) plausibly dates the VPS to . For the VS, I give Olearius’ numbers as in Wright (). For Eunapius, I follow the text and numbering of Giangrande (), giving Boissonade’s numbers in square brackets. All translations are my own. 1
W W B I S?
.................................................................................................................................. The VS starts from the premise that sophists are of absorbing, aspirational interest to readers, both its imperial dedicatee and its implied readers, for whom Philostratus acts as an expert guide.2 In the economy of the work, ‘sophist’ represents the natural goal of all members of the educated elite, the embodiment of the highest cultural ideals of their class.3 Writing biographies of sophists both promotes and defines that goal; the VS advances an image of the ideal sophist that was hardly universally accepted. The image is explicitly Hellenist: Philostratus uses ‘Hellene’ as a synonym for ‘sophist’ (Follet ), making sophistic virtually coterminous with Hellenism. In that sense, a collection of biographies of sophists also constitutes a cultural history of Hellenism. That cultural history can be read in turn as a history of the high Roman Empire in which Greek sophists form the organizing thread (Bowie : ). Nearly every emperor from Nero to Elagabalus appears, viewed through the lens of his interactions with sophists. The second half of the VS charts the movement of sophistic from Athens to Rome, so that Rome is placed on the map of Greek paideia, but in a secondary position (Kemezis ). Running from fourth-century Athens to the Severan age, Philostratus’ ‘Second Sophistic’ also effaces the traditional divisions of political history, making artistic development, rather than changes of empire or dynasty, the engine of historical periodization (Kemezis a: –). Philostratus’ professional network occupies the centre of that history, for the VS closely follows the lines of his academic ancestry (Eshleman : –). The biographies vary widely in length, from a single dismissive sentence () to the eighteen pages devoted to the work’s nodal figure, Herodes Atticus (–; Civiletti : –). For Philostratus, then, recording the lives of sophists serves to define the nature and contours of sophistic, to assert its role in mediating the relationship between (Greek) culture and (Roman) power, and to carve out a place for Philostratus himself as the authoritative heir and exegete of that movement. Eunapius’ collection is similarly self-authorizing: almost everyone in the VPS belongs to his intellectual lineage, which distinctively unites philosophical, rhetorical, and medical expertise. His mentor Prohaeresius dominates the sophistic section, surrounded by his teacher and rivals. These Lives, too, pointedly vary in length: Prohaeresius occupies as much space as the other sophists combined. The spotlight also lingers on Eunapius himself, as beloved student (.–, [–, ]),4 eyewitness (.. []; , []) or otherwise (.. []; , []; . []), and critic (passim). This highly personal cultural memoir is once more a Hellenist project, but one with explicitly religious overtones; ‘Hellene’ has acquired the meaning ‘polytheist’ (.. []; .., . [, ]). Documenting the lives of pepaideumenoi is an act of worship (.. []), repeating the veneration of intellectuals throughout the narratives (Goulet : ). Omitting or Philostratus’ narratorial persona is analysed by Billault (: ), Whitmarsh (: ), and Schmitz (). 3 Swain (: ) and Sidebottom (: ). See also Schmitz (: esp. , ). 4 This persona exaggerates a relationship unlikely to have been close (Watts : ). 2
distorting the truth risks impiety and sacrilege (.. []; .. []; .. []). Greek paideia continues to provide the cultural connective tissue of the empire and a yardstick by which to measure Roman power. The Rome-ward trajectory of the VS is reversed in the VPS: after the death of Porphyry in Rome, the centre of Greek culture shifts decisively eastward (Becker : –, –). Cultural pilgrims and rhetoric students are drawn to Athens from every direction (.. []; ..– []; ..–, [–, –]), before fanning out across the eastern Mediterranean and to the Latin west (..– []). Roman officials are graded on their education and support of the right pepaideumenoi; the proconsul who acquits Prohaeresius’ schoolmates of assault is deemed ‘not uncultured for a Roman’ (.. []). Eunapius, too, prefers to date intellectual history according to internal landmarks rather than by imperial reigns (.. []; .. []; , . []) and considers it the emperors’ good fortune to supply a chronological framework for men of surpassing virtue (.. []). The world has changed, though. From the first appearance of Constantine, traditional religion and the Iamblichan mysticism Eunapius cherishes are in retreat (.., . [, ]); openly cultivating Hellenism in the face of prevailing trends requires courage (.. []). Writing biographies of (mostly) pagan intellectuals5 now constitutes an act of resistance as well as cultural mediation, as Eunapius outlines a model of holiness that stands against the barbarous impiety of Christian monks (esp. . [–]). Hellenist aims and personal legitimation intertwine more poignantly in Eunapius’ Lives than in Philostratus’, for Eunapius insists that this embattled tradition has not been extinguished but was handed on intact to him (.., .. []; .. []).
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.................................................................................................................................. Historiography of sophistic begins, playfully, in Plato’s Protagoras (d–e), where Protagoras asserts that sophistic is an ancient, subterranean art, previously practised under the guise of poetry, initiations and oracles, gymnastikē, and music. This secret history advances a capacious view of sophistic that lays claim to the greatest authorities of the past while differentiating Protagoras as the first self-professed sophist. Until Philostratus, however, no one appears to have seriously imagined that sophistic had a discrete history worth chronicling. Elsewhere, the men who comprise his ‘ancient’ sophistic belong to the overlapping histories of philosophy, oratory, and rhetorical theory; Philostratus was apparently the first to group them together (Noël ). Like Plato’s Protagoras, Philostratus thus plunders ‘ancient’ cultural production to assemble a prestigious ancestry for his sophists. That reclamation project reverberates throughout the Lives, for Philostratus consistently relegates philosophy, forensic oratory, and rhetorical theory to the margins of sophistic. Like Protagoras, he also distinguishes his brand of sophistic from its antecedents. Rather than tracing a single movement descending from Gorgias, Philostratus identifies a second Prohaeresius is the lone Christian exception (pace Goulet : ), but even he is made as far as possible into an ‘icon of Hellenic holiness’ (Cox Miller : ). 5
phase initiated by Aeschines and continuing (after a notorious -year hiatus) in the Imperial period. This bifurcated schema roots Imperial sophistic in Classical Athens, while distancing Philostratus’ subjects from a prestigious but problematic set of ancestors. The opening of the VS, which lays out this schema, is preoccupied with the contested division between philosophy and sophistic. For Plato and Aristotle, characterizing sophists belonged to a larger project of defining philosophy and promoting their conception against competing models of wisdom. Philostratus accepts their separation of the categories, but reverses its valuation.6 This revisionism is signalled by his distinction between ‘philosophers reputed to be sophists’ and ‘those properly called sophists’ (), which affirms the demarcation of the categories while conceding that some people have trouble differentiating them. Contrary to popular supposition (), the difference is a matter not of eloquence, but of epistemology: where philosophers deal in ambush questions, minute inquiries, and professions of ignorance, the sophist claims omniscience, speaking ‘as one who knows’ (–; cf. , ). While echoing Platonizing characterization (e.g. Pl. Grg. a), Philostratus upends Plato’s critique: for Philostratus, sophists’ claims to certain knowledge are signs of authority, not specious arrogance. Into the disputed disciplinary borderland, Philostratus inserts two buffer states whose presentation seems provocatively counter-intuitive. On one side are the ‘philosophersophists’ (–), anachronistically relegated to a prefatory section before the ‘ancient’ sophists, lest they be mistaken for part of a continuous history of sophistic rhetoric. Omitting the philosophical interests and activities of Dio Chrysostom, Favorinus, et al., Philostratus reduces them (and, by implication, philosophy) to lame sophistic imitators (Civiletti : –). On the other side stand the ‘ancient’ sophists, defined as practitioners of ‘philosophizing rhetoric’ who spoke ‘according to their own judgement’, unlike ‘second’ sophists, who specialize in declamation in persona, operate ‘according to the rules of art’, and excel at improvisation (–). That distinction turns out to be a feint, however: Philostratus promptly subverts it by assigning all the hallmarks of the second sophistic to ancient sophists.7 He credits Gorgias with inventing extemporization (–, ) and artistic technique (–), Hippias with an in persona discourse on a mythological topic (). Ancient sophists are cited as stylistic influences on Imperial sophists (, , , ) and share many of their activities: paid teaching (, , ), embassies (, ), advice to cities (, ), performance at panhellenic festivals (–, , ), and forensic oratory (, ), as well as brushes with magic () and tyranny (–, ). Meanwhile, Philostratus ignores their philosophical contributions, an especially notable omission in the case of Gorgias and Protagoras (Billault : –), and correspondingly minimizes the philosophical interests of Imperial sophists (G. Anderson : –). By the end, the two sophistics have all but collapsed into one. Why invent that division at all, then? It has been argued that by effacing the difference between ‘first’ and ‘second’ sophists, Philostratus redefines sophistic as a ‘philosophizing rhetoric’ that subsumes philosophy (Côté ; ; Michel : –), best represented by the philosopher-sophists, rather than the virtuoso declaimers who dominate the VS G. Anderson (: ) and Mestre and Gomez (: ). This analysis draws on Côté (), but reaches the opposite conclusion. On the resemblance of ‘first’ and ‘second’ sophists, see G. Anderson (: ; : , ), Billault (: ), and Civiletti (: , ). 6 7
(Brancacci , refuted by Flinterman : –). These explanations seem backward, for the ‘first’ sophists are assimilated to the ‘second’, divested of their philosophical activities, while the philosopher-sophists are pointedly displaced from the history of sophistic. I propose instead that Philostratus’ teasing invention and erasure of a division between two sophistics functions to wedge apart sophistic and philosophy at precisely the point of apparent continuity. He begins by suggesting a continuum between the fields, with sophists categorized by their proximity to philosophy. Those categories are then reshuffled until a bright line emerges between them. Proper sophists do not engage in philosophy (even when they do), while philosophers are not sophists, however much they appear to be (), reversing Aristotle’s dictum that ‘sophistic appears to be philosophy, but is not’ (Metaph. b; Cassin : ). This position resists not only Plato, but also the cultural primacy of philosophy in the Imperial era. In an age when intellectuals sought to legitimize their disciplines by equating them with philosophy (König and Whitmarsh : –, –), Philostratus eschews association with philosophy and seeks to enshrine sophistic instead as the prestige discipline. Eunapius imitates Philostratus’ format (Buck ), but discards his historiographic scheme. His orators are not heirs of the Classical sophists, whom he never mentions, nor are they connected to the Philostratean network, though it is possible to do so: the son and (probably) grandson of Philostratus’ friend Nicagoras (VS , ) were active as sophists at Athens, and Eunapius’ subject Himerius married into their family (Or. .; ., with Penella : –). Indeed, the only Philostratean sophist named in the VPS is Aelius Aristides (.. []; []). Admiration of Aristides and disregard for Philostratus’ ‘Second Sophistic’ are typical of Late Antiquity (Jones ), but ignoring sophistic history is not; for example, the fourth-century commentator Sopater traces the development of rhetoric in three ‘crops’ (ϕοραί) from oral speakers such as Themistocles and Pericles to the literate orators Demosthenes, Aeschines, Isocrates, et al., to an Imperial Asian crop centred on Aristides (Prol. in Aristid. , ). In Eunapius, by contrast, sophistic has no independent past. Instead, his sophistic Lives are encapsulated within the Iamblichan diadochē, beginning with Prohaeresius’ teacher Julianus, identified as a contemporary of Iamblichus’ successor Aedesius (. []), and ending with Nymphidianus, brother of the philosopher Maximus ( []; cf. .. []). (On Iamblichus in Eunapius’ VPS, see Chapter in this volume.) Only the Iamblichans are situated within a larger history, as the latest in a series of ‘crops’ stretching from the pre-Platonic era to the present (.., . [, ]; .. []). While Eunapian sophists sometimes claim to champion ‘ancient’, atticizing oratory ( []; .– []; []; cf. .. []), the biographer himself betrays little concern to inscribe them in a longer tradition. In the VPS, the stream of Classical continuity flows solely through the philosophical line. Eunapius thus restores the traditional disciplinary hierarchy challenged by Philostratus. Sophists are subordinated both historiographically and in length of treatment, occupying less than half of the VPS; sophistic is one constituent of Hellenism rather than its cornerstone. Moreover, Eunapius’ announcement that he will not separate philosophers from sophists (.– []) does not mean, as it is often understood, that he has dissolved the distinction between the groups, but that his collection includes both; the labels and roles remain distinct. Any fluidity of the disciplinary boundary is unilateral: philosophy colonizes rhetoric, not the reverse. Sopater (.. []), Eustathius (. [–]), and Chrysanthius
(..– []) are all noted for their eloquence, while Porphyry is described as a master of all disciplines, such that one could not say whether he excelled more in rhetoric or philosophy (..–, – []; ..– []).8 By contrast, no sophist engages in philosophy. Eunapius’ multi-specialist philosophers might recall Philostratus’ philosopher-sophists, but while Philostratus treats those figures as sophists manqués, segregated from his main narrative, Eunapius places them at the heart of a cultural history in which sophists are supporting players.
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.................................................................................................................................. Depictions of the sophistic craft itself, however, remain fairly consistent from the first century to the fourth. Teaching, epideictic performance, and competition for professional and social distinction occupy Eunapius and his colleagues as they do Philostratus and his. Debates over appropriate self-presentation, delivery style, and the merits of improvisation perdure, within and across (and constructive of) disciplinary boundaries. Philostratus and Eunapius often agree, championing improvisation and preferring theatrical delivery to more sober styles of speech. The Eunapian Prohaeresius, though, embodies an asceticism at odds with Philostratean norms but consistent with the philosophical drift of Eunapius’ ideal. Prohaeresius is also more professionally isolated than Philostratus’ heroes; the sophistic world of the VPS is smaller, less densely networked, and more unrelievedly antagonistic than in the VS. A celebrated Philostratean diptych recording visits to Athens by the Cilician sophists Alexander the Clay Plato (VS –) and Philagrus (–) provides a useful starting point for comparison. Alexander, newly appointed as ab epistulis graecis (), exhibits a firm grasp of professional diplomacy. He makes a point of asking Herodes Atticus, the local superstar, to send his students to hear him, a potentially weighty endorsement (), and delays the performance to wait for them. Alexander’s elegant appearance has the crowd buzzing even before he begins speaking, and his model encomium of Athens confirms their goodwill. When Herodes finally arrives, Alexander improvises a second declamation treating the same theme in new language and rhythms, a stunning tour de force. He politely invites Herodes to declaim in turn and offers a finely judged compliment (‘We sophists are all slices of you!’) that casts Herodes as Homer to his Aeschylus (G. Anderson : ). In response, Herodes graciously matches Alexander’s taste for intensity and rhythmic variation, showers him with gifts, and curtly silences the student who belittles him. Philagrus has precisely the opposite experience. Instead of cultivating Herodes, he antagonizes him ‘as if he had come for just that purpose’ (). He conducts himself as Herodes’ superior, banning his star pupil from his performances, lecturing him on student management, and omitting the collegial invitation to join him on stage. In retaliation, Herodes’ students maliciously propose a declamation theme designed to expose Philagrus’ habit of recycling
Goulet (: ) collects further examples, seeing more mutual interaction between philoso phy and rhetoric in VPS than I do. 8
‘stale’ material. Enraged, Philagrus literally chokes during a subsequent declamation, permanently destroying his reputation in Athens. Eunapius’ accounts of sophistic displays diverge from Philostratus’ in several ways. Firstly, the only sophist whose performances he describes in detail is Prohaeresius, though he has heard others (.. []; , []); in the VPS, the circle of noteworthy sophists shrinks virtually to a single point. Secondly, all four scenes are command performances for a Roman magistrate, either a proconsul (. [–]; ..–. [–]) or a Praetorian Prefect (..– [–]; .– [–]). Other sophists attend as antagonists or foils, but none wields the evaluative authority that Herodes does. By contrast, while Philostratus’ sophists frequently address emperors, his fullest accounts record declamations for other sophists, whose judgements are decisive (VS –, –, –, –; cf. –, , –). In Eunapius, intra-sophistic relations are more attenuated, official power more obtrusive. In stagecraft, though, Prohaeresius’ performances recall the Philostratean scenes. One follows his return from an exile engineered by his competitors (..–. [–]). When the proconsul who recalled him unexpectedly demands an ex tempore display, the other sophists demur, citing Aelius Aristides’ refusal to ‘vomit’ his speeches (VS ), but Prohaeresius jumps at the chance to showcase his specialty (cf. ..– [–]; ..– [–]). Like Philagrus, Prohaeresius faces a hostile audience, but he masters the situation more adeptly. He has the proconsul force his two bitterest rivals to define his theme, and when they maliciously select a ‘definition’ (ὅρος) with ‘no opening for rhetorical pomp’, he improvises a flowing, sonorous declamation that soars ‘beyond all human expectation’. He also revises Alexander’s feat by arguing both sides of the case and then repeating the speech verbatim. The result is a rapturous reception with religious overtones: ‘All those present licked the sophist’s breast, as if he were a statue filled with divine presence. Some venerated his feet, others his hands; some called him a god, others the image of Hermes Logios. His rivals lay on the ground, consumed with envy, and some of them did not fail to applaud even as they lay there’ (..– [–]). These scenes crackle with competitive energy, which the characters variously seek to exploit or mitigate. In the Philostratean episodes, Herodes maintains a tight grip on the Athenian market, guarding not only his control of its student population but also his status as an academic power-broker. Philagrus tries to establish his own bona fides by flouting that authority, which might have seemed vulnerable at this early stage in Herodes’ career.9 Herodes counters with magisterial hauteur, as though critiquing a student exercise: ‘You seem to me to have made a poor prooemium’ (VS ). Philagrus falls prey to a textbook catalogue of techniques for neutralizing rivals: caught in linguistic error (Lucian Pseudol. –; Rh.Pr. ), trapped with a hostile declamation theme (Plu. Aud. F–D), exposed as a self-plagiarist (Lucian Pseudol. –). In contrast, Alexander eschews competition and instead solicits Herodes’ favour by behaving like an admiring junior colleague. His cooperation is rewarded, not only materially by Herodes, but also in the pages of the VS, where his glowing portrait may exceed his actual reputation.10 Such mutually beneficial collegiality is This incident probably occurred in the s (Puech : ) rather than the s (Papalas ). 10 The ‘under rated’ Alexander () evidently struck others as a self absorbed pretty boy () with a weakness for pretentious vocabulary (); his derisive nickname suggests other criticisms. 9
more common than is often recognized in the VS, and conspicuously absent from Eunapius’ sophistic Lives. Such interactions, both collaborative and conflictual, are mechanisms of individual and corporate self-fashioning. To take a famous example, the hyper-masculine Polemo declared his preference for aggressive, manly oratory first by breaking with his mentor Scopelian, known for depilation and a bombastic singing style (VS , –), and then by feuding with the effeminate, lyrical Favorinus; Favorinus acquired his own reputation as a sophist from that quarrel (). Polemo’s students likewise found the ‘drum-beating’ Scopelian a useful foil (); one suspects that they (or Polemo himself) are the critics who ‘consider Scopelian unworthy of the circle of sophists, calling him dithyrambic, undisciplined, and thick-witted’ (–). Such attacks not only advertise the critic’s artistic tastes, but seek to impose standards on the field as a whole, banishing competing models (and competitors) from consideration. Herodes’ praise of Alexander as a ‘sober Scopelian’ () hints at one competing model, and what was staked on Scopelian’s inclusion in Philostratus’ canonizing Lives. Such conflicts present difficulties for the collective biographer, for they threaten to disrupt the coherence of his group portrait: for example, Herodes studied with both Scopelian and Polemo (, –). Despite his love of scholarly gossip, Philostratus’ record of academic feuding is carefully tailored to confirm the sophistic canon his biographies propose. He relishes stories where superstars cut pretentious upstarts down to size, but challenges to his luminaries are quickly deflected or defused.11 Herodes does both simultaneously when he quashes his student’s mockery of Alexander with the warning that ‘you are slandering yourself as an ignorant judge’ (). Elsewhere, Philostratus himself intervenes to refute inconvenient criticism, brushing it aside as petty, malicious, or ignorant (Whitmarsh : –). Scopelian’s detractors in particular are savaged as ‘nit-pickers, dull men uninspired by improvised speech . . . with no great ideas of their own’ (–); they have undermined themselves, rather than their target, with their poor judgement. Anonymity protects critic and criticized alike, permitting us to infer that only inferior sophists disparage the great. Philostratus urges readers to be neither surprised nor swayed by such conflicting opinions, for they merely reflect the human tendency towards envy ()—a platitude that Eunapius repeats to explain the otherwise inexplicable fact that some people preferred Prohaeresius’ rivals (VPS []; []). Eunapius’ Lives give an even more vivid picture of sophistic in-fighting. Prohaeresius’ professional relations are characterized by unremitting animosity; even his dear friend Hephaestion is so intimidated by Prohaeresius’ ‘tyranny’ that he abandons Athens and the profession (.. [], . []). Scholastic conflict did intensify dramatically in the fourth century. Inter-school violence, exceptional in Philostratus (VS –), became routine, especially in Athens (..–. []; cf. Lib. Or. .–, .; Him. Or. , , .–; Norman ). Incoming freshmen were kidnapped as they disembarked at Piraeus (Lib. Or. .; Greg. Naz. Or. ..–.); a captain delivered an entire boatload directly to Prohaeresius (.– [–]). Competition for official chairs, airily downplayed in the VS (e.g. , ), escalated as state control of teaching tightened (Watts : –);
11
For example, Polemo’s presumed critique of Scopelian is put in the mouth of an anonymous student, and tempered by two mentions of his posthumous tribute to Scopelian (, ).
stories of teachers assaulted in the streets and in their beds chilled Libanius’ Athenian ambitions (Or. .–). Yet comparison with Libanius betrays the lopsidedness of Eunapius’ account, for Libanius inhabits a dense network lubricated by scholarly courtesies and endorsements as well as warfare (Cribiore : –, –). Eunapius strips away those relationships and manages to wring competition even from collegiality: Libanius’ On Natural Talent, a compliment to his rival Acacius, is turned into a confession of inferiority by Prohaeresius’ most serious competitor (VPS [], with Penella : –). That Eunapius accentuates sophistic conflict where Philostratus tempers it points to differences in the aims of their collections. Since Eunapius’ sophistic Lives are less a composite sketch than a frame for his biography of Prohaeresius, he has no need to balance multiple protagonists or smooth over clashes among them. Opposition to Prohaeresius—often the major fact of his colleagues’ Lives, even for a sophist as prominent as Himerius (Becker : , )—simply confirms his importance and magnifies his victories over an academic environment depicted as ceaselessly hostile. Improvisation is a privileged yardstick of competition in all three stories. Both biographers treat extemporization as the hallmark of sophistic excellence; for Philostratus, sophistic was born when Gorgias asked an Athenian audience to propose a theme in order to show up Prodicus and his ‘stale, oft-repeated’ ‘Choice of Heracles’ (VS –). These dazzling displays demonstrate the performer’s profound mastery of paideia, while their seeming effortlessness suggests that elite culture is innate rather than acquired, a sign of the natural superiority that justifies the pre-eminence of educated aristocrats (Schmitz : –). Mastery not just of knowledge but of the self is at stake: Philagrus’ breakdown is ascribed to his inability to handle his emotions as well as his declamation themes (VS ). In Eunapius, a student named Themistocles loses bodily as well as verbal control in court when asked for an impromptu prosecution speech: ‘he changed colour, bit his lip in uncertainty, glanced at his companions, and asked in a whisper what he should do . . . Much silence and confusion ensued.’ Themistocles is ‘an insult to his name’, a failed embodiment of the Classical past (VPS .., []). At the same trial, Prohaeresius proves his intellectual and moral superiority by extemporizing a brilliant defence (..– [–]). Yet the value of improvisation was not uncontested. Aelius Aristides is the most famous dissenter, but Philagrus himself belongs to an academic tradition that may have prized extemporization less than Philostratus’ teachers did. Philostratus reports that its founder, Isaeus, did not improvise (VS ), and that his students Dionysius of Miletus and Lollianus imitated his practice (, ). Philagrus, a student of Lollianus, would improvise on a theme once, but saw nothing wrong with reusing his own material thereafter (). Philostratus consistently downplays this group, which disrupts the geographical and academic lines of his work (Kemezis : –; Eshleman : –). Marginalizing them also bolsters the impression that everyone important shared his admiration of extemporization.12 This dispute intersects with debates over the compatibility of sophistic and philosophy. Contemporary with, and infamously ignored by, Eunapius, Themistius regards improvisation as a facile sophistic trick inimical to craftsmanship (Them. Or. ).
12
Alternatively, Philostratus may deliberately misrepresent a group he wants to marginalize; Pliny remembers Isaeus as a gifted extemporizer (Ep. .. ; G. Anderson : , ).
Like other critics, Themistius associates extemporization with a constellation of other traits that he thinks separate glib, shallow sophistic from true paideia: over-confidence, gaudy, ‘effeminate’ dress and deportment, pretentious language, sing-song delivery, histrionic movements, frivolous subject matter, and pandering to audiences (Them. Or. .–; .–; .b; cf. Aristid. Or. .–, ; Lucian Rh.Pr. , –, Bis Acc. ; Plu. Aud. B–D). Philostratus concurs, from the opposite perspective: in the VS, avoidance of improvisation often correlates with ‘natural’, unadorned delivery and language (–, , , ) and austere or rugged looks (, ) that evoke a philosopher’s countercultural roughness (Civiletti : ) rather than the voluptuous urbanity expected of sophists (; J. Hahn : –; Sidebottom ). Philostratus admits such sophists to his canon, but in a subordinate position consistent with the subordination of philosophy to sophistic throughout the VS. The issue of improvisation, then, is entangled with our biographers’ promotion of their academic ancestors, competing models of sophistic selffashioning, and attempts from multiple sides to differentiate or assimilate sophistic and philosophy. Eunapius draws those lines differently from both Philostratus and Themistius. Unlike Themistius, he shares Philostratus’ taste for improvisation and theatricality. His description of Prohaeresius leaping up at the climax of a speech (.. []) recalls Herodes’ admiration of Polemo’s manner of jumping out of his chair or stamping the ground at dramatic moments (VS ), while his distaste for Libanius’ ‘feeble, lifeless, uninspired’ declamations suggests dislike of plainer, less histrionic styles (.. [], with Cribiore : ). Yet in his appearance Prohaeresius cultivates a philosophical austerity that evokes Socratic trademarks: shoelessness, a single cloak, exceptional endurance of cold (..– []; cf. Pl. Smp. a–b; Penella : ). By contrast, Himerius—‘that brilliantly dressed fellow’ (Lib. Ep. .)—is singled out as being afraid to ‘trust his talent’ for improvisation (..– []). Eunapius, then, rewrites the sophistic model that treats extemporized declamation, theatricality, verbal pyrotechnics, and flashy visual style as a cohesive package. With Prohaeresius, he reconciles sophistic performance to philosophical self-fashioning, as he reorganizes the relationship of rhetoric and philosophy throughout the VPS.
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.................................................................................................................................. Another much discussed theme of the VS is its ‘close link between high culture, material wealth, and political leadership’ (Swain : ). While it is now generally agreed that Imperial sophists were politically prominent more by virtue of their aristocratic origins (Bowie ) than their sophistic activities (Bowersock ), recent scholarship has emphasized the role of Greek paideia in (re)producing and naturalizing power in the Roman Empire.13 In sophistic biographies, the professional and the political interpenetrate in complex ways, combining, collaborating, and competing with each other. In Philostratus’ presentation, Herodes represents an expansive model of sophistic achievement to 13
P. Brown (: ) and Schmitz () are fundamental.
which political engagement is not merely coincident, but integral (Côté ). Yet the ability of paideia to authorize members of the educated elite to approach wielders of power as their equals or even superiors (Drecoll ; Sidebottom : –) was predicated on a notional autonomy of the two realms (Flinterman : –; Whitmarsh a: esp. –). Their overt combination is inevitably subject to tensions and limitations, which become more pressing in Eunapius. In the VPS, the accent falls heavily on the autonomy and the superior value of sophistic, while its political dimensions are downplayed, reflecting a distrust of power as a morally corrosive force that suffuses Eunapius’ Lives as well as his History (Sacks ). Sophistic speech and public action dovetail in Philostratus’ representation of his subjects as benefactors. The Life of Nicetes announces the homology of sophistic oratory and euergetic construction: Nicetes ‘gave this science entrances (πάροδοι) much more splendid than those he built for Smyrna . . . by whose greatness he raised his deeds to the level of his words’ ().14 Magnificent civic building, patronage of panhellenic festivals, and historical declamation all participate in mimetic reactivation of the Classical past (Kemezis a: –; cf. R. Webb a). Sophistry itself may be regarded as a public good. Philostratus catalogues ways that Polemo’s teaching benefited Smyrna (): as a civic attraction that promoted tourism and good governance (cf. ), by garnering imperial support for the city (cf. , ), and through Polemo’s policy interventions (cf. , ). Taking a page from Alcibiades (Th. ..–) Polemo argues that even his ostentatious persona constitutes a public embellishment, since ‘not only does a city give reputation to a man, but the city itself acquires one from a man’ (). Polemo and others also employ their verbal skills in the public arena by representing their cities on embassies (–, , , , , , ), serving as imperial tutor () or secretary (, , , ), and holding civic and imperial offices (catalogued by Flinterman : –). These are not uniquely sophistic activities—indeed, good imperial secretaries are not always good declaimers (, )—but Philostratus claims them as sophistic achievements when it suits him. The result is a generous view of the public contributions of sophists qua sophists. Caracalla strikes at the heart of this model when he balks at ‘depriving cities of men who will perform liturgies on account of wretched little speeches’ (), reducing sophistic to its most basic product and questioning its public value. Yet even as Philostratus emphasizes the political value of sophistic, he also insists on its superiority to political power. Herodes is said to love improvisation more than appearing like a consular or descendant of consuls (). While Corrector of the Free Cities of Asia, he apprentices himself to Polemo, seeking him out with a deferential request (‘Father, when will I hear you?’), avidly absorbing (and lavishly compensating) a three-day performance, and taking pains to avoid direct competition (–). This pattern is repeated in multiple encounters between sophists and rulers. Polemo refuses to call on a visiting Bosporan king, but demands that the king come to him, bringing a hefty fee (). Aelius Aristides likewise keeps Marcus Aurelius waiting, on the Socratic excuse that he has been busy contemplating (–). In response, Marcus plays perfectly the role scripted for emperors in the VS
Gleason (: ) and Schmitz (: ) analyse the parallels between paideia and euergetism as forms of competitive public communication. 14
(Kemezis a: –): impressed by Aristides’ ‘unaffected, scholarly character’ and professing eager interest (‘When will I hear you?’), he permits the sophist to dictate the conditions of his performance; Aristides later capitalizes on this relationship to persuade Marcus to fund the rebuilding of Smyrna (). On yet another occasion, a sophist’s cultural authority is allowed to trump the demands of imperial politics. Serving as judge of the Amphictyonic games during Septimius Severus’ siege of Byzantium, Hippodromus of Thessaly insisted on awarding victory to a Byzantine actor, despite the other judges’ reluctance to risk the appearance of treason; his verdict was upheld by the emperor himself (–). The symbolic capital derived from Greek paideia enables these men to assert themselves before Roman power, while the script that casts emperors as indulgent fans of sophists also permits them to yield strategically to sophists’ political intercessions. Sophistic and politics do not mesh perfectly, moreover. While for Plato, the chief purpose of sophistic education is training political speakers (e.g. Sph. d; Prt. e–a; Grg. e, b, c, d–d), both Philostratus and Eunapius regard political oratory as peripheral at best to sophistic practice. Nicetes, who ‘revives’ sophistic oratory in Philostratus, abandons ‘the archaic political style’ (VS ). Eunapius describes Eusebius of Alexandria, a specialist in ‘the malicious arts of politics’, as suitable for the Roman market but not for Athens; in competition with a proper sophist, Eusebius quickly retreats into political oratory (VPS ..– []).15 Sophistic rhetoric itself stands somewhat athwart public life. Tensions are visible already in Philostratus’ Life of Aeschines, whose improvisational talents grow out of his engagement in civic politics, in embassies, law courts, and the assembly (), but who founds the ‘second’ sophistic only after being driven from public life (, ). Philostratus probes the relationship between sophistry and office most explicitly in his Life of Lollianus, who held both the first municipal chair of rhetoric and the hoplite stratēgia in Athens (–). The two roles cohere to a point: Philostratus uses the same verb (προὔστη) in parallel μέν . . . δέ . . . clauses to describe Lollianus’ occupancy of both offices, and Lollianus relieves a grain shortage by raising money from his students. Yet the Cynic Pancrates rescues Lollianus from hungry rioters by playing one role against the other, calling him ‘a seller not of bread, but of words’. Elsewhere, sophistry and politics are seen as competing commitments, as sophists face popular criticism for both abstaining from civic politics (, , –) and allowing politics to distract from oratory (; cf. –). Even Herodes voices mixed feelings about the relative value of words and deeds, as he imagines that completing the Isthmus canal would make a more fitting and durable monument to ‘the man I was’ than oratory will (). Sophists’ freedom to challenge imperial power was limited, moreover, both by political realities and by their symbolic role. Philostratus’ strained insistence that none of his subjects was ever exiled (, , , , –) contrasts tellingly with the norms of philosophical biography, where exile can be a badge of authenticity, certifying the philosopher’s detachment and courageous willingness to confront power (J. Hahn : –; Whitmarsh a: –; b). Clashing with political authority, fearlessly advising rulers and opposing tyrants, are tasks for the socially marginal philosopher, not
Alternatively, .. describes not Eusebius’ retreat before the sophist Musonius, but Musonius’ move to politics after a failed challenge to Prohaeresius (Becker : ). 15
the sophist (Flinterman ), the paradigmatic civic insider (Sidebottom : –). Philostratus fervently upholds sophistic autonomy and admires sophists like Hippodromus who defend the prerogatives of culture against the demands of power (Eshleman : –), but that autonomy is confined to the artistic realm; sophists who destroy themselves by confronting a tyrant receive no sympathy (, ). And despite his heroes’ high public profiles and importance as mediators between Greek cities and imperial power, Philostratus represents sophistic rhetoric itself as diversionary from, rather than collaborating in, governance (Flinterman : ). Just as Hadrian once diverted his cares by associating with sophists and philosophers (; cf. ), so Philostratus hopes that his sophistic memoir will ‘lighten the mental burdens’ of his addressee, Gordian (). These contradictions are not accidental. The interrelation of symbolic and political power works most effectively when it is covert; the more culture appears to be autonomous of power, the better it can play its role in legitimating the political power structure (Schmitz : –). That professed autonomy creates tensions about the compatibility of cultural and political achievement, while the sophist’s insider status can prove politically restrictive. Similar patterns run through the VPS. Eunapius praises Libanius for preferring sophistic achievement to political office, declining an honorary prefecture because ‘the title “sophist” was greater’ (..– []). Prohaeresius plays the traditional role of patronage broker, securing revenues to fund the Athenian grain supply by performing for the emperor Constans (..– [–]). That gift comes with the title of stratopedarch and a mutually beneficial opportunity to perform before the Praetorian Prefect in Athens. Prohaeresius’ dominance in Athens may have owed much to Constans’ promotion of him as a Christian teacher (Watts : –, disputed by Di Branco ), but Eunapius does not admit that; like Philostratus, he grants emperors the power only to reward merit, not to confer status. (The suggestion that Julian favoured Libanius to spite Prohaeresius [F . Blockley –] does not appear in the Lives.) Prohaeresius’ performances before Roman magistrates follow the Philostratean script. On trial before a ‘heavy-handed’ proconsul, ‘the wisdom of his words and the depth, facility, and sonority of his delivery’ reduce the judge to applauding like a schoolboy (. [–]). Prohaeresius correctly refrains from challenging the proconsul directly, alluding only briefly to the ‘recklessness’ of his administration, while the proconsul makes a show of yielding to Prohaeresius’ authoritative eloquence, enhancing his own authority as a man of culture (P. Brown : –). He is not the last Roman official whom Prohaeresius will rouse to spontaneous standing ovation and professional support (.., . [, ]). Still, the emphasis throughout is on the independence and superiority of sophistic to political power, not their integration. No sophist in the VPS approaches Herodes’ combination of cultural and political accomplishment. This reflects fourth-century reality, but Eunapius also exaggerates his subjects’ political detachment (Civiletti : ). While noting coolly that Libanius was ‘adept at handling political affairs’ (.. []), Eunapius gives little hint of his tireless activity as a patronage broker and intermediary between town council and imperial administration (Norman : –; Swain ), nor of Himerius’ political prominence (Barnes ). Nor does he share Libanius’ view (e.g. Ep. ., .; Or. .) that political office derives from paideia or that oratory itself constitutes a kind of office since it guides power. While Eunapius describes sophistic activity in the language of political power (Becker : , ), for his sophists, ‘tyrannizing’ at Athens (.. [];
.. []) means professional domination, not the political tyranny alleged of Herodes (Cracco Ruggini : ). Significant political activity in the VPS is reserved for men classified as philosophers and physicians (. [–]; ..– [–]; .. []; . [–]; .. []; ..– []). The generally unhappy results of their forays into imperial politics, moreover, bespeak deep pessimism about the interaction of paideia and power (Goulet : –). The tensions and contradictions that surround the interaction and relative merits of sophistic culture and political power for Philostratus disappear in Eunapius in favor of an ideal near-separation of the two realms (Cracco Ruggini : –).
C
.................................................................................................................................. Philostratus’ Lives invent sophists as such as a biographical subject and create for them a history almost out of whole cloth. In so doing, they define—ostensively rather than explicitly—an ideal image of the sophist, provocatively placed outside and superior to philosophy, at the pinnacle of Greek paideia. In the world of the VS, sophists (especially Philostratus’ own associates) stand at the centre of a revitalized Hellenism and hence of the cultural and even political history of the high Roman Empire. Eunapius emulates Philostratus’ format, his Hellenist ideology, his self-authorizing strategies, and his picture of the sophistic profession; his hero Prohaeresius would not be out of place among Philostratus’ virtuoso declaimers. Philostratus’ argument for a coherent, independent, culturally dominant sophistic movement with its own history has no place in the VPS, however. Eunapius’ sophistic Lives are not concerned to chronicle fourth-century sophistic, but to incorporate sophists into a novel history of Hellenism, reconceived as an interdisciplinary, insistently religious movement centred on Neoplatonist philosophy. Intended as a bulwark against Christianity, Eunapius’ reimagining of pepaideumenoi as pagan holy men comes at the cost of sophists as a distinctive biographical subject.
F R The best introductions to Philostratus’ Lives are G. Anderson (), Billault (), Bowie and Elsner (), and the commentaries of Rothe () and Civiletti (). Domitilla Campanile (; ; ) has produced insightful studies of individual Lives and the work’s perspective as a whole; Whitmarsh () and Kemezis (a) read Philostratus in his Severan context. Newcomers to Eunapius’ Lives should start with Penella () and the commentaries of Civiletti (), Becker (), and Goulet (), although Goulet’s views often diverge from the ones accepted here. For late antique rhetoric generally, see Kennedy (). J. Hahn () and Watts () examine Eunapius’ use of written and oral sources with an eye to his construction of communal identity. Building on Momigliano (), Cox Miller (), Criscuolo (), and Urbano (: ) situate the VPS alongside Christian hagiography.
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Problems and Paradigms ......................................................................................................................
B of philosophers, alongside those of political figures and poets, constitute one of the dominant forms of the genre in Antiquity. By the nature of their subjects, philosophical biographies almost invariably contain some doxographic element, explaining the opinions and arguments of the thinker in question. They are also frequently integrated into broader contexts, either into biographical series (Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers; Porphyry’s History of Philosophy)1 or into other philosophical contexts (Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life; Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus). Beyond these common traits, biographies of philosophers exhibit as much variety as other forms of ancient biography: in their structural choices; their approach to characterizing, and to varying degrees idealizing their subjects; in their narrating voices; and indeed in their ostensible purposes. Something of the variety of these responses to the challenges of representing the philosophic life in biographical form will emerge in the discussion to follow, which focuses on the class of philosophical biography best represented among our surviving texts: Neoplatonic biography. The biographies of Neoplatonic philosophers, like their successors in Christian biography and hagiography, depict ideals for emulation.2 At the same time, they are undoubtedly concerned with depicting specific individuals (J.M. Dillon ). In this double purpose lies one of the central tensions of ancient philosophic biography, and it is with some aspects of this tension that the present chapter will be concerned, in particular with the responses to these issues by Neoplatonic biographers from the third to the sixth century . The era of late antique Platonism that now goes under the name of Neoplatonism was quite productive of biographical literature, and a reasonable sample of works survives. Consequently it is possible to observe in these works both diachronic developments, as they respond to On Diogenes Laertius, see Chapter in this volume. On monastic Lives and their reworking of Hellenic (‘pagan’) practices, see Chapter in this volume. 1 2
rapidly and profoundly changing times, and varied personal responses to the fundamental problems of this type of biographical writing. The Neoplatonic schools were very much ‘textual communities’, intensely concerned with exegetic activity on a canon of philosophical and literary works. They were, beyond this, intensely concerned with the nature of interpretation and the role of literature,3 and with the teaching of this long and complex tradition (Lamberton ). Considerable sophistication can be expected in their own literary productions: the personal memoir of Porphyry, the extended ethical meditation of Marinus and Damascius’ ‘transcendental prosopography’ (Athanassiadi : ) each employ markedly different narrative strategies in their broadly biographical projects. In addition to providing a valuable glimpse into the Platonic life as it was lived in this era, and into the functioning of an important form of late antique education, they also allow an insight into the production of texts in a culture steeped in received, ancient learning. The Neoplatonic biographies can be divided into two broad classes.4 The first group is made up of the biographies of Pythagoras by Porphyry and Iamblichus, the Life of Pythagoras and On the Pythagorean Life respectively. Both works stood at or near the beginning of larger projects: Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras was one of the first sections of his History of Philosophy, and Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life was the opening of his ten-part introduction to Pythagoreanism. Pythagoras and his community took on a particular importance in this era as a model for the philosophic life and school (Staab ). This was, however, an ideal which required translation into the realities of the present, though the degree to which third-century philosophical practice is reflected in On the Pythagorean Life must remain a matter of speculation (Festugière ; von Albrecht ). In both texts Pythagoras is presented as an ancient and largely inimitable paradigm.5 Though a contemporary figure as great as Apollonius of Tyana might, in the imagination of Philostratus, rival and even outdo Pythagoras (Flinterman ), in practical reality, even within the rather different expectations of late antique Platonists, the ancient sage, as a being of profoundly ambiguous ontological status, could only be a rather remote exemplar. The second group is made up of the Lives of contemporary (or near contemporary) figures: Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus and the Order of His Books, Marinus’ Proclus, or On Happiness, Eunapius’ Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists (on which, see also Chapter in this volume) and Damascius’ fragmentary Life of Isidore or Philosophical History. These biographies faced a set of challenges different from the Lives of Pythagoras. While the figures depicted in them are nearer in time6 and in imitability, this very proximity presented in a starker way the tension between the ideal and the particular. All three, in their different ways, chart a path between an abstract ideal and the depiction of a particular
3
To take just one example, Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Republic extensively discusses both interpretive method and specific points of Platonic and Homeric interpretation. See Festugière () and Lamberton (). A complete English translation of the Republic Commentary is currently being made by Dirk Baltzly, John Finamore, and Graeme Miles. 4 Blumenthal (: ) proposes a tripartite division. 5 On the revival of Pythagoras in the Roman era, see D.J. O’Meara (). 6 Porphyry’s opening sentence emphasizes the contemporaneity of Plotinus: ‘Plotinus, the philoso pher of our times’, as A.H. Armstrong (: ) translates (Πλωτῖνος ὁ καθ᾽ἡμᾶς γεγονὼς ϕιλόσοϕος). On the various possible interpretations and translations, see the notes by Pépin and Brisson in Brisson (a: ).
individual or individuals. Moreover both Porphyry and Marinus, and probably Damascius, made striking structural choices in the presentation of their material. Porphyry, avoiding the chronological ordering which he was quite capable of giving,7 organizes his account largely as a sequence of testimonia, illustrating with progressively greater clarity the true nature of Plotinus. Marinus, for his part, structures his Proclus on a version of the Neoplatonic scale of virtues. In part, this choice is easily accounted for: the work is a funerary eulogy, and it was a standard rhetorical practice to order such a speech under the headings of the four cardinal virtues. Where Marinus’ work is innovative, however, is in the application not only of the cardinal virtues but of these virtues as they exist at all of the levels on which a human being can be active: from the virtues in the body to ethical virtue, then political, cathartic, theoretic, theurgic virtues, and an ineffable level beyond this (Marin. Procl. ). The structures chosen by both Porphyry and Marinus, in different ways, give to the Lives of their subjects a structure of spiritual/philosophical ascent, thus tying these texts to one of the central narratives of this philosophical school. Damascius, by contrast, takes a very different approach. Though the scale of virtues and fundamental notion of ascent are still there, the ‘patterns of perfection’ (D.J. O’Meara ) which he depicts are in all cases marred by some degree of imperfection. Only a few of his philosophers are able to achieve perfection in the majority of levels of virtue, and the ideal is instead seen in pieces, some possessed by one person, some by another. Though it is impossible to be certain of the original structure of this text, it appears that its panoramic perspective and sharp criticisms combined to present a fragmentary ideal, the reassembling of which in a single individual presented considerable difficulties. Like Damascius, Eunapius presents a serial or collective biography, detailing more briefly the lives of networks of teachers and students. Both also show an interest in rhetoric as well as in philosophy, though the degree of this interest and its character are rather different.8 In both of these texts, as in Marinus’ Proclus, the anti-Christian and pro-Hellenic implications have become particularly clear, though there were hints of this already in the earlier examples. For all their apparent otherworldiness, these biographies are all engagements with the conflicts of their times and reflect them at every turn.9 In the discussion to follow I will proceed through the texts in chronological order, as far as possible. What survives, it should be stressed, is certainly not a complete sample of Neoplatonic biographical writing.10 Nonetheless, it is enough to form a coherent idea of the nature and development of this specific and important sub-class of philosophic biography.
7
At least, it was possible for Porphyry to give a chronological account of the later parts of Plotinus’ life. The best indication of this is the possibility of extracting such a chronological sequence from the account we have. See Goulet (a). 8 Athanassiadi (: ) argues for an anti rhetorical Damascius. It is quite likely, however, that the comments which he appears to make against rhetoric in general belong to the specific circumstance of his conversion from rhetorical to philosophical studies. See the review by Lamberton (). 9 See Urbano (). On Neoplatonic ethics and political philosophy, see D.J. O’Meara (). 10 The fragment attributed to Damascius by Brinkman () is probably from a different Neopla tonic biography (Athanassiadi : ) despite Zintzen’s (: ) acceptance.
L P: P’ L P I’ O P L
.................................................................................................................................. The classification of these texts as biographies has often been challenged.11 Nonetheless, biography is clearly an important element in both works, and given the relative fluidity of ancient understandings of this genre, it is not out of place to include these texts in a discussion of Neoplatonic biography. The prime exemplar of the Pythagorean life is, after all, Pythagoras himself, and it is often through him that this way of life and its associated virtues are demonstrated. From the conclusion of the first chapter of Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras, with its turn from the initial invocation to the homeland and family origins of Pythagoras (genos and patris), strong cues are given to expect a work that is in part at least a biography. Secondly, ancient biography was a particularly flexible genre, and the denial of biographical status to works like these, that do show a considerable focus on recounting the life of an individual, would imply a rather firmer sense of the defining lines of biography than we are entitled to draw from the surviving tradition (Hägg a: –). It is more often than not the case that a work will contain elements of both biography and of something else. These biographies by Porphyry and Iamblichus bear striking similarities to one another. Their structures, dividing broadly into parts devoted to the life and to the nature of Pythagoras’ teaching, are similar, and on occasion they recount events in the same words. This is not, however, as Rohde (–) already argued, a certain indication of the dependency of Iamblichus on Porphyry’s account.12 More importantly, these similarities should not obscure the differences between these texts: Iamblichus’ is not only a much longer account but also uses its materials much more freely in the development of its own image of Pythagoras and his school. It, unlike Porphyry’s biography, overtly aspires to be an account both of Pythagoras’ life and of the Pythagorean way of life. Despite the certainty with which it has sometimes been asserted that Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras was an early work, written before his encounter with Plotinus and while he was still under the philological, rather than philosophical, influence of Longinus,13 this is only a plausible surmise.14 Whatever its date, Porphyry’s is a curiously spare and detached account, very different in character to his Life of Plotinus as well as to Iamblichus’ account 11 Dillon and Hershbell (: ), for instance, describe Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life as ‘much more than a biography’, and propose that it is ‘not amiss’ to classify it as a gospel (ibid.: ). Brisson and Segonds (: xii) observe: ‘C’est non pas la biographie de Pythagore, mais la présentation complète de sa philosophie.’ See also von Albrecht (: ) and J.M. Dillon (). 12 Rohde ( ). His theory, however, of mechanical compilation by both Porphyry and Iamblichus has few contemporary adherents, who emphasize rather the purposeful selection and compilation by both writers. 13 Plotinus famously characterized Longinus as ‘a philologist, not a philosopher’, see Pépin (a). 14 Bidez’s () conjectural chronology was long accepted. For objections see, for instance, Johnston (: ). In particular, the belief that Porphyry had an early tendency to superstition which was corrected by Plotinus is not sound.
of Pythagoras. Its view of Pythagoras differs, moreover, from that of Porphyry elsewhere (D.J. O’Meara : –). This Life is, in fact, closer in nature to the Life of Pythagoras included by Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of Eminent Philosophers, assembling as it does the information contained in various, now lost sources, generally without commenting or overtly favouring one source over another.15 Whenever Porphyry wrote, or better compiled, this text, it tells us relatively little about his own view of Pythagoras, beyond implying the sage’s importance for a general history of the origins of Greek philosophy.16 Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life is quite different. This large and at times sprawling text gives a more definite portrait of Pythagoras,17 though it too is pulled in various directions by the traditions with which Iamblichus had to work. Pythagoras is throughout the ideal sage, capable not only of perfect virtue and asceticism but also of performing miracles. One important area in which this work has on occasion been found inconsistent is in the status of Pythagoras as human or divine. In this, however, rather than seeing Iamblichus as ‘wavering’ (Hägg a: –), we might instead see a subtle understanding of Pythagoras’ nature. Though Iamblichus denies that Pythagoras was the son of Apollo (VP ), no one, he asserts, would deny that he was sent to us ‘under the leadership of Apollo’ (ἀπὸ τῆς Ἀπόλλωνος ἡγεμονίας, VP ). He is less exact, however, in specifying the degree of closeness to the god: he was ‘a companion (συνοπαδός) or still more closely connected to him’ (οἰκειότερον ἔτι πρὸς τὸν θεὸν τοῦτον συντεταγμένην, VP ). The choice of term (συνοπαδός) here is important for an understanding not only of this passage but of the text’s overall representation of Pythagoras. As D.J. O’Meara () has observed, ‘Iamblichus is interpreting the divine origin and mission of Pythagoras in terms of the myth in Plato’s Phaedrus (e–c).’18 What this means, in effect, is that while Pythagoras is not Apollo, nor physically a son of Apollo, he is a particularly pure soul in the procession of this god, who has been sent down to earth to save less pure souls.19 When Iamblichus later recounts three times the famous story of Pythagoras’ golden thigh, which he showed to the Scythian priest Abaris to prove that he was the Hyperborean Apollo (VP , , ), this very overt depiction of a divine Pythagoras might be understood in the same way. In short, because of the theory of divine processions evoked in its opening, On the Pythagorean Life can present a Pythagoras who is at different times both divine and mortal, thus allowing the use of otherwise contradictory traditions.20 The striking silence of Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life regarding the death of Pythagoras is likely due to this same understanding of Pythagoras’ nature. Lévy argued that both Porphyry and Iamblichus were avoiding a version of the end of Pythagoras’ life in 15
The best guide to the complexities of the Pythagorean tradition remains Burkert (). On the other fragments of the History of Philosophy, see Segond’s appendix in des Places and Segonds (: ). 17 Similar observations have often been made. See, for instance, Goulet (: ): ‘La Vie pythagor icienne de Jamblique est un ouvrage beaucoup plus original que celui de Porphyre.’ 18 D.J. O’Meara (: ). Gorman (: ) correctly observes the similarity of the use of συνοπαδός here to Iamblichus’ De mysteriis .. See also Brisson and Segonds (: xviii xix). 19 D.J. O’Meara (: ). The notion of procession of souls reappears, for instance, in Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Republic, . , where Proteus is an ‘angelic mind’ in the procession of Poseidon. 20 As Goulet (: ) observes in discussing Apollonius of Tyana, an intermediary status between mortal and divine is ‘typiquement pythagoricien’. 16
which he ascended to the heavens, as does Philostratus’ Apollonius (VA ..; see Lévy : – and Hägg a: –). It is quite likely that Philostratus or his source had transferred such an ascent of Pythagoras to Apollonius, just as Apollonius elsewhere is made to imitate Pythagoras (Flinterman ). Though it would be neat if this ending had been borrowed from a biography of Pythagoras by Apollonius himself, there is insufficient reason to identify the Apollonius cited by Porphyry and Iamblichus with the Tyanean.21 Nonetheless, it is very likely that such a tradition of ascent did exist, and the avoidance of this striking possible ending by both Neoplatonic biographers requires explanation.22 It is not, clearly, due to a sense of the implausibility of such an ascent, given the inclusion of golden thighs and flying Scythians (Iamb. VP ) earlier in the text.23 Nor, given Iamblichus’ acceptance of an apparently fully divine Pythagoras, is it an insistence on his purely human character (pace Hägg a: ). If Iamblichus had wanted to leave his readers with a plainly mortal Pythagoras, then narrating one (or more) of the traditions of the sage’s death could have made this clear. One possible explanation is that at the end of a text which has demonstrated the stature of Pythagoras’ soul and treated the body only as a vehicle, the physical death of the protagonist is not a matter of the highest importance, and an ascent in the body to the heavens would not have been in keeping with Iamblichus’ emphasis on Pythagoras’ spiritual over his physical nature. Iamblichus, like Porphyry, ends on the tenuous survival of Pythagorean teaching. Both speak, in the same words, of ‘sparks very dim and hard to catch’ (ζώπυρα . . . πάνυ ἀμυδρὰ καὶ δυσθήρατα, Porph. VP ; Iamb. VP ).24 Both texts are unanimous in emphasizing, however, that Pythagorean wisdom did continue, despite this difficult period. The embers go on to reignite the philosophy of Pythagoras, and the very existence of the biographies is evidence that Pythagoras’ divine mission had not failed. As the preceding discussion has implied, the complex problems of Iamblichus’ and Porphyry’s sources have been much discussed. Though this is not the place to enter further into that discussion, suffice to say that while Porphyry is content to recount what he has read, Iamblichus, despite his inconsistencies and repetitions, goes much further towards making the figure of Pythagoras his own. It is his own Pythagoras towards which the text aims to lead us, with the aid of the gods invoked at its opening (VP –). Whatever the reality of the first Pythagorean school and of the even more shadowy Pythagorean groups of the Hellenistic and Roman eras, Iamblichus clearly presents Pythagoras as the foundational figure of Hellenic philosophy, and depicts an unbroken continuity from him to his own present day.
21 An Apollonius is, notoriously, named as a source in the Pythagorean Lives of both Porphyry (VP ) and Iamblichus (VP ). Rohde argued influentially that this was Apollonius of Tyana ( : ), followed by Lévy (: ff.) and, among many others, Dillon and Hershbell (: n. and n.). This is not, however, a secure inference (Brisson and Segonds : lxvii; Petzke : , ). For further discussion, see Gorman (), despite a sometimes alarming willingness to take Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius at face value. 22 Diogenes Laertius chooses to have Pythagoras captured when refusing to cross a field of beans, in keeping with his evident fascination with the Pythagorean bean taboo: D.L. .. 23 Brisson and Segonds (: xix) well observe that the miraculous elements of the text serve as proof of Pythagoras’ divine nature. 24 The source is likely Aristoxenus of Tarentum or Nicomachus, see Brisson and Segonds (: ).
The problems of depicting an ideal appear in different forms in the Lives of contemporaries to those encountered in Lives of the historically, and even ontologically, remote Pythagoras. If the soul of Pythagoras is, as Iamblichus asserts, of a special kind, then it is hardly feasible for ordinary mortals of later periods to imitate him. We are rather to ‘establish as leader the initiator and founder of divine philosophy’ (VP ). Though we are supposed, no doubt, to imitate Pythagoras the hēgemōn, much as souls imitate their divine hēgemōn, this emulation can only, for ordinary human beings, be a more or less remote one. Turning to the Lives of contemporary or near-contemporary philosophers, we shall see how varied the degrees of perfection could be.
P’ L P
.................................................................................................................................. While Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life barely mentions its protagonist’s death, Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus places it almost at the beginning. This is also a very different work to Porphyry’s own Life of Pythagoras, as he is not now assembling ancient traditions with detachment but recounting Plotinus’ character from his own recollections. Porphyry is speaking, moreover, of a period that he presents as profoundly important to his own life, as well as to the history of philosophy. This is a narrative with a decidedly ‘overt’ and intensely involved narrator, who names himself, and about whom we learn a great deal. This is also the major source for the life of Porphyry himself, and it is essential to the text’s role in introducing the Enneads, that he establish his own credentials as the best, and indeed the inevitable, editor for these essays.25 Even before the narrative of Plotinus’ death, Porphyry makes an equally remarkable move in the presentation of his narrative by opening with the creation of a portrait of Plotinus. This episode, like Plotinus’ demise, has attracted a considerable amount of scholarly analysis (e.g. Pépin b; Edwards a; Stern-Gillet ). Despite Plotinus’ refusal to sit for his portrait, his students contrived to have it produced by bringing Carterius, the greatest contemporary portrait painter, into Plotinus’ lectures. We might see in this refusal an implication that the verbal portrait of Porphyry’s biography is by its nature a truer one than any painting could be.26 The transition directly from this portrait to Plotinus’ disease of the bowels (Plot. .) reinforces this impression of the limited and transitory nature of bodily appearances. The Life that follows is not arranged in chronological order, though it is careful at several points to indicate dates. What Porphyry offers instead of a chronological sequence is a series of testimonia to the nature of Plotinus, moving from relatively worldly concerns, perception of character (Plot. ), the esteem of his contemporaries (Plot. ) to the culminating piece: the oracle of Apollo (Plot. ; Goulet b; a; Brisson and Flamand ). This complex piece of hexameter verse is a kind of hymn, but not a hymn addressed to a god, but rather imagined as sung by the god to one who was once a mortal. The origins 25 Further on the narrator of the Life of Plotinus in Miles (: ). On Porphyry as editor, see Goulet Cazé (). 26 As does Francis (: ). See Edwards (a: ff) on biography as portrait and Francis ().
of these verses are uncertain and likely to remain so. More can be said, however, about their effect in the Life. The movement into the oracle is a shift in genre (biographical prose to oracular verse) and from a primary, limited narrator to an omniscient, secondary one. The last words of Plotinus, at the beginning of the text, had spoken of bringing the divine in himself back to the divine in the all, and it is the possibility of attaining a state above humanity, the condition of being a daimōn, with which the biographical portion of the text ends. It is evident to any reader of this text that Porphyry’s Plotinus is to embody a way of being a philosopher. In this at least it bears a resemblance to Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life and to a lesser extent Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras. Yet the question must arise of whether this is a more imitable ideal. Though the focus on an elder contemporary might suggest that the text will present a figure nearer to actual human capabilities, its protagonist was still ‘possessed of something more than other men’ (Plot. .). Despite the greater individuality of the Plotinus whom Porphyry is able to bring to life, he can only provide a model to be emulated by a spiritual/philosophical elite. For the more ordinary reader, this too must remain a remote ideal, though this narrative portrait also offers a guide to reading the Enneads themselves, informing us of the mind into whose presence we are about to enter.
M’ P, O H
.................................................................................................................................. Like Porphyry, Marinus attempts to depict his teacher, though after a much shorter time, probably to mark the first anniversary of Proclus’ death.27 Indeed, this idealizing portrait seems to respond to Porphyry’s at several points, implicitly elevating Proclus above Plotinus.28 The structure of the piece is, however, quite different to the Life of Plotinus. Marinus adopts from contemporary rhetoric the practice of structuring a eulogy around the four Platonic virtues: wisdom, courage, self-control, and justice (σοϕία, ἀνδρεία, σωϕροσύνη, and δικαιοσύνη). But he develops this in a specifically Neoplatonic manner by applying a developed version of the Neoplatonic scale of virtues. As Saffrey and Segonds observe, this development allows Marinus to avoid simply marking off topoi, allowing the sections on family and nature, education, and actions to be integrated neatly into the virtue-based structure (Saffrey and Segonds : xlvi–l). The germ of the scale of virtues appears in Plotinus, Ennead ., and is developed and schematized further by Porphyry in the Sentences Leading to the Intelligible (). Marinus, following Iamblichus, adds theurgic virtues to the levels developed before him (the political, cathartic, theoretic) and levels of ethical and bodily virtues below the political.29 This system, with its elaborate and fine distinctions, is telling of the difference between this 27 Saffrey and Segonds rightly describe this text as belonging to the genre of ‘l’éloge funèbre; qui est un espèce du discours épidictique’ (Saffrey and Segonds : xlii). 28 For instance, Marinus, unlike Porphyry, refuses to give a bibliography of his master’s work: Procl. with Edwards’ note (a: n. ). 29 The history of the scale of virtues is a complex one. For full discussion of its use in Marinus, see Saffrey and Segonds (: xlviii c); Schissel von Fleschenberg () with the review of Theiler ().
biography’s protagonist and Plotinus, and indeed of the different character of Proclan to Plotinian Neoplatonism. While Plotinus’ philosophical works are far from unsystematic, there is in Proclus a far greater attention to developing details and to systematizing.30 It is apt that this systematizing tendency is also marked in Marinus’ biography. Despite this elaborate structure by virtues, Marinus’ Proclus also maintains a linear chronology, though the text nowhere announces chronology as a second structuring principle, but rather assumes it. The conflation of these two structures produces an impression of gradual ascent: Proclus begins with a fortunate body and a privileged background, and by his own efforts comes to possess all of the virtues at all levels, and hence perfect happiness (eudaimonia). The belief that perfect virtue produces perfect happiness is fundamental to the text’s depiction of Proclus and is the explanation for the second part of its title. It is a measure of Marinus’ success that the two coexisting structures do not overtly clash. The combination of the two is also assisted by the fact that many of the actions described are either habitual (hence described in an iterative narration) or are given as examples of qualities (e.g. Procl. on ascetic and ritual habits; Procl. on daily routine). A comparison with the practices of Porphyry and Iamblichus is instructive. While Porphyry too was concerned to show Plotinus as possessing the virtues proper to a philosopher, the depiction of these virtues was far less schematic. Iamblichus, though he did choose to structure part of On the Pythagorean Life in accordance with Pythagorean virtues (–), was a good deal less methodical than Marinus (though see von Albrecht ). Although these repetitions have been defended as a pedagogical tool (Dillon and Hershbell : –), it is sometimes difficult to see what the criteria for selecting points for emphasis might have been. It is not obvious, for instance, why Iamblichus was so keen that his readers should remember Pythagoras’ golden thigh (VP , , ). It is probably truer to say that assembling the material available to him is more important to Iamblichus than literary form, and that on occasion this tendency to compile leads to untidy results. Marinus, by contrast, produces a polished rhetorical work, despite his stereotyped disclaiming of rhetoric (), and so is free of this type of incongruity. Although the combination of chronological movement and spiritual ascent might suggest a gradual learning and improvement on Proclus’ part, it is important from the eulogist’s perspective to stress his protagonist’s perfection at all times. This is a further tension produced by the dual structure of the work, and it too is not directly addressed. Proclus’ progress through the virtues is also a progression through a series of texts, so that politics, for instance, is mastered through the political works of Aristotle and Plato’s Laws and Republic (Procl. ). Yet Marinus emphasizes that the philosopher’s development is not simply textual but a mixture of this activity of reading and commentating with contemplative and theurgic self-transformation. Sometimes the structuring of the work by virtues developed and texts studied clouds the chronological movement: we hear, for instance, of Proclus studying the works of Orpheus under Syrianus (Procl. ), and immediately thereafter of his refusal to compose a commentary on these verses, though Marinus
Further on the development of the scale of virtues with reference to Iamblichus’ VP, see Staab (: ). 30
This, of course, is another vast topic. For an excellent overview of Proclus’ thought, including its relation to Plotinus, see R. Chlup ().
convinced him to make some notes on them (Procl. ). As a result of these studies, he ‘attained theurgic virtue in a higher and more perfect degree’ (Procl. , following here the translation of Edwards a). But when? It is not clear whether these virtues developed while initially studying these texts or when writing about them later or at some time in between. Certainly, a progression has taken place but the timing is unclear. This tension between the virtue-structure and chronology is related closely to the tension discussed above in philosophical Lives in general, namely, between the depiction of an individual and the presentation of an ideal. When there is some conflict between these two, it is undeniably the idealizing purpose, and hence the virtue-structure rather than chronology, which wins out for Marinus. Nonetheless, glimpses of the specific and human do appear. Similarly to the Life of Plotinus, where Porphyry speaks of Plotinus’ evident dyslexia and lack of interest in editing, Marinus’ Proclus on occasion allows the foibles and even weaknesses, like Proclus’ quickness of temper (Procl. ) to appear. A major hinge in the narrative structure of Proclus is the movement from political to cathartic virtues (Procl. ), that is, from virtues concerned with interaction with others to those which are concerned with the separation of soul and body. Marinus does not say, however, that Proclus moved on to perfect these virtues after perfecting the political, but rather that he undertook ascetic and ritual practices to achieve these higher virtues throughout his life. Nonetheless, there is a sense of temporal progression in the conclusion to Marinus’ account of these virtues, when Proclus advances to virtues greater and beyond even these (Procl. ), that is, to the theoretic virtues. The virtue-structure once more moves the narrative onwards, and a chronology is only vaguely indicated. Marinus is much more concerned to define with exactness the nature of Proclus’ inner being and his relationship to the gods than was Porphyry in the case of Plotinus. While Porphyry allowed Plotinus’ statement that the gods should come to him to remain mysterious (Plot. .–), Proclus is seen offering constant worship of a range of deities, aspiring to be the ‘hierophant of the kosmos’ (Procl. .–). Theurgy, which had not featured at all in Porphyry’s memoir of Plotinus, in the Proclus has taken on considerable importance. Marinus also reports Proclus’ belief about his past life as Nicomachus of Gerasa (J.M. Dillon ), and states in the same chapter that his soul was of the Hermaic chain (Procl. .–). Porphyry, by contrast, though he reports the oracle on Plotinus’ posthumous fate as a daimōn and says that Plotinus ‘possessed by nature something more than other men’ (Plot. .), is much less specific with regards to this kind of information. These past-life details are part of the Neo-Pythagorean strand in Marinus’ biography. Pythagoras’ own past lives were, of course, well known. These differences between the Life of Plotinus and that of Proclus are indicative of broader changes in post-Plotinian Neoplatonism. The greater tendency to systematizing and elaboration in later Neoplatonism is reflected in the stricter and more developed virtue-structure of Marinus’ biography. Another profound change between the cultural environments of the two texts is the transformation of Christianity from one important part of the religious landscape, to the dominant and official religion. Though a reader might often suspect that Porphyry is in part responding to Christianity in the Life of Plotinus (Edwards b), this is far from overt. Marinus, by contrast, refers directly, though in somewhat coded terms, to oppression by the Christian majority. The self-exile of Proclus to Lydia seems to have been due to problems with Christians, described as ‘Typhonian winds’
and ‘giant vultures’ (Procl. ). Between these two texts in praise of the masters of Marinus and Porphyry, both the character of Neoplatonic philosophy and the world in which it was being practised had changed.
S B: E’ L P S D’ P H/L I
.................................................................................................................................. The final two examples of Neoplatonic biography are both, unlike the preceding instances, serial biographies, telling of the lives of interconnected groups of individuals.31 While Eunapius’ text survives entire, we have only fragments of Damascius’ text, relayed in the Suda and Photius’ Bibliotheca.32 Though the fragments are substantial enough to form some opinion about Damascius’ work, discussion of it must remain somewhat tentative. Both texts, by focusing on groups rather than individuals, reduce the amount of space which each person receives. Cox Miller () rightly observes that serial biographies tend to produce a single life in various instances, and this certainly holds true for Eunapius.33 He is, however, concerned with three related types of individual: the philosopher, sophist (on which see Chapter in this volume) and iatromantis, this last category being a kind of sophist with claims to medical and prophetic abilities. In biographies of similar length to Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists, Eunapius depicts a world of teachers and students, intricately connected by metaphoric and sometimes literal ties of kinship. Much as Herodes Atticus offered a centrepoint for Philostratus’ sophistic genealogies, the central figure of Eunapius’ Lives is the philosopher Iamblichus, despite the fact that the work begins with the earlier figures of Plotinus and Porphyry. Theurgy, that is, the ritual and contemplative practices of spiritual ascent practised by Platonist philosophers in this period (Addey ), plays a prominent part in these Lives. The account of Sosipatra (on whom, see Iles Johnston ) exemplifies this interest well. After the death of her husband, Eustathius, this female philosopher and theurgist undertook a sort of team teaching with Aedesius in Pergamon, where he was admired for his ‘exactness’ (ἀκριβεία) and she for her ‘divine inspiration’ (ἐνθουσιασμός, VPS ). This latter quality, the narrative implies, was due to her unusual education under the tutelage of mysterious strangers, who appeared to be both initiates of Chaldaean (that
31 With regard to Damascius, Athanassiadi (: ) argues convincingly for the title Philosophi cal History (Philosophos Historia). 32 For the reconstruction of Damascius’ Philosophical History, see Asmus ( ), Zintzen (), and Athanassiadi (). I cite the fragments using Athanassiadi’s numbering, and so use PH rather than LSJ’s Isid. as abbreviation. 33 Eunapius has not received a great deal of literary scrutiny. See also Buck ().
is, theurgic) wisdom and blessed spirits (VPS –). Though the symmetry in the praise of Aedesius and Sosipatra suggests an equal importance for theurgic inspiration and philosophical rigour, in Eunapius as a whole more attention is devoted to the theurgic side and to the recounting of wonders. The Philosophical History appears to have been similar to Eunapius’ work in its presentation of a composite ideal, though Damascius is far sharper in his criticisms of his characters’ failings than Eunapius, or indeed than any other Neoplatonist biographer. Even Damascius’ teacher Isidore, who is ostensibly the focus of the text, is not perfect (PH –), and others come in for greater criticism. Marinus, for instance, ‘did not reap the deep furrow of ideas’ in his relatively few works (PH F) and wrongly departed from Proclus’ interpretation of the Parmenides (PH I). As D.J. O’Meara has demonstrated, the scale of virtues is important to Damascius as it had been to Marinus, though it did not play the structuring role in the Philosophical History that it does in the Life of Proclus. Instead, the various individuals appear to have been assessed according to their capacities in the levels of virtue (D.J. O’Meara ). It is not pushing the evidence of these fragments too far to say that Damascius’ ideal was itself a fragmented one, found partly in one individual and partly another. This notion of ordinary human existence as a thing of fragments was also conveyed in the Philosophical History by the image of the tearing apart of Dionysus (PH C). The use of Dionysus as mythic paradigm is certainly nothing new (see Dam. In Phaedonem .–.), but in a text which was clearly so concerned with the difficulty of assembling an ideal self, and with the probing of human failings, it has a particular aptness. The description of the sufferings of descended souls as ‘truly Typhonian and otherwise earth-born’ (PH C) also connects the dismemberment of Dionysus with that of Osiris. The two gods are equated in two other fragments (PH B and C), following a well-established syncretism (Plu. Moralia b; Hdt. .). Both the creation of the material universe and the descent of the individual soul are expressed through the myths of Dionysus and Osiris, which are themselves syncretized. Fragment A, furthermore, states that the Egyptians worship Isis and Osiris as the two creators of all things, with Osiris ‘arranging matter by form and number’ and Isis watering and nurturing creation. Both the existence of the natural world at large and the incarnation of the human soul appear to have been related to the same complex of Egyptian and Greek myths. Equally important to the Philosophical History is the possibility of escaping this fragmentation. Given the use of the dismemberment of Dionysus as an image of fragmentation into material particularity, it is apt that reintegration should be imagined through the traditional Platonic image of becoming a Bacchus. The much quoted line in Plato’s Phaedo (‘Many are the narthex-bearers, but few are the Bacchoi’ (c–d)), itself a quotation from ‘the Orphics’, is interpreted by Damascius to mean that becoming a Bacchus is the state of being liberated from the world of genesis. One of the best-known passages of Damascius’ surviving works (In Phaedonem .) speaks of the two paths of philosophy and theurgy, and of the Bacchus as the person uniting these two. Only Heraiscus is given this honour in the surviving fragments of the Philosophical History (PH A). The figure of Dionysus/ Bacchus, in other words, appears to have been used to convey both the fragmentation of descent into matter, and reversion to the intelligible.
C
.................................................................................................................................. All of the Neoplatonic biographies, in a remarkable variety of ways, grapple with the same group of issues: the construction of an ideal through an inevitably particular individual, and the presentation of the unfolding in time of a life whose aspirations lie in the non-temporal. While the Lives of Pythagoras depict a remote and semi-divine figure who can be a guide to the philosophic life only in a special sense, the lives of contemporaries (Plotinus and Proclus) come closer to imitability, at least for the philosophical elite to which these texts were addressed. The serial biographies by Eunapius and Damascius, though just as concerned with virtues and ideals, are more able to depict the imperfections of their subjects, precisely because they are not aiming to establish one individual as the embodiment of all virtues. Although the structures of the Pythagoras biographies, especially that of Porphyry, are heavily influenced by their nature as compilations, the biographies of contemporaries and near-contemporaries allowed much greater scope for choice. Porphyry chose to arrange his life as an ascending succession of perspectives on Plotinus, while Marinus ingeniously combined the rhetorical structure by virtue with a version of the Neoplatonic scale of virtues. Porphyry’s choice results in a structure that avoids chronological order, despite his frequent noting of chronological markers; Marinus is in general able to combine a chronological sequence with his virtue-structure, though at the cost of occasional vagueness of time. In addition to this history of responses by individual authors to a particular set of biographical problems, these texts also chart two related diachronic trajectories. In them can be seen both the progressive marginalization of these non-Christian (and often antiChristian) philosophers under the increasing dominance of the new religion, and changing tendencies within the Neoplatonic schools themselves, from the relatively freer approach of Plotinus to the tightness of structure and fineness of distinction exemplified by Proclus. In relation to questions of structure, the loss of the complete Philosophical History is especially acute, as here too there may very well have been connections to be drawn, exercising due caution, with the surviving philosophical works of Damascius. In every instance the narrative strategies of these biographies are informed by broader philosophical, cultural, and religious currents. These are texts in which some of the major figures of the late antique Platonic school engage with the nature of the philosophical life, in a genre that makes these questions human and concrete. It may well have been that the figure of Socrates gave an important impetus to the development of biography (Dihle ), and it is fitting that at the end of Antiquity these last ‘pagan’ philosophers should still find it a vehicle for ethical contemplation.
F R For Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras, see especially des Places and Segonds (), and regarding Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life, see Dillon and Hershbell (), Staab (), and Brisson and Segonds (). The fundamental resource for Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus is the two volumes of
commentary edited by Brisson (; a). On Marinus’ Proclus, Masullo () is still useful for linguistic and textual matters, though Saffrey and Segonds () is far more informative on the philosophical, literary, and cultural import of the text. Though Eunapius has not attracted a large secondary bibliography, see Penella () on the Lives as a source for cultural history and the translation by Wright (). Athanassiadi () provides an insightful reconstruction of Damascius’ Philosophical History. Given, however, the difficulty of such reconstruction, interested readers will still wish to consult Asmus ( ) and Zintzen (). Among the books and articles concerned more broadly with Neoplatonic biography, see Goulet (), Edwards (a), Lamberton (), J.M. Dillon (), Urbano (), and the discussion of philosophical biography, including the works discussed in this chapter, in Hägg (a).
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Lives of Miracle Workers, Apostles, and Saints ......................................................................................................................
T history of scholarship on biographies of holy men is long and complicated. This chapter will discuss the special relationship between the ancient genre of biography and the religious phenomenon of holy men. We need to start with a short flashback to the beginning of the twentieth century to understand what was and, for some scholars, still is at stake in this specific branch of studies. In his Hellenistische Wundererzählungen, the German philologist and religious historian Richard Reitzenstein () claimed that there was a very close relationship in Antiquity between biography and holy men. He posited the existence of a specific literary genre, aretalogy, which originally proclaimed the miracles of deities (Isis, for example) and supposedly developed into several biographical subgenres which focused on subjects occupying different positions on the scale of divine versus human beings, such as miracle workers, prophets, philosophers, adventurous travellers (Reise-Aretalogie), and so forth.1 However, according to Reitzenstein (; b), these genres had a direct impact on the emergence of Christian literature: the canonical and apocryphal gospels and acts of the apostles, the acts of the martyrs, and the Lives of saints, of which he situated the first examples in Egypt with Athanasius’ Life of Antony, the anonymous History of the Monks in Egypt, and Palladius’ Lausiac History. Although contemporary scholarship no longer sees aretalogy as a genre, the Forschungsgeschichte offers more than a century of discussions about the links between a narrative literary genre (with many possible subgenres) and the many manifestations of holy men, sages, and miracle workers in the ‘pagan’ (Egyptian, Greek, Roman, etc.) and in the Judaeo-Christian traditions (P. Cox , G. Anderson ). In his Hellenistische Mysterienreligionen, Reitzenstein (: ; ) also talks about the type of the theios anthrōpos or ‘Gottmensch’ as a type of Hellenistic prophet and miracle worker who influenced the New Testament. Ludwig Bieler published his very influential study (Bieler –) on the divine, godlike man (theios anēr; ‘göttliche Mensch’) a few years after the demise of Reitzenstein. Bieler did not focus on literary genre but his concept or ideal-type was paradigmatic for several decades, though it also caused much controversy. Bieler’s theios anēr was used by Rudolf
1
See also M. Smith (; ). For criticism, see P. Cox (: ) and Haase ().
Bultmann (: ) and his school to explain the Hellenistic influence on the evolution of the early Christian kērygma of Jesus as the son of God. He referred to ‘a whole series of “divine men” ’ (theioi andres) who claimed to be sons of (a) god or were regarded as such, some of whom were also cultically worshipped. The concept of the holy man does not coincide with the concept of the divine man, but the two clearly intersect. Hence, the centuries-old debates between different Christian denominations, or between believers and sceptics, about the ‘real’, original message and acts of Jesus and about the identity ascribed to Jesus by his first followers, versus possible ‘pagan’ influences on the way his life and identity were conceived of during the first four to five centuries cannot be avoided in a chapter about biographies of holy men. To make things even more complicated, we will see that some scholars have claimed that the influence went from Christian to non-Christian sources.2 Other scholars (Holladay ; Blackburn ; Koskenniemi ; Flinterman ; Du Toit ) have criticized Bieler, arguing that ‘theios’ has different meanings in the metaand the object-language. In most ancient sources it simply means ‘beloved by the gods’ or ‘pious towards the gods’; it does not always ascribe a super-human ontological identity to a person. Hence some claimed the concept of theios anēr did not exist as an ancient category of thought. Some even tried to argue that no miracle workers perceived and presented as something more than mere humans existed prior to the emergence of Christianity. The discussion about the direction of the influence of concepts and literary forms such as biographies of holy men (pagan to Jewish and/or Christian or from Jewish, Christian to pagan), dates back even further when we recall Ferdinand Christian Baur and his publication on the similarities between the gospels and the Life of Apollonius by Flavius Philostratus (references in Van Uytfanghe ).
T H M
.................................................................................................................................. The term ‘holy man’ was made almost canonical by Peter Brown’s (b) study of the social function of Christian saints in Late Antiquity (Elm and Janowitz ; HowardJohnston and Hayward ; A. Smith ; critical: MacMullen ). The term is also used for people who did not have the same or even a comparable social function as Brown’s ‘holy man’. A critique formulated against Brown and the many historians he influenced, is that they used Christian hagiography as sources which could be ‘mined’ for historical information. Averil Cameron (; ) and others called for more attention to be paid to the rhetorical aspects of these sources and Brown has remedied this in other publications (; ), but the focus was never on these texts as literature. The term ‘holy’ is also used to describe non-Western spiritual traditions (Cunningham ) and seems to avoid the full acceptance of ecclesiastical authority that the modern use of ‘saint’ can imply, or the theoretical framework that the opposition ‘sacred versus profane’ entails. 2
Even a short sketch of these long debates is beyond the scope of this chapter: each bibliographical reference in this chapter contains its own full bibliography and opens the door to further discussions. Hans Dieter Betz () compared Lucian and the New Testament. The concept of the ‘Gottmensch’ is presented in three long articles in the RLAC: one by the same Betz (), and also one by Schottroff () and Grillmeier ().
: , ,
But it does not solve all the terminological problems, and many attempts have been made to find a more suitable vocabulary. In his seminal article, Brown used ‘theios anēr’ once: in a short comparison of his Syrian Christian charismatic ombudsmen with comparable pagan and Jewish figures.3 Garth Fowden () wrote an influential paper on ‘the pagan holy man’. Mark Edwards (a) even used the term ‘neoplatonic saints’. Sources documenting the lives of pagan sages, thaumaturges, and Neoplatonist philosophers have been called ‘pagan hagiography’ and even ‘gospels’ (see Van Uytfanghe for references). None of these terms are ideal and some were no doubt chosen for purely ‘rhetorical reasons’. The problems with terms like ‘pagan hagiography’ or even ‘Heiligkeit’ in general in the history of ancient religions have been discussed by Dihle () and Auffarth (). The evolution of the terms hagios and sanctus in Christian contexts has been amply studied for more than a century (Delehaye ; Van Uytfanghe ). Suffice it to say here that ‘hagiography’ was originally only used for the third part of the Hebrew-Greek Bible (Ketubim-Hagiographa) and that several New Testament writings call every single adherent to the new faith ‘saint’ (e.g. hagious in Acts :). Even when the use of the term became more exclusive and when the cult of the martyrs and the saints was well established, there was no formal procedure to decide who was a saint and who was not. The Lives discussed in this chapter were not always written because the people they celebrated were already receiving a cult. In many cases it was the other way around: these texts are often performative, they create holiness or sanctity, in some cases the subject of veneration is even created in the sense that he or she is arguably totally fictional (e.g. Jerome’s Paul of Thebes and Malchus). In many cases the Lives of holy men establish holiness without using any of the ancient terms we now translate as ‘saint’ or ‘holy’. Wolfgang Speyer () has tried to introduce ‘numinous men’ to avoid a ‘Christocentric’ terminology, but the obvious reference to the theory of Rudolf Otto () on ‘Das Heilige’ has prevented this term from being universally accepted. The perspective adopted here is not the one of the religious sociology of Late Antiquity, let alone the viewpoint of a religious institution or even school in the history of religion, but of literary history. Despite all the problems, I will continue to use ‘holy’ as the term of a modern meta-language and as an umbrella term for all religious traditions: pagan, Jewish, Christian, Manichaean, etc. I also use it for a wide variety of people and realize that different perspectives are possible on one and the same individual: a holy man in one source can appear as a charlatan in another (Panayotakis, Schmeling, and Paschalis ). Some modern publications differentiate between ‘philosophers and holy men’, ‘holy men and saints’ or between ‘holy men and charlatans’, but this again depends on the perspective taken and such distinctions between religious traditions or between levels of paideia are always open to debate. As Hadot () has shown, ancient philosophy was sometimes more a way of life than a self-reflective theoretical discourse about man and the world. The turn towards the ‘care for the self ’ (Foucault ) in the Hellenistic and Roman period can perhaps explain why we have so many biographies of philosophers (Swain ): in fact, we have more biographies of religious and philosophical virtuosi than of military and political leaders (Hägg a: –). The definition and social-psychological function of ancient
See P. Brown (b: ) for the comparison, also P. Brown (: ) on ‘literary portraiture in the form of biography and autobiography’. 3
philosophy also mean that the modern, almost exclusively theoretical-discursive concept of philosophy does not fully apply to our sources. Many actions and sayings attributed to ancient philosophers would not even qualify as rational, let alone philosophical in the modern sense of those words, so divisions as the ones cited above between philosophers, holy men, and miracle workers are not ideal. There are also important differences between our sources, even those discussing one and the same philosopher. If one compares the rather sceptical Life of Pythagoras in Diogenes Laertius’ collection Lives of Eminent Philosophers (.) with Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras and the treatise On the Pythagorean Life by Iamblichus (see Chapter in this volume on these texts), one notices clear differences in the attitudes towards the miraculous (Edwards b; G. Clark ; Staab ; von Albrecht et al. ; Urbano ). We should also add that Iamblichus actually wrote about the Pythagorean way of life (bios), but his work also contains an actual Life (that of Pythagoras; –). Furthermore, as noted above, the definition of philosophy itself is open to debate in Late Antiquity. Christianity presented itself as the true philosophy. Whether Antony was an illiterate peasant or not, according to Athanasius (V. Ant. ), he defeated pagan philosophers in a dispute and advised them to imitate his own lifestyle. Theodoret of Cyrrhus calls the Syrian ascetical athletes ‘philosophers’ (HR, Prol. –) without any reference to intellectual debates. Perspective, again, is important. As discussed in Chapter in this volume, Lucian attacked the ‘pagan’ Alexander of Abonotichus, the ‘false prophet’ of the god Glycon because he was popular and, in his eyes, a fraud. The career-Christian Peregrinus Proteus was portrayed by him as both a Cynic and a cynic. But his Life of Demonax seems serious and positive about the philosopher who ridiculed a holy man (). There is no question in Lucian’s mind that Demonax was anything more than a virtuous— and witty—philosopher. Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius,4 for its part, had many functions: one of which is apologetic, defending the Pythagorean sage against the accusation of goēteia. One man’s charlatan is clearly another person’s holy man. But if our only surviving source is negative towards a person whom others saw in a much more positive way, should we include this and other ‘charlatans’ in our discussion here or not? The miraculous is not a criterion for ‘holiness’ either (Van Uytfanghe ). Rather than accepting Tiede’s () strict difference between the two ‘types’ of the wise man and the miracle worker, I believe that there is a continuum of the miraculous on which holy men can be placed. The Greek and Latin words aretai and virtutes can be used in the double meaning of moral virtues and of miracles, and some biographies of holy men ascribe both or only one of the two meanings to their subjects. Possidius’ Life of Augustine, for example (on which see also Chapter in this volume), leaves no room for the miraculous but discusses his moral and intellectual qualities, and his ecclesiastical accomplishments. As mentioned above, ‘saint’ or ‘holy’ imply an ecclesiastical perspective, which scholars should not adopt, but we should not limit our selection of Lives of holy men to collections of miracles either. The variety of views within ancient Christianity (or should one say ‘Christianities’) was immense. Not every holy man is a saint, and not every saint is a holy man, and certainly not for every Christian denomination. There are several apologetic
4
On the title, see Chapter , n. in this volume and Boter ().
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and celebratory Syriac Lives of Severus of Antioch, who was a heretic from an opposing point of view (Brock and Fitzgerald ). The sixth book of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History is often seen as a bios of Origen of Alexandria (P. Cox ), but he was anathematized in and is not formally a saint in any church as far as we know.
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.................................................................................................................................. I adopt the solution offered by Marc Van Uytfanghe in his many important publications on the hagiographical discourse and spiritual biographies (; ; ; ; ; ). He applied the concept of ‘hagiographical discourse’ developed by Michel de Certeau (–) to spiritual biographies in general.5 This allows scholars to study pagan, Jewish, and Christian texts. It bypasses questions of religious ontology, canon, and genre. The people presented in spiritual biographies have a close connection to the divine without being fully-fledged gods themselves. It can be applied to the canonical gospels because there are sufficient passages in the synoptic gospels which do not yet seem to treat Jesus as a god (Mark :, : and parallels). The pagan and the Jewish-Christian traditions have a different ontology of the divine, although the divide is not always absolute. The ontology of gods and men is hierarchical but potentially dynamic in the ancient Greek and Roman worldview. Demigods exist and both demigods and mere mortals can ascend to a higher status. There are intermediate beings for whom the term theios anēr might not be an adequate, object-language term, but the existence of intermediate beings is well attested from the Classical period onwards. In On the Pythagorean Life, Iamblichus quotes Aristotle (On the Pythagorean Philosophy) who knew of a theory in which reasonable beings were divided into three categories: gods, men, and beings ‘like Pythagoras’ (; Laks and Most : –). The ontological status of Apollonius of Tyana—god, mortal man, or ‘something like Pythagoras’—was probably deliberately made ambiguous by Philostratus (Praet, Demoen, and Gyselinck ; Miles ). A second important remark is that in the Pythagorean and Platonic traditions, the soul is seen as divine, even in mortals who are not imagined to be ‘something like Pythagoras’. This care for the soul as the core of the care of the self, has been the main goal of philosophy since Socrates. In Plato we already have the ideal of becoming like god, with the important further qualification ‘as far as possible’ (Tht. b: ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν). The philosophical lifestyle, including both practical (e.g. asceticism) and theoretical (mathematics, astronomy, etc.) aspects, allows one to perfect oneself to a higher degree than most people ever achieve. So there are at least two pagan models to establish a link with the divine without claiming that the subject of the biography was a full god. The fluidity of these models is shown by Eunapius in his Lives of Philosophers and Sophists (.–), where he says, on one and the same page, that Apollonius of Tyana was something in the middle between gods and man
5
See also Gemeinhardt and Heyden (: ) and Gemeinhardt ().
(οὐκέτι ϕιλόσοϕος· ἀλλ᾿ ἦν τι θεῶν τε καὶ ἀνθρώπου μέσον), and that Philostratus should have called his book on Apollonius the sojourn amongst men of a god (δέον Ἐπιδημίαν ἐς ἀνθρώπους θεοῦ καλεῖν). In the Jewish-Christian texts, the special relation to the divine will rather be expressed by the term ‘man of god’ than by the acceptance of intermediate beings between the transcendent god and his creation. But the discourse of the angelic life in monastic biographies (Frank ) and the philosophical ontology of someone like Gregory of Nyssa, allowing man to either rise to the dignity of angels or stoop to the level of pigs, are two examples of how there was a middle ground between the polytheist and the monotheist positions. The ontologies are comparable but not identical: the subjects of Jewish and Christian spiritual biographies are not themselves presented as anything more than mortals. Gregory of Nyssa stresses that the spiritual ascension towards perfection is a progressio ad infinitum: the ascent towards the divine is infinite, the theiosis remains forever tangential for mortals (Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses ). Man must imitate the exempla given in Scripture and hagiography, but will never become god. The Lives written by Philo of Alexandria (see Chapter in this volume) are also good examples. His Life of Moses is a combination of paraphrase of the biographical material in the Bible and of biblical exegesis and commentary. Van Uytfanghe () calls it perhaps the earliest extant example of the hagiographical discourse: Moses has an exceptional relationship with the deity and ascends to the highest level possible but he remains human. In rabbinic traditions, there are several miracle workers who show parallels with polytheist figures but there is no biographical tradition comparable to what we have in pagan and Christian Lives.
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.................................................................................................................................. The inclusion of the apostles in this chapter seems to pose several problems. The biographical material about the apostles is mostly contained in what international scholarship calls the ‘apocryphal acts’. Although this term clearly stems from a pre-secular period of scholarship, I continue to use it as a convention. It is impossible to give an overview of the rich biographical literature about the twelve apostles (or rather the thirteen or even fourteen, if one includes the apocrypha on Matthias, and the Gospel of Judas Iscariot; Pagels and King ; Burnet ). These texts resonate in later martyr accounts (see Chapter in this volume). It is a remnant of a theological approach to treat texts about apostles as a category different from the Lives of martyrs, non-martyred saints, or pagan holy men. But the apostles are, in fact, miracle workers; or, in the Christian tradition, God is said to perform miracles through them. In terms of generic classification, fluidity seems to be a key aspect. There has been much discussion about the unity of the Gospel of Luke and (the canonical book of) Acts and, as a consequence, of the genre of Acts as history or (collective) biography, the influence of the novel and other genres (Pervo ; Futre Pinheiro, Perkins, and Pervo ; Adams ). The so-called apocryphal acts are contemporary with most of the other texts discussed in this chapter. They have been mostly discussed as fringe-novels rather than biographies, but the fluidity between historical and
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fictional has long been recognized for the genre of ancient biography.6 Titles are not a good indication of genre. The material in the Acts of Paul and Thecla has been further elaborated in the Life and Miracles of Thecla (Dagron ; Bremmer ; S.F. Johnson b; c). The Greek Acts of Andrew were translated and made more orthodox by Gregory of Tours in his Liber de miraculis Andreae Apostoli, which was labelled ‘Vie d’André’ by Jean-Marc Prieur (Bovon and Geoltrain : –). The main reason to treat them as separate texts and the apostles as a separate category of holy men is the sheer volume of modern publications discussing them. The same goes, a fortiori, for the canonical gospels and the canonical acts of the apostles. The redaction of many of the apocryphal acts is very complicated and again shows the fluidity or absence of generic boundaries in biographical material from Late Antiquity. The Acts of Thomas, for example, include the famous so-called Hymn of the Pearl or Hymn of the Soul () which was most probably interpolated and has triggered long discussions about its origin and meaning (gnostic or not; Hennecke and Schneemelcher –; Bovon and Geoltrain : –; Bremmer ; Luttikhuizen ). This fable or madrasha poem, presented as a first-person ‘autobiographical’ narrative by a prince travelling to Egypt and forgetting about his home country, shows interesting parallels with the Greek Cologne Mani codex which is often called a Life of Mani but bears the title On the Origins of His Body (Koenen and Römer ; Cameron and Dewey ). The Acts of John, which have come down to us in a fragmentary state, have several components (Chapters –, for example, are probably from a different, gnostic source). The richness and variety of the biographical traditions on the apostles in different languages are well illustrated by the recent publication in the Series Apocryphorum of the Corpus Christianorum of Thecla and Paul’s Armenian dossier by Calzolari (), comparing the acts, miracles, and martyrdom with the better-known Western texts. In Englishlanguage scholarship, Judith Perkins (; ; ) Richard Pervo (; ; ) and others have done a lot to discuss the apocrypha from a literary perspective, assessing the influence of other narrative genres such as epic and the novel. One of the most puzzling questions about these texts but also of some other hagiographical texts is to what extent they were meant as entertainment (Huber-Rebenich ).
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.................................................................................................................................. Some scholars seem to use ‘biography’ for a supposedly reliable Life in a historicaldocumentary sense whereas ‘hagiography’ seems to stand for embellishment and/or pure invention. But the situation is more complicated (Insley and Mellon Saint-Laurent ). Some Lives of holy men for example, had the title of bios or vita; but most offered only a name or something elusive. Even supposedly common-sense definitions of the concept of Arnaldo Momigliano (: ) calls Xenophon’s Cyropaedia ‘the most accomplished biography we have in classical Greek literature’, though it clearly contains fictional elements and should be called a historical novel or an Erziehungsroman. The fluidity between novel, history, and biography is also very strong in the traditions about Alexander the Great starting with Ps. Callisthenes. On these two texts, see Chapter and Chapter respectively in this volume. 6
‘biography’, like the one proposed by Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘An account of the life of a man from birth to death is what I call a biography’ (: ), does not solve the problem since many biographies give no information about the birth of their subject and some were simply written well before the person died (see Chapter in this volume). Porphyry, in his Life of Plotinus and the Order of His Books, rejects the topoi on ancestry, parentage, and birthplace, and deliberately inverts the normal order of a biography by starting with the death of his teacher (–; see Chapter in this volume and Edwards b). In my view, Richard A. Burridge (: ) makes a valuable contribution to the debate by using Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblances as an escape clause from the generic problem: he argues that the gospels would have been recognized as bioi by ancient readers because there are enough features overlapping with other works so labelled, even if no single bios ever offers all ‘the’ features making it into ‘the’ ideal-type Life. Hence, I do not distinguish between biographical and hagiographical works.
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.................................................................................................................................. We use hagiology for the modern study of saints and things related to the cults of the saints (Philippart , pace Talbot ). Hagiography stands for the writings about saints but it is not a genre. Some English-language scholars use the word ‘hagiography’ as a countable noun synonymous for vita but I use it here in a much broader sense, including letters, panegyric, funeral orations, poems, epigraphical material etc. Hagiography is thus much broader than the Life, bios or vita which, as has been said, is also far from a homogeneous (sub-)genre. Speeches or panegyrics cannot be clearly separated from written biographies about holy men. Libanius’ Lament over Julian (Or. ) is only about pages long, but his so-called Funerary Speech on the same emperor (Or. ) is ten times longer, making it either a written work or a forerunner of Fidel Castro’s speeches. The same can be said about Gregory of Nazianzus’ Oration on Basil the Great. Other works are presented as letters, but are actually Lives so filled with oratorical topoi that we could just as well call them encomia. What is the genre of Jerome’s Epistle , the Epitaphium Sanctae Paulae, which was written as a consolation addressed to her daughter Eustochium but which flows over into the encomiastic and the biographical genre (Smit )? The scholarship has proposed all sorts of subgenres and mixed genres for which names like ‘encomiastic Lives’, ‘biographical orations’, or ‘hagiobiography’ (A. Wilson ) have been invented, but the reality of the Lives of holy men and women is that there is a constant crossing of boundaries, so much so that Tomas Hägg has remarked that the ancient writers do not give us the impression of knowing that such boundaries existed, so we should perhaps give them up as modern creations or at least stop conceptualizing genres in spatial terms. Instead of thinking of domains with boundaries and overlaps, we should think in musical metaphors where certain themes are repeated but with new material and variations on old themes, played with different instruments, sampled and remastered, and so on. In search of a definition of spiritual biographies we should also realize that the Lives of holy men and women are not always narrative. I have discussed the canonical gospels (Burridge ), but if the hypothetical Q source were ever to materialize, we would have a
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collection of mainly logia attributed to Jesus (Quesnel ). This is, as we know, the reality of the Gospel of Thomas, of Philip, and other apocryphal writings, which have only the shortest possible narrative framework. Many other ‘Lives’ are similar collections of sayings or apophthegmata with a very limited narrative frame-story about the life of the celebrated sage. The Life of Secundus Silentiarius, for example, has a short frame story explaining why Secundus refused to speak (see Chapter in this volume for details). The Life is a clever meta-reflection on philosophy and rhetoric, because his silent way of living, a mix of the Cynic and the Pythagorean bios, made him so famous that the emperor Hadrian sought his advice. Refusing to answer even the emperor, the philosopher came close to becoming a pagan martyr, but they finally engaged in a silent, written philosophical dialogue. The rest of the work is a pagan philosophical catechism of questions and answers. The Life became Christianized and was very popular in the Middle Ages but its literary, unorthodox, and hybrid character is also reflected by the manuscript tradition in which it frequently occurs without the biographical frame-story. We have similar works in the ancient Christian tradition: the Life of Syncletica, spuriously attributed to Athanasius, consists of chapters with only a minimal biographical framework. The rest contains spiritual advice given by Syncletica on numerous matters. As Castelli (: ) notes, some of these sayings also appear in collections of apophthegmata, celebrating the sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers (see also Ward : –). We should also look at the problem from another angle. The famous collections of sayings of the Desert Fathers offer more than simple sayings. In many cases, we have small biographical anecdotes and in some cases, the anecdotes and sayings of a given father or mother amount to a short biography. Some of the individual apophthegmata are longer than some chapters with a single anecdote or a single saying of the Desert Fathers in collective works which are traditionally seen as collective biographies of desert saints like the Lausiac History or the History of the Monks in Egypt (Hübner ; Cain ). Susan Ashbrook Harvey () has rightly spoken of short cameos of saints. But if we have several pages of anecdotes and sayings attributed to, say Macarius the Great, why would we not call that a fringe-biography? Biographies can also take the form of philosophical dialogue. Early in the twentieth century, a newly-discovered papyrus showed that Satyrus (c. ), who published philosophical Lives, also wrote a Life of Euripides in dialogue-form (POxy. ) as part of a trilogy on the three classical Athenian tragic poets (see Chapter in this volume). The Life of John Chrysostom attributed to Palladius similarly takes the form of a dialogue, and the same can be said about part of the hagiographical dossier on Martin of Tours. The Life of Martin was written during the lifetime of the saint and so did not cover the life ‘from the cradle to the grave’. Sulpicius Severus later published three letters on the death and burial of Martin, which are usually added to the actual vita in modern editions. But the hagiographer added yet another piece to the dossier: the Gallus, a dialogue in the tradition of Cicero and Minucius Felix, with further biographical material about Martin but also including travel accounts about eastern monks, miracles, and so on. To make the generic fluidity even greater, the whole dossier was paraphrased by two poets of the fifth and sixth centuries who turned it into epic hexameters: Paulinus of Périgueux and Venantius Fortunatus (Labarre ). There surely is no simple answer to the question of what the ‘genre’ of all these writings is.
We have many such poetic paraphrases, both centos and in original verses. The gospels were paraphrased in Latin by Proba and Iuvencus. In Greek, we have the famous paraphrase of the Gospel of John by Nonnus of Panopolis, the author of the Dionysiaca. The latter work is considered mythical epic: but is the paraphrase a biography? A less-known (but in principle comparable) prose and verse dossier exists about the imaginary Cyprian of Antioch, a magician who converted to Christianity and who was confused in the tradition with Cyprian the bishop of Carthage. His vita was one of the sources of the Faust legend. There are three short Greek texts which constitute a Life (or rather a novel): the confession, conversion, and passion of Cyprian, in which the story is told of a pagan man who is in love with an unwilling Christian virgin, Iustina. Cyprian is called in to work his love-magic but he converts to Christianity and he dies the chaste martyr’s Liebestod with the virgin. This story was known to Gregory of Nazianzus, who used it in his Oration (In praise of Cyprian of Carthage). Prudentius also alludes to it in his Peristephanon (Passion of Cyprian .–). Towards the middle of the fifth century, the empress Eudocia turned the novelistic Greek version into hexameters (Bevegni ). Compared with the ‘genuine’ Latin version by Pontius, this is, generically speaking, something quite different, but all these texts can be brought together under the umbrella of ‘discours hagiographique’.
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.................................................................................................................................. I have referred to the debate about the historical-documentary value of spiritual biographies. Whether pagan, Jewish, or Christian, they are all characterized by different degrees of stylization of the historical subject. Jacques Fontaine, in his influential and book-length methodological introduction to the Life of Martin (Fontaine ), seems to assume there is usually some basis in historical fact from which the stylization started. I have also mentioned ‘biographies’ of characters who never really existed and of people about whom biographers knew absolutely nothing apart from a name. In this case, stylization turns into pure invention. Although these spiritual biographies of invented characters contain explicit truth claims, the doubts about the veracity of saint’s Lives are not just a modern phenomenon. Jerome’s biographical writings (discussed in Chapter in this volume in more detail) are illustrative. In his Life of Hilarion, Jerome felt forced to react against critics who had rejected his Life of Paul on the grounds that ‘he who had always lived hidden, had never existed’ (Prol.). The Life of Malchus, the captive monk, is presented by Jerome both as a ‘story of chastity’ (historia castitatis, ; ed. C. Gray ) and as an exercise for the writing of a full-scale history of the church (.–), but it is so reminiscent of the topoi of the ancient novel and of biblical narratives that most modern scholars call it a work of fiction, although Berschin (: ) seems to accept the historicity of the figure. Even when the biographee is a historical person, stylization can be so strong that we cannot trust the biography to give us any reliable information about the reality behind him. The late antique biographies written about Plato, for example, present him as a god-like figure. Apuleius’ De Platone et dogmate eius, although not a classical biography, contains many elements of Plato’s stylization into a superior being. The biography added by Olympiodorus as an introduction to the commentary of Plato’s Alcibiades , and the
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anonymous sixth-century Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy enhance those elements (Layne ). Even Diogenes Laertius refers to older traditions that associate the birth of Plato with Apollo, although he also includes negative traditions, such as the charges of plagiarism which go back to Theopompus of Chios in the fourth century (see Chapter in this volume on Aristoxenus’ unsympathetic Life of Plato). I have already mentioned the different traditions on Pythagoras. A figure sometimes associated with him, Empedocles, is a good example of how stylization can start with the self-presentation by the person himself. Diogenes calls him ‘boastful and selfish’, for which he quotes the line ‘All hail! I go about among you an immortal god, no more a mortal’ (.). He also records the hilarious, sceptical story about Empedocles’ attempt to confirm his apotheosis by jumping into the crater of Mount Etna. His act of divine disappearance supposedly failed because one of his famous bronze slippers was found next to the crater. This story of a self-styled death-apotheosis resonated well into the times of Hölderlin and Nietzsche. The second possible level of stylization involves other people: the entourage and the transmission of stories in oral or written form. Finally, the biographer in the written text usually makes the largest contribution to stylization. It could be argued that Fontaine () developed this three-layered model to protect hagiography against criticism of historical unreliability (Barnes ; Praet ). The first and second levels of stylization are usually impossible to prove but in cases where biblical stylization is obvious, he could then argue that the holy man himself might have consciously or unconsciously imitated biblical figures or his entourage might have interpreted him in that way, thus avoiding ascribing the topoi to the literary imagination of the hagiographer. In both pagan and Christian spiritual biographies, one can find identical or very similar topoi about the special birth and the death of the hero, about exceptional capacities, etc. But, as I have already suggested, these are not exclusively related to miraculous powers. Spiritual biographies celebrate aretai or virtutes in the double sense of moral virtues and miraculous powers. Here again, there are many possible variations and positions: one text will emphasize moral character over miracles, the other will do the opposite. Both the Life of Origen contained in Book of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, for example, and Possidius’ presentation of the Life of Augustine contain little to no miracles. In other Lives, the balance will tip towards miracles with almost no attention paid to the moral character or spiritual teaching of the thaumaturge. Spiritual biographies are not neutral; they are not part of objective historiography. Stylization implies that the primary function is not to inform the reader in a historicaldocumentary sense. The aim of the authors is often to establish or defend the authority of the person or the tradition he or she stands for. It can be apologetic or paraenetic: the person, his or her deeds and sayings are offered as an example, their moral character (ēthos) is offered as an ideal for mimesis. As we have seen in Chapter in this volume, Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life is a philosophical treatise on the ‘way of life’ (bios) initiated by Pythagoras and was part of a much larger handbook or compendium that introduced Pythagoreanism in all its practical and theoretical aspects. The same goes for other works in the Platonic and Pythagorean traditions: they are introductions to a curriculum. In other cases, authors feel the need to defend and praise their biographees, as is clear in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius (Chapter in this volume). These apologetical and panegyrical aspects of spiritual biographies imply that there is also a positive selection of features whereas the negative traits of the characters are ignored or refuted as slander.
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.................................................................................................................................. Spiritual biographies are performative texts. One rarely becomes a general because someone writes a text claiming you were one. In the case of spiritual authority and exemplarity, there are many examples of characters who were established as holy men by the texts written about them. Some of these were totally invented by the authors, others lived in such a distant past or the information was so scarce or the intention of the authors were of such a nature that nothing can be accepted as historically reliable. These texts were written to serve a purpose: examples for moral mimesis, the establishment of spiritual or philosophical authority, or the promotion of a cult with all its implications of power and wealth. There is no formal unity: spiritual biographies exist in prose and in verse, in narrative and in dialogue form, as letters and speeches, they can be very short and very long, contain many or few miracles. Aretalogy was never a real genre, but these text are focused on exceptional people and their aretai or virtutes in the double sense of miracles and virtues.
F R On writing spiritual Lives, Van Uytfanghe () is foundational. Aigrain () deals with sources, methods, and the history of life writing of saints in particular. On apocryphal writings on the apostles, Gregory et al. () is the most recent comprehensive starting point; for texts and translations, see Bovon and Geoltrain () and Geoltrain and Kaestli ().
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M literature begins in the middle of the second century with so-called martyr accounts or martyria.1 Scholars traditionally divide these texts into two types: narrative representations of the suffering and death of martyrs (so-called passiones) on the one hand, and dramatic representations (i.e. in the form of a dialogue) of the trial preceding it (socalled acta or praxeis) on the other. The exact semantic range of both labels is debated (e.g. Malingrey : ; Saxer and Heid : –), but in any case the distinction does not capture the textual reality in its full complexity: even the predominantly narrative texts often contain an interrogation scene, whereas most so-called acta always have a narrative frame, however minimal it may be. In addition, there is no formal unity across the board. Most martyr accounts are short prose stories (one of the shortest, the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs (c.), has only two pages of Latin text in Musurillo ) but others are exceedingly long (e.g. the Greek Passion of Gregory the Illuminator). From the fourth century onwards, some martyr accounts were written not in prose but in metre. The following examples illustrate particularly well the pluriformity of the field (and, therefore, the artificiality of the above-mentioned distinction): the Greek Passion of Polycarp of Smyrna (written between and ), first, has been identified as the first early-Christian piece of writing to use martyrium terminology2 and is often regarded as the start of the whole genre—although its date and authenticity have been questioned (Moss ; Zwierlein ); but it takes, unlike most other martyr accounts, the form of a letter (Hartog ). The Latin Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas (dated ), for its part, is formally much more complex: not only does it include multiple narratorial
1
In this chapter, we do not discuss martyr accounts in languages other than Latin and Greek (on which see Chapters in this volume). 2 Baumeister (: ) and Seeliger and Wischmeyer (: ). Bremmer (: ), on the other hand, observes martyrium terminology in the Apocalypse of Peter, which he dates to around (ibid.: ).
voices (one of these being an ego-narrator that claims to include Perpetua’s own prison diary) but it also is a mix of different narrative forms (symbolic and apocalyptic visions, dialogue, and third-person narrative).3
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.................................................................................................................................. For a long time since its emergence during the Counter-Reformation, scholarship on martyr accounts was driven by a distinct interest in narratives that were considered to be reliable sources for the history of the persecutions in the first few centuries of the Common Era.4 H. Rosweyde () sets the tone when he announces his intent to use historical and philological criteria to identify the so-called ‘authentic’ Lives of the saints. Although after him J. Bolland (: Praef. . in Acta sanctorum, Jan. I, xxxiii and Praef. ., xxxv) is explicit that not all the texts that he edits have the same historical value,5 many later editors emphasize that they are interested only in authentic acts.6 E.F. Le Blant (: ) puts his finger on this intellectual bias when in his supplement to Ruinart’s socalled ‘acta sincera et selecta’ he remarks that it exists to the detriment of the study of other texts. The consequences of the scholarly outlook that Le Blant describes are nowhere more visible than in editorial practice throughout the ages: the identification of (an ever increasing number of) texts as historically inaccurate, unreliable, or invented has done its fair share to banish them from the desks of editors. Whereas T. Ruinart, for example, in his edition of Acta primorum martyrum sincera et selecta () includes c. texts, Knopf ’s () ‘collection of sources for the history of the martyrs’ (iii, our translation) includes no more than twenty-one; and von Gebhardt () has twenty-two. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the general trend in editorial practice is clearly one of increasing selectivity: Krüger and Ruhbach () select thirty-three texts, Musurillo () twentyeight, and Bastiaensen et al. () only twelve; Barnes (: –) presents a canon of nineteen, Maraval () has twenty-seven, Seeliger and Wischmeyer () thirteen, and the recent Pléiade volume of ‘Premiers écrits chrétiens’ (Pouderon et al. ) offers no more than eight texts.7 None of these editors and translators, it is true, claim to be exhaustive, but many of them are explicit about the strictly historical criteria of
3 The bibliography on this text, its complexity, interpretation, and relation with its Greek translation and recensions is enormous. See, for example, Bremmer and Formisano (), Heffernan (), Kitzler (), and Bremmer (a) each giving extensive further bibliography. 4 Rebillard (: ) reviews the history of collecting martyr narratives. 5 See also Rebillard (: ) and Praet (). 6 See Donet () for an overview of editions and, in some cases, discussion of their policy of inclusion; and Moss (: ) on the ‘historical nucleus’ in martyrdom literature as assumed by many early editors in the wake of the Bollandists. 7 There are, of course, exceptions: Catholic publishing houses have continued to print large, inclusive collections. Examples are Caldarelli () or Ruiz Bueno (), which include fifty nine and sixty five texts respectively.
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authenticity and reliability driving their selections,8 even if recent editions have also used other criteria.9 It is, in other words, one of the ironies of the history of research that the huge investigation and publication projects initiated to counter Protestant criticism of the cult of saints (including that of martyrs), have in fact consolidated the thesis that the vast majority of transmitted martyr accounts are not historically reliable. This awareness has led to disproportionately massive attention being paid to a relatively limited number of early narratives that were contemporary or near-contemporary to the persecutions that they (purport to) describe (second, third and early fourth centuries) and have therefore been considered to be historically reliable documentation for them. This predominant attention is arguably one of the reasons why today it is still common in scholarship to conceptualize the end of the persecutions in the fourth century as a rupture in the representation of martyrs. Whereas, it is said, in the early centuries of the church, Christian steadfastness is exemplified by martyrs, after the persecutions, their role is taken over by other types of saints—primarily monks and bishops.10 This idea has shaped traditional histories of Christian literature, which usually have chapters on the early martyr accounts and on the rise of biographical hagiography (such as Athanasius’ Life of Antony), but not on later martyr accounts, which thus tend to disappear from the scholarly horizon. This chapter provides a modest attempt to draw attention to such later accounts as pieces of life-writing.
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.................................................................................................................................. Several hundreds of martyr accounts have come down to us in Latin, Greek, and most oriental languages and are believed to have been written several centuries after the persecutions (although their dating remains in many cases highly speculative; see Further Reading section). In fact, they are far more numerous than biographies of non-martyrs. Many are more complex and more elaborate from a narrative point of view than their preNicene predecessors. This quality too has been addressed mainly as an index of their nonhistoricity. H. Delehaye’s (: –) famous classification of martyr accounts, for example, is based on a sliding scale of authenticity which coincides more or less with a continuum from simple registration of facts to narrative amplification: it ranges from straightforward, hardly narrative official transcripts of interrogations and (alleged) eye-witness accounts to more elaborate stories that he calls ‘novels’ (featuring either a historically real or an invented 8 For example, Bastiaensen et al. (: xxx) on trustworthiness, Musurillo (: xii) on reliability, Everett (: ) on authenticity, Ruiz Bueno (: ) on ‘the granite rock of truth’ as opposed to legend and novels (our translation) as selection criteria, and Maraval (: ) on included texts as sources of specific historical realities. 9 For example, Rebillard () with chronological and Seeliger and Wischmeyer (: vii) with both generic grounds and pragmatic considerations (some texts have already received too much attention to be included). Lapidge () is explicit about the fictitiousness of the passiones included in his collection. 10 See, for example, Gemeinhardt (: ) and Van Uytfanghe (). Scorza Barcellona (: ) on the ‘transition’ (‘il passaggio’) from passiones to Lives of saints and new typologies of exceptional Christians after the persecutions. Along those lines, Harvey (: ) pays less attention to post Nicene than to pre Nicene martyr acts. See also Bremmer (b).
saint) and ‘falsities’ (‘les faux qui n’ont ni fonds historique, ni fonds cultuel’). His later revision too (), which essentially again distinguishes between historically reliable (‘passions historiques’) and more imaginative stories (‘passions épiques’), opposes non-narrative or less narrative forms (such as letters, transcripts, etc.) to more elaborate narratives.11 In this chapter, we are concerned, precisely, with the narrative qualities of martyr accounts, and, more specifically, with the question of how the (re)constructions of the lives of the protagonists inscribe these texts in biographical (and other) narrative traditions.12 Ever since the early martyr accounts have been studied by nineteenth- and twentiethcentury scholars (e.g. Reitzenstein a) as being part and parcel of the cosmopolitan rhetorical, philosophical, and religious literature of the Imperial age, they have been read as literary pedigrees essentially tapping from other genres, which more often than not were conceptualized as ‘predecessors’ or ‘models’ (but see Chapter in this volume on problems with the first term). The role of the Jewish tradition is especially debated in this respect. Old Testament stories such as the three young boys in the furnace (Dan ) and Daniel in the lion’s den (Dan ), are particularly prominent in martyr accounts (Baumeister ). The Maccabees too are often introduced in the texts as examples of martyrdom.13 All these models thus seem to re-establish the biblical past in the narrative universe through what scholars have labelled ‘biblical stylization’ (Deléani-Nigoul ; Van Uytfanghe ; Saxer and Heid ). This strategy was particularly important for the production of texts on martyrs about whom authors had little or no direct information. In these stories, martyrs are thus portrayed as choosing to re-enact biblical story-patterns and imitate biblical figures. In addition to the biblical tradition, the literary tradition of philosophical dialogue is also an important background. Famously, Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, present the last days and the death of Socrates through dialogue between him, his judges, and other Athenians (see, for example, Musurillo on the acts of the so-called pagan martyrs and the tradition of depicting lives of philosophers). As for the more narrative subgenre of martyr accounts (passiones), scholars have looked at another so-called ‘predecessor’: the genre of exitus illustrium virorum (or what in Greek is referred to as teleutai literature): the description of the end of the lives of illustrious men, Other scholars clearly echo Delehaye’s classification: Aigrain (: ) proposes a variation; Berschin (: ) has a more diversified classification, based on literary form rather than supposed historical reliability; Quasten () distinguishes between official court protocols, eye witness reports and legends; Lazzati () between ‘dramatic’ texts (built around dialogues such as the Martyrdom of Polycarp and those of the martyrs of Lyon and Vienne), ‘narrative’ texts (such as the Martyrdoms of Perpetua and Felicitas, Marianus and Jacob, and Lucius and Montanus), and mixed texts (e.g. the Martyrdoms of Cyprian, Fructuosus, and Apollonius); and Saxer and Heid () between narrative passiones, court protocols, and epic and novelistic legend. On these and other classifications, see Seeliger and Wischmeyer (: ) and Dehandschutter (: = : ). 12 M.S. Williams (: ) argues that martyr acts portray ‘only a tiny proportion of human experience’ and offer an account of death rather than an account of life. He therefore excludes them from being ‘full blown hagiographies’. Swain (: ) is more flexible. 13 There is some debate about the importance of and Maccabees for shaping the idea of Christian martyrdom: Hilhorst reads Maccabees as a ‘passion épique’ (: ) and argues for its ‘strong . . . impact’ (: ) on Christian martyrdom texts; Bowersock (: Chapter ), on the other hand, sees martyrdom as an essentially Christian invention without precursors in other traditions; van Henten () too has sensible reservations about notions of continuity between the two traditions; for Ziadé (: ), the similarities suggest a common literary phenomenon. 11
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often victims of tyrants (e.g. Eigler ). It is not clear whether the references in Pliny (Ep. .. about Titinius Capito) and Cicero (Div. . about his own collection) allow us to accept the existence of an actual genre, but it is clear that collections of exempla focusing on the death of famous people existed in different forms and surface in different genres. Aretalogy too has been presumed to have influenced martyr accounts, even if it is no longer seen as an independent genre (P. Cox ; Haase ).14 It was present in the oriental cults of Isis and Sarapis (on their comparison with Christianity, see Reitzenstein ; Bremmer ). Finally, Hellenistic miracle-collections have been counted as models for both the gospels (K.L. Schmidt : –) and martyr accounts (of which the earliest texts are the least miraculous). Most importantly for our purposes, martyr accounts have obvious affinities with the ancient biographical tradition. Praise and edification are important socio-cultural functions in both traditions (on biography, see Gengler and Chapters , , and in this volume; on hagiography, Aigrain : –, –). On the other hand, since the purpose of martyr accounts is not so much the description or glorification of an individual but rather the affirmation of the ideals for which (s)he dies,15 many of them deal only with the last days of martyrs, containing little or no biographical information (other than what occasionally emerges during the interrogations) or even a description of the execution. Some texts emphasize their own strict focus on death episodes: the Passio of Photina (BHG g), for example, is explicit that only her martyrdom will be dealt with, not her preceding life. Typically, such martyr accounts are organized around a fixed, recognizable pattern that starts with a reference to an edict of persecution under a certain emperor and proceeds with the arrest of the protagonist, his/her interrogation by a governor (or emperor), his/her refusal to sacrifice to the pagan gods (sometimes with divine support communicated through signs), torture episodes of varying length, and, finally, the execution of the saint (often after several failed attempts), which is sometimes followed by the recovery and burial of his/her body by Christians.16 But many martyr accounts do much more than that. They also cover (parts of) the preceding lives of martyrs, either in little vignettes of biographical excursions17 or in fullyfledged narratives (which sometimes circulated as independent stories).18 In order to capture such narrative elaborations, Elliott distinguishes between passiones on the one hand (which he calls ‘centripetal’, as they aim for a quick, ultimate climax), and vitae on the other (called ‘centrifugal’, given the elaboration and excursions that postpone that climax).19 In fact, we would add, many martyr accounts accommodate both dynamics at the same time. An oft-cited early example of biographical elaboration is the Life and Passion of Cyprian (second half of the third century20), which offers a description of Cyprian’s life complementing the account of his death.21 Some martyr accounts display more awareness
On aretalogy as significant for biographical developments in general, see Chapter in this volume. A.G. Elliott (: ). 16 See Lapidge (: ) on all these elements constituting the plots of acts of the Roman martyrs. 17 For example, on Victoria in the Passio of Dativus, Saturninus et al. § (Tilley ). 18 19 Van Uytfanghe (: ). A.G. Elliott (: ). 20 In von Harnack’s () view, this is the first Christian biography. See also Gemeinhardt (: ) and Barnes (: ) on this text and its elaboration of the episodes preceding Cyprian’s death. 21 Van Uytfanghe (: ) and Gemeinhardt (: ). 14 15
than others about their biographical dimension: the Acts of Epipodus and Alexander (BHL –; Lyon, ), for example, opens with a statement that, before recounting the death of the saints, it is necessary to say a few words about their lives too—an explicit reminder that this story is more than just a simple passio.22 Similarly, the Passio of Marculus (BHL ) is explicit that ‘we must not omit the memorable course of his earlier life’(§).23 Narrative elaborations of lives that precede martyrdoms resort to different effects. In the Passio of Pancratius of Rome (BHG –), for example, the narrative preceding the martyrdom discusses in detail the family of the saint. This biographical information has a role to play later in the story, when during the interrogation leading up to Pancratius’ execution the pagans realize from which illustrious family he descends. Sometimes, the narrative preceding the martyrdom plays a role that goes beyond such mere narrative functionality. The Passio of Gordianus (BHG ) is an example of generic playfulness: the story begins with an inversion of standard protocols of the martyr acts genre. The protagonist is initially an official under Julian the Apostate and is shown interrogating a Christian priest called Ianuarius. It is only after his conversion that he himself is persecuted and dies. The episode surely echoes the famous story of Paul, another devoted Christian who started out as a persecutor, but it also plays with the story patterns underlying the genre that it practises: in this story, the protagonist is initially cast not as the saint but as the persecutor (both by his position as an interrogator and by his speech: he offers Ianuarius the choice between sacrificing to the pagan gods or being punished). In many passiones the narrative component is developed so strongly that it eclipses the martyrdom itself. The Passio of Nicephorus (BHG –), for example, is, first and foremost, a story about friendship in which the actual martyrdom seems almost incidental; the Passio of Sergius and Bacchus (BHG ) too is predominantly about companionship and friendship; the Passio of Theodotus of Ancyra (BHG –) has been labelled ‘un récit . . . qui a parfois les allures d’une idylle ancienne, mais qui contient aussi les actes d’un martyr’ (Leclercq : viii); and the Passio of Salsa (BHL ; Fialon ) is not technically a martyrdom at all but rather a concatenation of adventures followed by the murder of the protagonist by an angry mob. Some martyr accounts purposefully reflect on the biographical protocols underlying lifewriting. The handling of chronology is one of these. In the Martyrdom of Maximian and Isaac (BHL ; Tilley : –), for example, the narrator is explicit that it is difficult to describe the triumphs of the saints ‘in their proper order’ (§). Life-writing, in other words, demands an awareness of and insight into chronology that is not easy for hagiographers to reconstruct. In the same paragraph, the same narrator wonders about which episodes in the lives of his protagonists he should take as starting and ending points: So where shall I begin? At what point shall I open the door of praise and where shall I close it when I leave? . . . If I begin by recalling the character of the entire life, I shall seem to slight the martyrdom when I come to it. If I . . . go directly to preaching the martyrdom, I shall be considered disdainful of so great a biography because I narrowed my topic. (trans. Tilley : )
22
Leclercq (: ).
23
Tilley (: ).
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This passage is heavily programmatic. First, it again thematizes the complexities raised by the treatment of a martyrdom as part of one’s life. The balance between the life and the martyrdom is a delicate one, and tipping it in one direction or another may inadvertently activate in the reader important assessments of both the text and authorial intent. At the same time, the passage is also explicit about the conceptualization of the story as an encomium and thus inscribes itself in a long biographical tradition historically connected with the genre of praise. But life-writing in martyr accounts involves more than thinking about chronology. Like other authors of ancient and late antique narrative, hagiographers adhere to well-established protocols theorized in ancient rhetorical theory, a discipline in which students throughout Late Antiquity received thorough training. It provides templates for the description of persons and organizes their semantic investment, their behaviour, and walks of life around sets of common places, the so-called loci a persona (literally ‘common places deriving from a/the person’).24 Ancient theory distinguishes between external and internal loci (a distinction that goes back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric). External loci comprise, among other things, occurrences at birth (e.g. dreams or signs), name, social descent (including that of parents, ancestors, or other relatives), city (or fatherland, or ethnic provenance), intellectual training and cultural education (paideia), and, finally, death (and the period/events following it). Internal loci, for their part, are subdivided (by some treatises at least) into physical qualities on the one hand (e.g. beauty, strength, stature, etc.) and psychic qualities on the other (both intellectual and moral, such as wisdom, temperance, courage, etc.). It is not difficult to recognize abundant use of many of these topoi throughout narrative literature, and martyr accounts are no exception.25 Of course, the focus on death episodes itself develops a topic that has traditionally been a standard topos of life-writing. In addition, martyr accounts usually describe the saint at his/her introduction with a few important biographical markers. The Passio of Iuliana (BHG ; PG : ) is typical: the introduction of the saint firmly pinpoints her according to the usual coordinates, such as her native city (Nicomedia), youth and beauty, noble origin, parents, character, chastity, and devotion to Christ. Topoi are also frequently rewritten in a specifically Christian key. It is well known, for example, that name-giving is used to reflect the Christian values for which the saint stands. The Passio of Panteleemon (BHG z; PG : –) makes this explicit: his original name is Pantaleon (‘all lion’) but changes in the course of the narrative to Panteleemon (‘wholly merciful’). Other biographical markers too are reshaped as to form religious identity. Paideia, for example, a traditional marker of intellectual and cultural competence, is often rejected in martyr accounts in favour of Christian, spiritual doctrine. Like other narrative genres, martyr accounts often use topoi from the rhetorical template to document events that for any hagiographer must have proven heuristically problematic—or, more often, impossible—to recount. In a genre which focuses so much on one’s death (and the public performance and observability of it), the topical episodes at the other end of one’s life, birth/origin, childhood, and youth, are perhaps the most notable examples for the simple reason that such episodes will almost always have been entirely undocumented. It is well known that in ancient biography, childhood episodes often result
24 25
See De Temmerman () for details and references to ancient rhetorical treatises. See Seeliger and Wischmeyer (: ) on martyr literature as part of rhetorical historiography.
from what Chris Pelling (a: –) eloquently identifies as ‘imaginative reconstruction’: biographers compensate for the lack of source material by retrojecting into the past observable characteristics or modes of behaviour associated with biographees during their adult lives. In martyr accounts too, this strategy is common. In the Passio of Saba the Goth (BHG ; Heather and Matthews : –), for example, we learn that from childhood onwards the saint sought nothing else but piety to Jesus, thinking this to be perfect virtue (§.). In some cases there also seems to be an attempt to rationalize or explain such idealizing depictions. The Passio of Theodosia (BHG y; Leclercq : –) explains why already during childhood she was free of all worldly concerns and that this disposition allowed her to practise virtue and reach spiritual perfection: after the early death of her father, we hear, her mother goes to live in a monastery with her and dedicates herself completely to the education of her child. In this instance, the ‘imaginative reconstruction’ underlying the childhood episode is validated through a development within the narrative itself.
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.................................................................................................................................. Especially in so-called epic martyr accounts, many narrative elaborations cluster around the themes of erotic love, desire, marriage, and the preservation of chastity. The Passio of Nereus and Achilleus (BHL ; Lapidge ), for example, does contain a martyrdom, to be sure, but its one overarching theme is ‘the need to preserve one’s virginity and to reject marriage and procreation’ (Lapidge : ). The Passio of Barbara (BHG –) too is a story about the saint’s seclusion, beauty, and rejection of marriage first and foremost, and develops into a Martyrdom only at a relatively late stage. Such stories are often coated in well-established, generic topoi. An example is the metaphrastic version of the Passio of Agatha, a virgin martyr in Catania under Decius (BHG ; PG : –). Immediately after the introduction of the saint, we read that Quintianus, the governor of Sicily, hears about her beauty, which makes him lust after her. He has her arrested under the pretext (προϕάσει δῆθεν) that she is a Christian but, the narrator is careful to add, in fact it is because of his erotic desire. As soon as he sees her, he falls in love with her. The episode capitalizes on an eroticization of topical material of martyr acts: the reason why in other passiones martyrs are arrested has here become nothing more than a pretext, an excuse for the governor’s erotic desire. The passage, in other words, takes a well-known topos of martyr accounts (the apprehension of the saint for his/her religious beliefs and practices) but makes it operational in a distinctly erotic context. That such an eroticization is a deliberate choice on the part of the narrator is suggested by the comparison of the passage with a version of this story included in the twelfthcentury imperial mēnologion of Koutloumous (BHG b; ed. Halkin and Festugière ). Here, the real motif of the governor for arresting the heroine remains ambiguous. Just as in the metaphrastic version, he hears reports about both the formidable beauty of the girl and the fact that she worships Christ, after which he has her appear before him. But unlike the metaphrastic version, the mēnologion version does not make explicit the governor’s motif. Here too he falls in love with her as soon as he sees her but the question remains as to why
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he has arrested her in the first place: because of erotic desire (as in the metaphrastic version) or because she is a Christian (as the genre of martyr accounts prescribes)? Some martyr stories develop extended sequences of eroticization. The Passio of Iuliana (BHG z; ed. Angelidi ) is a case in point. Iuliana is a so-called virgin martyr who is said to have died in Nicomedia (current-day Izmit, in Turkey) under Emperor Maximianus. The story starts not as a regular passio but as a story of love and marriage: Eleucius and Iuliana are introduced at the start as a betrothed couple, but she refuses to marry him until he converts to Christianity. The author of the passio goes out of his way to inscribe his account into the genre of martyr accounts. Iuliana’s father, who intervenes on Eleucius’ behalf, is clearly modelled on the figure of the persecuting governor in martyr acts: when he first hears from Eleucius about his daughter’s refusal to marry, he is outraged and says (to Eleucius) that he will feed her to wild animals if what he says is true. But after this initial reaction, his approach to his daughter becomes more calculated: he then uses kind words to persuade her. When, in response, she reiterates her condition (Eleucius should become a Christian), he repeats his initial threat to her directly, but she adamantly refuses. Both the rhetorical approach of the father and the adamant refusal of his daughter recall the dynamic between judges or governors on the one hand, and persecuted Christians on trial on the other: the persecutors, often characterized by anger, first use calculation and kind words in order to persuade them to renounce Christianity but subsequently resort to threats. But in this case, the dialogue is, of course, not one between a judge and a martyr about renouncing Christianity, but one between a father and a daughter about accepting marriage. Eleucius makes this explicit when he underlines that Iuliana’s torture has, in fact, nothing to do with religion but everything with marriage. He says that, if she agrees to marry, the torture will stop, and that, if she does not sacrifice to the gods, he will not force her. It is only when Iuliana’s father has her locked up and asks if she will worship the pagan gods, that Christian religion comes into the picture. It is tempting to read such systematic eroticization of a well-established story-pattern from martyr accounts as an attempt by the narrator to create recognizability. The stories of love, marriage, and chastity are coated in time-honoured story patterns so as to lend them validity and credibility. Of course, the Martyrdom of Iuliana is only one story in a broad tradition in late antique hagiography that develops female chastity and the refusal of sex even within legitimate marriage (see also Praet ). In some martyr acts, erotic constellations hark back first and foremost to the apocryphal acts of the apostles, notably those of Thomas and of Paul and Thecla (where erotic language is famously used to depict Thecla’s spiritual coup de foudre when she meets Paul; K. Cooper ; Perkins ).26 These two acts visibly build on erotic themes in their plot lines, which in their most basic forms are more or less identical: in both cases, a rich, pagan couple is married or about to be married; the woman is converted by a male Christian teacher, which causes her to break off the engagement or marriage; following the encratitic preaching of the apostle, she rejects pagan sexual morality; her husband or fiancé then tries to get his revenge in court, and the male Christian teacher is put to death. One of the oldest instances of this story-line is found in the Passio of Ptolemaeus and Lucius (probably dated either to the mid or second half of the second century), which is reported by Justin Martyr (who was executed around ) in his second 26
On the dates, see Bremmer (a: Chapter ).
Apology and quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea.27 Justin mentions an anonymous woman, who wants to divorce her licentious, pagan husband. The husband, it is recounted, rightly suspects that her moral objections result from her conversion to Christianity (and to a life of chastity) and therefore implicates the man who has converted her—Ptolemaeus, who confesses to being a Christian and is executed. Because of the prominence of the themes of erotic love and desire, female chastity, and (the protection of) virginity, martyr acts have also invited comparison with the one other ancient narrative genre that develops these themes to a comparable extent: the so-called ancient Greek love novel. With this (anachronistic) term, scholars denote a number of fictional prose narratives from the first few centuries of the Common Era.28 These novels are built around several of the stereotypical motifs that have a role to play in martyr accounts too—and in other hagiography, especially on women (see, among others, E.A. Clark : – and Bossu ; Staat takes stock of recent scholarship on the topic). In the Passion of Hadrian and Natalia (BHG ), for example, the female protagonist, once her husband has died, evades male attention and marriage proposals in a way reminiscent of Greek novel heroines (i.e. by using ruses, asking for postponement, and taking flight). The typical romance structure underlying the novels (meeting of lovers, separation and adventures, and, finally, reunion and homecoming) has also been identified in hagiography (Robins ) and may be discerned in martyr accounts in particular. The Passion of Indes and Domna (BHG z) is an example. In the first episode, the love between the central couple is introduced (although much of Domna’s love is about Christian charity rather than erotic desire; §§–); they travel and are separated (§§–); Indes dies as a martyr, after which his corpse is reunited with Domna, who returns home, finds his body and then joins him in death.
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.................................................................................................................................. Many of the texts mentioned or discussed in this chapter have been known to scholars for a long time. Yet, as a result of the specific intellectual and ideological premises that have dominated scholarship since the Counter-Reformation, most of them were neglected as serious objects of research for several centuries. This situation has now changed (albeit in some cases relatively recently) but we have attempted to show that these texts have to offer unexplored, rich material to scholars interested in narrative in general and life-writing in particular. They adopt, rework, and/or activate in their readers biographical storypatterns and protocols, and in some cases show awareness of the creativity involved in and required by this process. One area where this is particularly visible is where lives of martyrs are reconstructed around the themes of erotic love, desire, marriage, and the preservation of virginity (or chastity). Such accounts often capitalize on an (occasional or more extensive) eroticization of topical material of the genre of martyr acts in which they inscribe themselves. 27 28
Musurillo (: ), Praet (), and Maraval (: ). Whitmarsh () and Cueva and Byrne () are introductions to the ancient novel.
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F R Peter Brown (a) almost single handedly turned the negative reputation of the later Roman Empire and its culture into positive energy for the study of Late Antiquity but he uses Lives primarily to study the social function of saints and their cults (b; ). Averil Cameron (; ) has directed research towards discourse. Following both P. Brown () and Foucault (), other scholars have approached martyr accounts to study gender and sexuality (e.g. Burrus ; ; Cobb ). Foucault also inspired new approaches to the functions of martyr accounts (e.g. Perkins on their role in constructing Christian identities, and Castelli on collective memory and identity) and to their connections with other narrative traditions, such as the ancient novel and the apocryphal acts of the apostles (Perkins ; Hock, Chance, and Perkins ; Futre Pinheiro, Perkins, and Pervo ), and with material culture (Grig ). The most recent turn in scholarship is to produce regional studies and editions, such as Fialon () on North Africa and Fauquier () on Gaul. And, of course, scholars also continue to focus on individual texts or saints (e.g. Fialon, Meyers, and Piredda ) or different versions of individual hagiographical dossiers (e.g. Petitmen gin ; Calzolari ). For the Latin texts, a few attempts have been made to locate and date them (or, at least, the version thought to be original): Gryson and Frede () give approximate dates (by century or half century) for texts up to the ninth century. Most authors of the chapters in Philippart and Goullet ( ) also provide datings for the texts they discuss (e.g. Lanéry , on texts written in Italy between ). An online database (https://www.unamur.be/philo lettres/histoire/h.htm) with ap proximate dates for all the BHL numbers (more than , entries) is provided by Michel Trigalet and François De Vriendt. It uses as a terminus post quem a text internal criterion (i.e. the dramatic date of the martyrdom). Since the terminus ante quem is often very late (e.g. a manuscript from the twelfth or even fifteenth century), it does not always help the student of Late Antiquity. The dating of Greek martyr accounts is more problematic. Of course, individual studies and editions sometimes suggest or establish dates but for Greek hagiography in general there is, to the best of our knowledge, nothing comparable to either Gryson and Frede () or Trigalet and De Vriendt’s database. The two volumes of the Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography (Efthymiadis a; a) represent a huge step forward but offer little on the chronology of texts in the early Byzantine period. The Clavis and the BHG sometimes offer dates, but in many (if not most) cases the only available indication for dating anonymous Greek acta and passiones is the term ‘praemetaphrastica’, which means they predate the (often rewritten) versions in the famous mēnolo gion of Symeon Metaphrastes (c. c.).
A The research leading to these results has received funding, for KDT, from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/ )/ERC Starting Grant Agreement n . We thank Jan Bremmer for many enriching comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
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......................................................................................................................
B the monastic era, Christian literature had produced no work with the structure of the typical pagan bios. The Gospels of Mark and John dispense with any account of the human birth and education of Christ; the Gospels of Matthew and Luke recount both, but even in their narratives the death of Christ predominates to a degree unparalleled in the Lives of Greek or Roman figures. (On the gospels and biography, see Chapter in this volume.) The trial and execution of the protagonist are frequently the sole theme of a martyrology; acts of the apostles, whether canonical or uncanonical, are generally catenae of miracles interspersed with sermons, and may be deemed complete without any record of the hero’s birth or death. Even the outline of Origen’s life must be extracted from the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius (.–). This historian has left us an invaluable work which we know as the Life of Constantine (on which see Chapter in this volume); its original title, On the Life of Constantine, reveals that its purpose is not simply descriptive but honorific.1 As we shall see, the works commemorating the deeds of monks lack many features which are typical of the bios; if they nonetheless approximate more closely to the pagan model, the reason may be that—in contrast to the martyrs of old, the apostles, the prince of theologians, and the first Christian emperor—the ascetic of current or recent times was sufficiently like the reader to be taken as an exemplar. Indeed, it would appear that the Life of Antony and the works that it inspired were always intended to excite not only wonder but emulation. In the pagan world, philosophical biographies were written with similar motives; they were commonly prefaced with some account of the youth and education of the protagonist, though in the longest specimens—the ones most comparable to the works considered in this chapter—he is apt to owe more to his native powers of divination than to his human teachers. It is typical for his glory to be reflected in his satellites, who may also be the custodians of his memory: Porphyry’s celebration of Plotinus (see Chapter in this volume) and the panegyric on Origen attributed to Gregory Thaumaturgus (Crouzel ) are personal memoirs, neither of which is strictly described as a bios in its title, while Philostratus professes to have based his work In Honour of Apollonius of Tyana (see Chapter ) on the testimony of Damis. The absence of such claims in the Lives of
1
Cameron () compares this with the Life of Antony. On the importance of the preposition, see Edwards (b: ). Hägg (a: ) takes a different view.
Antony and Pachomius may add some weight to Reitzenstein’s comparison of the former to the treatise by Iamblichus On the Pythagorean Life. The parallels that he draws, however, are not uniformly cogent, and it is possible that the most striking of them reveal a shared debt to the Bible rather than direct imitation.2
T L A
.................................................................................................................................. It is generally agreed that the Life of Antony is a product of the fourth century. The Greek text of the Life of Antony (Bartelink ) ascribes it to Athanasius, patriarch of Alexandria and formidable champion of the Nicene Creed, which stated that God the Son is of one essence with the Father.3 In favour of this attribution, it can be said that, notwithstanding his illiteracy, Antony is depicted in the Life as an eloquent mouthpiece of the Nicene faith, unmoved by the sophistries of its opponents. Although it has been urged that Athanasius could not have had the personal knowledge of Antony to which the author of this work pretends, that is at best an argument against his veracity, not against his being the author. It has also been maintained that Athanasius, to judge by his dogmatic and expository writings, would not grant to demons the power of troubling the elect that is permitted to them in this Life; to this, however, it seems to be a sufficient reply that every genre has its own laws, and that Antony’s war in the desert may be seen as a continuation on earth of the struggle that Christ, according to Athanasius, waged on the Cross against wickedness in high places (Inc. –; Thomson ). Finally, it has been argued that the Greek is not the original form of the Life, and that the Syriac or Coptic versions exhibit more primitive features.4 This judgement is not shared by a majority of scholars, and at present we can say only that, if Athanasius’ claim to authorship has yet to be supported by a strong philological argument, there are no strong grounds on which it has been denied.5 Whoever wrote it, the work is one of the longer texts that goes under the title Life and Regimen (Βίος καὶ πολιτεία) of the Holy Antony. Its purpose is clearly to glorify its protagonist, and to hold him up as an ideal to Egyptian monks whose habitual role, from the middle of the fourth century onwards, was to act as a phalanx in defence of orthodoxy as this was defined by the Alexandrian see. Some modern historians have surmised that the eremitic life was an alternative to brigandage for Egyptians who had been ruined by high taxation; as though to forestall this calumny, the Life records that Antony was a young man of means who gave up his prodigal ways when he was suddenly touched by Christ’s command to the rich young ruler, ‘Sell what thou hast and give it to the poor’ (V. Ant. ; Matt :). Connoisseurs of classical tropes will remember that a number of Greek philosophers—Antisthenes, Polemo, and Plotinus, for example—were also converted
See Reitzenstein (); Edwards (b: ) on Iamb. VP and Exod : (cf. Cor. :); also on Cor. and John :. 3 Brakke (: ) suggests the Life redacts earlier traditions. On its theology, see Gregg and Groh (: ). 4 5 Draguet (); Barnes (). Brakke (); Rousseau (: ). 2
abruptly and by a chance word.6 The austerities that follow, however, bear no resemblance to the disciplines of any Greek school. The humble novice spends some years at the feet of aged hermits who have retired to the desert before him (); at length, he feels called to adopt a more stringent regimen, living on frugal measures of the coarsest food and passing whole nights without sleep (). He has to weather not only the charge of fanaticism but the assaults of the devil, who whispers to him of the pleasures of home, appeals to his sexual instinct by assuming the form of a beautiful woman, and tries his courage by taking on the shape of one ravening predator after another (). On one occasion he is so badly bruised that onlookers take him for a corpse (); on another, a crowd of spectators is drawn to his cell by the din of battle, and they rout his demonic assailants by making the sign of the Cross (). The devil throws gold and silver before him in vain (), and reptiles flee at his approach (). After twenty years of meditation in solitude (), he emerges to preach a sermon to the host of imitators who have gathered around his refuge. He exhorts them to remember that the goods of this world are as nothing compared with the joys of the next (), to go on ‘dying daily’ with the apostle Paul (; Rom :), and not to expose themselves to Christ’s malediction on those who turn back from the plough (). No demon, however terrible in aspect, can withstand the true servant of Christ (–); their pretence of foretelling the future is illusory (–), and all their overtures will come to nothing if we practise the patience of Job (). Antony continues to grow in virtue, zeal, and discernment (). When persecution falls upon the Alexandrian church, he ministers openly to the confessors in prison, but the magistrates are too afraid of him to satisfy his desire for martyrdom (). He retires to the upper Thebaid, where he cultivates his own garden of crops and herbs and receives the homage of the local Saracens (). His deeds begin to bear a closer resemblance to those of Christ: he brings forth water miraculously for a crowd that is ready to die of thirst (), goes up a mountain to meditate (), and then preaches to a multitude, heals a lunatic () and a paralysed woman (), relieves a sick girl at distance (), and delivers two youths from possession (; ). The likeness is never exact, but those who have characterized this work as an ‘anti-Pythagorean’ narrative are closer to the truth than those for whom Antony is little more than a Christian simulacrum of the Greek sage.7 If, for example, the illumination of Antony’s countenance at – reminds some critics of a similar episode in Iamblichus (VP –; Deubner ), why should we not infer that the pagan author is indebted to the stories told of Moses and Elijah in texts which antedate his own sources?8 This is not to say that the Life of Antony owes nothing to pagan models, but that it stands in a competitive rather than a parasitic relation to them. Pythagoras, for example, might perform miracles of clairvoyance, but he never anticipated Antony’s vision of departing souls (), his awareness of another monk’s death at a distance of some days’ journey (), or the ecstatic rapture which threw the saint’s companions into temporary dismay. Moreover, Antony does not use his authority to found his own sect but testifies on behalf of the church against the Melitians who had set up their own bishop in Alexandria (), against the Arians who deny the Trinity (), and against the Greeks who substitute voiceless effigies for the living
6 7 8
Hier. Iov. ..; D.L. ..; Porph. Plot. . So Rubenson (: ) against Reitzenstein (). Barnes (: ); Edwards (b: ).
image of the unseen God (–). This appeal from idol to image is very much in the style of Athanasius, who strove with vigour against the same three enemies. The Christlike Antony seldom acts as judge or intervenes in public affairs, though he sets an example to all by prayer and discipline. His death, at the age of (), is preceded by a meek farewell to his brethren and an injunction to bury his corpse without the extravagances of a pagan funeral ().
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.................................................................................................................................. Although the Life of Antony is the first of its kind, it did not set the universal pattern for others because the cenobitic, or communal, form of asceticism became more prevalent in the Christian world and therefore in hagiography. Even John Cassian’s preference for the eremitic way in his Conferences is theoretical, as it must be in a work consisting largely of discourses by various masters to a community of novices, perhaps in emulation of Xenophon’s Memorabilia. Jerome, during his years as a hermit, composed a brief Life of Paul, the putative predecessor of Antony, to which he later added the Lives of Antony’s followers Malchus and Hilarion;9 all choose the desert, knowing that they will fall prey to fiends and robbers, and all enjoy an immunity that belongs only to figures of legend. Martin of Tours routs demons and defies emperors, according to Sulpicius Severus, yet he is no monk but a bishop, and in serving his first apprenticeship to abstinence as a soldier, he bears a stronger resemblance to Pachomius, the founder of the cenobitic life. As we shall see, the ancient Lives of Pachomius concede the historical precedence of Antony, but only to add authority to his confession that the younger saint has chosen the better way. The first Life of Pachomius was written in Sahidic, his own dialect of Coptic.10 Fragments of ten versions survive, but the only complete representative of this text is an Arabic translation.11 The longest of the narratives now extant is in Bohairic, another dialect of Coptic, and owes its length to an appendix which describes the government of two Pachomian institutions after the founder’s death by his pupils, Theodore and Horsiesius.12 Much of the same matter, with a severe curtailing of the appendix, is contained in the version known as the First Greek Life.13 Discrepancies between this and the Bohairic Life (discussed in detail in Chapter in this volume) have persuaded the majority of scholars that neither text is a mere derivative of the other; the language of the original on which both depended has still to be determined.14 The Second Greek Life, the most widely known in the Middle Ages, is now of least interest to scholars of Antiquity,15 as it combines the content of the First Greek Life with a collection of anecdotes, known as the Paralipomena, which also survives in earlier recensions.
9 10 12 14 15
PL , , . See Chapter in this volume on these three biographical writings by Jerome. 11 Veilleux (: ). Ibid.: . 13 Ibid.: , hereafter cited as B. Ibid.: , hereafter cited as G. Ibid.: . See further Rousseau (: ); Goehring (: ). Veilleux (: ).
Neither the Bohairic nor the Greek can be trusted as a faithful chronicle of events: so much is apparent, for example, from their accounts of the military service for which Pachomius was conscripted in his youth. The Bohairic text asserts that the war was provoked by a Persian invasion of Roman territory in the reign of Constantine (B), but no such invasion occurred, and it is impossible that Pachomius was forced into the army at any date after . The Greek, more circumspectly, speaks of a muster of troops by Constantine against an unnamed tyrant (G), but even this implies a flagrant anachronism.16 Again it would seem that Pachomius must have died in on the grounds that no other year (except perhaps or ) would be consistent with the testimony of both the Bohairic and the First Greek Lives that the day on which he expired, the fourteenth of Pasons or ninth of May, fell forty days after the Passover during which he succumbed to illness (B; G). At the same time the statement in the Bohairic Life that he was years old is admitted to be incompatible with other ‘chronological indications’ in these narratives.17 It ought by now to be evident that we cannot discuss Pachomius as a historical figure, but only as a character in these texts. It can fairly be said that he exhibits more Pythagorean traits than Antony. In forming his own community, he imposes a term of silence on his neophytes (B and B), and sets an example of strict vegetarianism, to be followed by all except when he himself perceives the necessity of a concession to bodily weakness (B). His miracles, such as they are, seldom entail the suspension or reversal of natural laws, but are more commonly feats of clairvoyance which enable him to ascertain the fitness of postulants for the monastic life (B–). His reverence for the characters of the alphabet, attested in the Greek Life and in his own letters, may be compared to the high estimation of the properties of numbers which distinguished the Pythagoreans at all times, and Iamblichus in particular. He himself, like the Samothracian, was an oracle to his pupils, and only the less proficient were offended by his lapidary judgements. While ‘brotherhood’ and ‘friendship’ are not such watchwords in the monastic life as in the Pythagorean communities, two of the most eminent successors of Pachomius, Theodore and Horsiesius, are so much at one in temper and vocation that the death of Theodore cements the union of their souls (B, B; G). As in the Life of Antony, it is obvious that the author has the gospels at his elbow. The ability to recognize and cast out a demon, which set Christ apart from sorcerers and sages of his time, is also credited to Pachomius, though in his case it is sparingly employed. As in the Gospel of Mark (:), the father of a demoniac is the petitioner (B: G); as in the stories of miraculous feeding,18 the miracle is effected with a loaf supplied by one of those who are present. From another man, according to the Bohairic Life, he cast out demonic host which gave its name as ‘Hundred’ (B), thus proving a little less formidable than the legion that had been expelled by his Master (Mark :). In imitation of the latter’s humility, he stooped to wash the feet of a disciple (B). As Christ had promised the faithful that they would tread the snake and the scorpion underfoot (Luke :), Pachomius was able to ignore the sting of the scorpion and remained unmoved when two snakes wound
16 Ibid.: , suggests that Pachomius was enlisted by the ‘tyrant’ Maximinus Daia for his campaign against Licinius in . 17 18 Ibid.: . Matt and parallels; John :.
themselves around his ankles as he prayed (B; G).19 On another occasion the illumination of the abbot’s face invites comparison with Christ’s transfiguration (B), with the descent of Moses from Sinai which prefigured it, and with the return of Pythagoras from Carmel, as this is recounted by Iamblichus. In the closest approximation to a biblical narrative, a woman with an issue of blood is healed when she seizes the garment of Pachomius before he can forestall her (B; G). The capacity to heal by inadvertence had been communicated to Peter by Christ, and it would seem that the woman who touched the hem of Christ’s robe had acquired a peculiar celebrity in the fourth century, when she came to be identified with the legendary woman who had wiped the face of Christ on the road to Calvary.20 In the Bohairic Life, the gospels also furnish precedent for anecdotes concerning the disciples of Pachomius, though there is no direct imitation of the Saviour. Thus, Zacchaeus, an emissary from Pachomius to Antony, is said to have been a short man like his namesake at Luke : (B); and, whereas in the Gospel of John, Nathanael is amazed to learn that Jesus saw him sitting under a fig tree when he was too far away to be visible (John :–), in the Bohairic Life it is Theodore who is praying under the fig tree and Pachomius who is the object of his vision (B). We must not be too quick to lay the invention of such stories at the door of the biographer, since it is possible that the monks had shaped their lives, or allowed their perception of life to be shaped, by their remembrance of the gospels, since these were texts that all of them were required to have learned by heart. Neither of these Lives can tolerate an unresolved feud between Pachomius and Antony, who had passed into the record as another unshakable ally of Athanasius. In the Bohairic Life, however, Pachomius contrasts the anchoritic, or solitary path to its disadvantage with the cenobitic, or communal, practice of his own disciples (B). In both the Bohairic and the Greek Lives, the hero refuses an expensive blanket when he is suffering from an illness that threatens to be terminal (B; G). We cannot be sure that Antony’s testimonials in both Lives to the sanctity of Pachomius are fictitious (B; G), though we may confidently suspect the Bohairic text of some embellishment when it puts into Antony’s mouth the confession that he too would have embraced the cenobitic regimen had it existed when he first retreated to the desert (). Of these biographies, as of most biographies in Antiquity, we can say that they tell us not so much what their protagonists did as what deeds were attributed to them, and what these deeds had come to signify.
T M S
.................................................................................................................................. In Antony’s wake whole cities of renunciants (to borrow a near-contemporary metaphor) grew up in the deserts of Syria and Egypt. Forsaking all domestic ties and leaving no trace of themselves in any civic roll of honour, they were scarcely fit subjects for biography. What remained of them was a rumour of marvellous deeds and pithy sayings, known by hearsay alone until some amanuensis cast them into a form conducive to public edification. The 19 20
Cf. Acts : : and B, where a scorpion dies after stinging one of the brethren. See Mark :; Acts :.
Sayings of the Fathers (Apophthegmata Patrum) survive with much variation in Greek and Coptic redactions; in these, as in a related work, the Institutes of John Cassian, the sayings are grouped according to the virtues that they illustrate, and furnished with only so much narrative commentary as is necessary to render them comprehensible to a new audience.21 Pagan florilegia of this kind had been produced by Valerius Maximus and by Plutarch in his compilation of Spartan aphorisms. In another work by Cassian, the Conferences, the sayings of particular abbots are collected into separate books, but even here their precepts are only thinly interspersed with narrative. Maxim gives way to miracle in the Lausiac History, written about by Palladius, which is extant in longer and shorter Greek redactions, in Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and Latin renderings, and with much contamination and alteration in a history of the monks which has been confidently attributed to Rufinus.22 In all these versions each new chapter, however short, introduces a new protagonist: sometimes two or three anecdotes may cluster round a single name, but no interest in the representation of a personality is apparent. If we are looking for historical data and the ēthopoiia that characterize other ancient biographies, we must turn to the Religious History of the Monks of Syria, composed about two decades after Palladius by Theodoret of Cyrrhus (ed. Canivet and Leroy-Molinghen –). The titles Lausiac History and Religious History are not conventional. In Greek and Latin usage the word historia generally denotes an investigation of wide scope: if it describes a narrative, the subject is most likely to be a great event involving many nations or the transactions performed by the statesmen of one nation over a period of years. Only in the True History of Lucian and the equally fabulous History of Apollonius, King of Tyre do the fortunes of one man claim the attention of the reader. At the end of the fifth century, Damascius gave the title Philosophical History to his collective memoir of the Athenian Neoplatonists (see Chapter in this volume), but this is no proof that Palladius and Theodoret, writing almost a century earlier, were availing themselves of a current nomenclature. Both took for their subject not a person or a school but a human type that was new to the world; both knew Greek too well to use the term bios, which, even in such comparable works as the Lives of the Sophists by Philostratus or the Lives of Philosophers and Sophists by Eunapius, commonly signifies a dispassionate record, commencing with the birth of the hero and ending with his death (see Chapter in this volume). The biblical title praxeis (‘acts’, as in acts of the apostles) might have served well enough for Theodoret; whatever he claimed on behalf of his saints, however, this pious author was not challenging comparison with Luke. Theodoret’s aim, as he tells us in his epilogue, is to set before the reader a variety of examples, so that each may choose his own. Sometimes, as in his chapter on Maron (), he has nothing more to offer than a brief and generic eulogy; even the fuller accounts are not linear narratives but anthologies of superhuman deeds which prove the monk a faithful imitator of Christ, a worthy companion of the prophets, and a nonpareil to every pagan holy man, real or imagined. We meet Julian of Saba for the first time in the wilderness, where, in contrast to his solitary precursor John the Baptist, he sets up a ‘wrestling-school’ for his fellow-ascetics (.). At Maccabees :–, the wrestling school is a Greek 21
See further Rubenson ().
22
See Butler (: ).
abomination; the chief exercise of Julian and his acolytes, however, is to intone the psalms of David with inextinguishable fervour (.). On one occasion, he withdraws, like Moses, to engage in lone communion with God, and returns to find that a new cell has been built for him, surpassing his own conception (.); like Moses again, he creates a miraculous spring to slake the thirst of a youth who has trusted too much in his own powers of abstention (.). Not Moses but Pythagoras was reputed to have killed a snake with his teeth (Iamb. VP ); the Christian sage destroys this representative of the old enemy without stirring a limb (.). An admirer of Pythagoras had witnessed the death of Domitian from afar (Philostr. VA .); in the vision of James, the victim is a more infamous persecutor, Julian the Apostate (.). The scholar Aphrahat—born for the wilderness, notwithstanding the worldliness of his impious parents—practises all the austerities that were enjoined on the first evangelists, wearing no tunic, refusing all succour, tolerating only one companion (.). Speaking in parables like his Master, he warns the reprobate Valens (a second Julian) that a Christian is bound to rebuke the vices of his sovereign as he is bound to put out a fire in his neighbour’s house (.). A satellite of the emperor who molests him is slain by God without mercy (.); as such vindictive accidents are commoner than we might wish them to be, we should also note that when a woman ignored her son’s death in order to go on serving Julian of Saba, he rewarded her by bringing the child to life (.). Of all these wrestlers in body and spirit, none compares with Symeon Stylites, who was still alive when Theodoret wrote his history. From his earliest youth, we hear, Symeon’s austerities inspired the awe of his colleagues and won him the homage of the multitude (.–). The sick and the crippled were brought to him in legions (.), so that, after his healing of a paralytic (.), his encomiast feels obliged to acquit him of blasphemy by citing Christ’s own promise that those who come after him will perform greater works than his. In a striking, though unsignalled, allusion to the crowning miracle of the gospel, he invites a man who doubts whether he is a being of flesh and blood to feel the lesions on his body (.). From the summit of his pillar he can sway crowds and admonish princes; for all that the proper relations between the holy man and his anointed shepherds is illustrated by his willing obedience to Meletius, the chorepiscopus or spiritual administrator of Antioch (.). Here, as when the suspect theologian Diodore of Tarsus is named as an ally of Aphrahat (.), ecclesiastical claims to honour are underwritten by the authority of the holy man.23
T D G G
.................................................................................................................................. Both types of monastic biography are exemplified in the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, who earned this sobriquet after being raised to the papal throne from a Benedictine monastery in .24 The Dialogues are purportedly the transcript of a conversation between the author and Peter, a fellow-ecclesiastic, who opines that recent times, at least in Italy, have not produced men of God who can be compared with the apostles and martyrs of the 23 24
On the charismatic authority of the ascetic, see P. Brown (a). On date and historicity, see Meyvaert (). Edition: Pricoco and Simonetti ().
primitive church. The choice of form may have been an innovation, unattested as it is in extant specimens of biography, except for the oldest of all, the Life of Euripides by Satyrus,25 of which Gregory will have known even less than we do. In undertaking to show that Peter has judged his times too harshly, the Pope hints that his aim is to furnish the church with models of holiness as the ancient Romans furnished their readers with models of probity in peace and war. If he has Nepos in mind here, he will also have been acquainted with Sallust’s warning that inward virtue is the one prize that cannot be snatched from us by the treachery of fortune (Cat. ; Jug. ; Rolfe ). Gregory combines both precedents, choosing as his subjects the most independent statesmen that the church could boast in an age of Gothic hegemony and presenting them as exemplars of humility, which always held the first place among the virtues for this self-professed ‘servant of the servants of God’. The twelve anecdotal Lives that make up the first book of the Dialogues range in length from a single chapter to twenty-one chapters, and are divided first according to geography, then chronologically within each locality. In keeping with his Augustinian maxim that we can merit only what God has elected to grant us (Dial. ..), Gregory shows a preference for miracles which are prefigured by those of Christ or his predecessors in the Old Testament. Honoratus of Fundi begins his career as a thaumaturge by catching a fish in waters hitherto supposed to be barren (..–; cf. John :). His successor Libertinus raises a girl from the dead with the aid of a shoe inherited from Honoratus (..–); Gregory explains that he was exhibiting the same deference to his master that Elisha (who also raised a dead child) exhibited to Elijah when he made use of his predecessor’s mantle (..). Honoratus, who had no master, is likened to John the Baptist and Moses, with the admonition that neither can be a pattern for the ordinary novice (..). When Equitius of Valeria heals a woman at a distance, we are reminded that Christ performed a similar miracle in the Gospel of John (..–). On another occasion, a messenger sent to Equitius finds him as humble as Christ and as formidable as Elijah (..–); it was equally true of Constantius of Ancona, though he could transform water into oil (..) that no-one who looked only on his outward person was conscious of his stature (..). Nonnosus of Soracte, having imitated the miracles of two previous saints in a single act, goes on to create a surplus from a few drops of oil in the manner of Elisha (..). Boniface of Ferentum, having produced a miraculous quantity of wine, enjoins his acolyte not to reveal it to anyone (..–). Peter’s interjection prompts a commentary on Christ’s unsuccessful attempts to conceal his mighty works: knowing, says Gregory, that they could not be hidden, he was teaching the elect that it was their duty to perform miracles in secret and permit God to make them known (..–). Fortunatus of Todi reluctantly brings back a man from the dead, who, in contrast to Lazarus, complains that he has been cheated of the afterlife (..–); this infelicitous act is redeemed by the presbyter Severus, who restores a soul to its body when it was on the road to hell (..). It is common in Christian hagiography—commoner than in its pagan antecedents—for a critic or adversary of the hero to set a cautionary example. Those who mock the fishing of Honoratus are merely put to shame (..), but the churl whose untimely intrusion at his death bed angers Boniface is killed by a falling stone (..). The Goths who rob Libertinus of his horse find that their own mounts will not obey them until they return it (..–); a 25
See Burridge (: ) and Chapter in this volume.
Goth who has insulted Fortunatus quickly returns to him craving a miracle after he suffers a terrible injury (..–). When a demon goes about pretending to be a pilgrim expelled without cause by Fortunatus, the man who befriends him forfeits the life of his son (..). In contrast to panegyrists of other saints, for whom death is the just desert of every antagonist, Gregory feels bound to assure his puzzled interlocutor that the father had been moved not so much by pity for the impostor as by enmity to the abbot (..). When Boniface gives alms to mendicants from his nephew’s private chest, he restores the coins by a miracle but tells his indignant nephew that a miser cannot hope to become an abbot (..–). Direct confrontation with a demon is rare in this first book, though Equitius exorcises one and Boniface a legion, both from the bodies of girls who have sinned. One saint, Felix of Fundi, takes a broad view of the divine economy, enlisting a serpent to intercept a thief who has repeatedly stolen the produce of his garden (..–). Thus, the first deceiver, now a type of Christ, secures this second paradise against a new interloper; the felon, having stumbled in his attempt to flee, is found dangling from his feet but allowed to survive. Having admonished Peter that a saint’s life is judged by his virtue, not his miracles (..), Gregory devotes his second book to the life of Benedict, the founder of his order. This is a narrative in the classical manner, commencing with the infancy of the protagonist and ending with his death. In contrast to the usual practice of pagan authors, and his own practice in the first book, Gregory names the four witnesses to whom he owes the bulk of his information (: Prol. ). This reliance on men who knew Benedict only as an adult entails that nothing can be said of Benedict’s origins except that he was the child of a noble family, who, like Antony, spurned his studies and sought God in solitude from an early age (Prol. ). This sojourn in the wilderness leads to the first of many encounters with the devil, though in this case it is not Benedict himself who is molested but the monk who feeds him in secret (..). The opening verses of the Gospel of Mark are equally reticent; more erudite readers may have been aware that Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, also spoke of his childhood with extreme reserve (Porph. Plot. ). When Benedict emerges from the wilderness, he is dressed in pelts, like the saints of old (..; cf. Hebrews :); as in Gregory’s first book, however, the more astute spectators soon perceive the nobility of the man within. Benedict’s first recorded miracle is the detection of poison in a chalice, which he causes to burst by making the sign of the Cross (..). Soon after this he retrieves an axe from a river like Elijah and causes water to flow from a rock like Moses (., ., ..). The observation that Benedict, when administering his first monastery, was apt to lose sight of himself in his solicitude for his flock prompts an excursus on ‘going out of oneself ’ (..), which reminds us once again of the life of Plotinus. When Benedict forsakes his recalcitrant brethren in order to bring new life to others (..), we recall that Christ too severed himself from his kin to take up a ministry which included the literal raising of the dead. Benedict comes closest to reproducing one of Christ’s miracles when he causes a fellowmonk to walk on water (..–). On the other hand, he frequently exhibits a gift of prophecy which, as Gregory explains to Peter, was intermittently bestowed upon him by the Spirit who ‘blows where he wills’ (..; cf. John :). He penetrates the disguise of a man who impersonates the Gothic king Totila, and when the king himself appears, he correctly predicts that Rome will be vanquished not by the Goths but by the elements (.–). Like Moses and Ezekiel, he conceives in his mind the plan of a sacred edifice and
knows when it has not been executed (..). When he anticipates another attempt to poison him, he treats the culprit with forbearance (..). He is not deceived when monks have taken food outside the monastery (.) or received unauthorized gifts from religious women (.). When the devil kindles an illusory fire, Benedict’s words suffice to dispel the terror of the brethren (.); two other monks are liberated from demonic possession, though one falls prey to his tormentors again when he breaks the saint’s embargo on assuming priestly office (..; .). The steadfast adherence to God which enables him to perform these exorcisms gives him the power to cure a leper (.), to release a man from his bonds with a look (..), to furnish a bankrupt with the means of paying his debt (..) and to resuscitate a dead youth (..). Religious women who died without the eucharist on account of their sins are posthumously readmitted to communion (.); on another occasion he places the consecrated host on the breast of a corpse and brings it back to life (..). One woman proves a match for the saint, miraculously detaining him overnight despite his intention of returning to the monastery (..–); he subsequently displays his high regard for her by arranging for her burial in his monastery (..). There appears to be little order in the recital of these miracles, except that the majority of those which prove his authority over matter follow those which illustrate his prophetic discernment. They culminate in a vision of a bishop’s ascent to heaven (..) and a presentiment of his own death (..). One of his last acts is to compose his rule of monastic life (.). How faithful to his own Rule is the life of Benedict? He emerges as a saint from the wilderness to become an abbot, whereas the prologue to the Rule implies that the only pious hermits are those who have undergone monastic discipline (Chapter ). Moreover, the Rule assumes that to wield authority, one must first be a good disciple, whereas Benedict, like Honoratus, had no need of a human master. For all that, his biographer agrees with the Rule in inculcating absolute obedience to the abbot (cf. Rule ); he certainly thought it the duty of every monk to climb the twelve rungs of the ladder of humility described in Chapter of the Rule; and when he defends his hero for resigning the charge of a factious order, he echoes Benedict’s warning that it is those who despise admonition who will be judged, not the teacher whom they have driven away (Rule ). If Benedict himself is not in all respects a representative cenobite, the reason is that the Spirit who ‘blows where he wills’ has raised him up, not to be a follower, but to found a new paradigm of brotherhood.
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.................................................................................................................................. Nothing need be said here of the third and fourth books, in which Gregory falls back into the episodic manner of the first. Credulous as they are, and devoid of narrative structure even in the book dedicated to Benedict, the Dialogues are rich in topical colour, the want of which is therefore all the more keenly felt in the works of his admirers. These included the Venerable Bede, whose account of the founding of the abbeys of Wearmouth and Jarrow is a compact and orderly narrative, the work of a better historian than Gregory; it is only at the gates of death, however, that its characters acquire any traits of life. Sermonizing or intoning psalms, they glide impassively into beatitude, leaving behind them nothing worthy of remembrance but their formulaic virtues and the decorated edifices which verify
Gregory’s famous saying that images are the books of the unlearned (Lives of the Abbots , ed. Plummer ). Bede hopes to give some vigour to his own work by applying to his protagonist Benedict Biscop the words that Gregory had written in praise of Benedict, and by reproducing an unctuous letter written by an English abbot to Gregory at the time of his installation (). It appears, however, that he has no anecdotes to hand which would enable him to turn Benedict Biscop or his colleague Sigfrid into turbulent, masterful athletes of the spirit like the ones whom we meet in Gregory’s Dialogues. The characters in this narrative are more real than those in any other work that we have examined here, in the sense they are figures of history unalloyed by legend. In another sense, they are less real to the reader because we are told no more of them than Bede himself could learn from the documentary record. We have seen that, while the authors of monastic Lives may be conscious of their pagan antecedents, the works that they produce are not mere copies of the philosophic biography but manifestoes for a new philosophy. In the Life of Antony, the miraculous is not played down, any more than it was played down in Pythagorean literature, but the soul of the narrative is the ascetic way, as this is exemplified in the practice and interpreted in the speech of the principal agents. The eremite is reconciled to the cenobitic norm in the Lives of Pachomius, which give more credit than the Life of Antony to the instructors of the adolescent hero, and more prominence to those who founded monasteries beside him or in his wake. As the number of monks proliferated, the extended life gave way to compilations like Theodoret’s History of the Monks of Syria, in which each saint is represented by a handful of anecdotes and a skeletal biography. The Dialogues of Gregory the Great consist for the most part of similar vignettes, except in the second book, which is given over entirely to Benedict. The protagonist is first of all a lone recluse, then an abbot, uniting the noblest traits of the Desert Fathers and his Italian predecessors; his virtues, however, are often demonstrated at the expense of his own subordinates and rivals, who fall at times below even the worldliest standards of good conduct. It is possible that latter-day monks had fallen prey to corruptions unknown in the times of Pachomius and Antony; or it may be that hagiography was now too hackneyed a form to retain its audience if it failed to depict human nature in all its colours. The literature of Christendom would certainly be impoverished if such works had been lost and Bede’s austere Lives of the Abbots were a more typical remnant of the monastic age.
F R The question of monastic education (which necessarily shaped the content and purpose of biogra phies) is addressed with learning and perspicacity in two recent volumes: Larsen () and Dilley (). Peter Brown’s approach to the holy man as a vessel of power has been extended by some scholars and challenged by others: see, for example, Campiano and Filoramo (). Readers who wish to compare accounts of monastic life with pagan hagiography will find much to ponder in Urbano (). Finn () is written with the insight of a Dominican, but does full justice to the antecedents of Christian monasticism. J. Taylor () not only examines a model for Christian practice which was first cited by Eusebius, but exemplifies the traditional art of exhorting one’s contemporaries through the lives of ancient saints.
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B is a Greek word and concept for which there is no Syriac equivalent. A more generic word is used, tashʿitha (‘narrative’), for texts that we would label hagiography, apocrypha, and history as well as biography. Yet authors wrote Lives in Syriac as in any other Christian tradition and were aware of the specific features of the genre. We have to assess, then, if that makes a difference in the way of understanding and construing biographical literature, that is, if there is a Syriac specificity in writing Lives compared to other Christian literature. Syriac, moreover, is a language in which biographies and hagiographies were both translated and composed, and biographies circulated widely from one language to another, crossing cultural and ecclesiastical boundaries. Greek biographies were translated into Syriac and Syriac ones into Greek, Armenian, Arabic, and Ethiopic. Beyond translations, the issue is one of adaptation and reception of these texts in different cultural and religious milieus. Syriac biography cannot be seen in isolation from other ancient (both Christian and non-Christian) literatures. We can understand it better if we have in mind the background of ancient Greek rhetoric, biography, novel and encomia, Christian Greek hagiography, Persian epic, and Muslim biographical dictionaries. In this field as in many others, Syriac is at the crossroads of many traditions and acculturated many influences while creating its own literature. Life-writing is an exceptionally rich field of Syriac literature, attested in an extraordinarily broad geographical scope, well beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire. Since Syriac literature is Christian, biographies are largely centred on holy figures: male and female biblical figures, saints, ascetics, and clerics. Biography thus almost completely overlaps with hagiography (see Chapter in this volume on such overlaps in Latin and Greek contexts). Since individuals were at the core of the christianization of the East, whether they were missionaries, converts, lay people, or ecclesiastics, their Lives were written in all the regions where Syriac was used as the literary and religious language of the Aramaic-speaking populations: in the oriental provinces of the Roman Empire, prominently in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Palestine as well as in the Sasanian Empire—especially in the western Aramaic-speaking provinces—where Christianity had rapidly spread. Central and East Asia as well as Southern Arabia were also pervaded by the influence of Syriac liturgy and literature, and biographies were also written there in Syriac. The chronology of biographical production encompasses the history of Syriac Christianity and extends
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over roughly a millennium, from the fourth century, when Christianity was well established, to the fourteenth century when Arabic almost entirely supplanted Syriac as a literary language. Christians created their own memory—and mythology—through biographies, turning exemplary figures into literary models (Cameron ). The authors who wrote in Syriac were preoccupied not only with the universal Christian heroes such as Saint George (whose Life was translated from Greek into Syriac and from Syriac into Sogdian) or with local figures such as Bar Shabba, the first bishop of Merv (Brock ; b). They strove to build the history of their nascent churches through the celebration of their own heroes, local ones as well as defenders of the right dogma. Syriac-speaking Christians became divided in the course of the christological discussions of the fourth and fifth centuries. After the Council of Ephesus in , where the bishop of Constantinople, Nestorius, was condemned, Dyophysites who fled to the Persian Empire, found support in the local ecclesiastical hierarchy, which for political and geographical reasons had developed independently from the church in the Roman Empire and became known as the Church of the East (hereafter E)—misleadingly known as the ‘Nestorian’ Church, as their adversaries put it. After the Council of Chalcedon in , some Christians in the eastern part of the Roman Empire (hereafter W for West Syriac) decided to follow its decision, whereas others kept to Miaphysite views and eventually became known as the Syrian-Orthodox (deemed Jacobites by their opponents). Hagiography, though texts circulated from one tradition to another, was affected by these doctrinal positions, with each church creating its own saints and memory, only partly shared with the others. Literary and narrative devices are at play in the encomiastic dimension of ancient biography and hagiography. In Syriac, the word tashʿitha does not imply any distinction between truth and fiction. We do not know to what extent tales of miracles were intended to be believed (Dagron ), but they pervaded all Christian and even late pagan literature. The modern distinction between facts and fiction is thus not applicable and we should address fictionalization as such, especially since we cannot be certain that all the characters actually existed. No serious attempt has been made so far to try and understand fictionalization in these literary compositions, or to use narratology as a tool for literary analysis.
H
.................................................................................................................................. The education that Syriac authors received was rooted in the scriptures and Greek paideia. Their writings were thus influenced by the Bible, on the one hand, and Greek literature, both classical and Christian, on the other. Just as in the Graeco-Roman tradition (see Chapter in this volume), the Bible was momentous in providing models for the acts of the martyrs. The stories of the three Hebrews in the fiery furnace (Dan ), of Daniel in the lion’s den (Dan ), and of Bel and the dragon (Dan ) were major references (Detoraki : ). The fourth book of Maccabees from the Septuagint is another important influence. It tells of the martyrdom of Eleazar for defying King Antiochus, who wanted to force the Jews to eat pork or meat from pagan sacrifices ( Macc –). Even more prominent is the story of the seven brothers who were executed in the same circumstances,
and of their mother, who threw herself on their funeral pyre after having supported them throughout their ordeal ( Macc –). This story became immensely popular in Christian and especially in Syriac literature where it circulated independently from the Bible in manuscripts of saints’ histories (Witakowski ; K.R. Smith ; Brock b). This long narrative prefigured the heroic passions of the martyrs of the Christian faith. The ultimate model is the passion of Jesus Christ himself, which gives meaning to the suffering of the Christian martyrs (Detoraki : ). The acts of the apostles is another key model: Stephen’s martyrdom, the miraculous escapes of Peter, Paul, and Silas, and the trials and arrests of Peter and Paul, to cite only a few episodes, were sources for Syriac hagiography. The apocryphal acts of the apostles, many of which predate the fourth century, were translated from Greek into Syriac, such as the Martyrdom (ܣܗܕܘܬܐ, sahduta) of Peter (BHG –; CANT .IV), the Acts of Pilatus (the Syriac title Hypomnemata Ananiou is transliterated from Greek; CANT .), and the Acts of Matthias and Andreas among the Anthropophagi (BHG –d; BHO ; CANT ). The Syriac History of Philip in the City of Carthage (BHO ), however, is different from the Greek Acts of Philip (Ruani and Villey ). The Acts of Thomas (second century; BHO –; CANT .I ), the Doctrina Addai (fourth/fifth century?) and the Acts of Mar Mari (late sixth/seventh century) were written in Syriac and told the history of the three apostles who supposedly converted the regions where the Syriac churches were attested, respectively, India, northern Mesopotamia, and Syria, and the western provinces of the Persian Empire. These texts advocated for the apostolic foundation of the Syriac churches. They thus created a shared memory of the local communities. Significantly, the so-called Doctrina Addai (BHO ) does not refer in its title to the ‘acts’ or ‘Life’ of the apostle Addai (Thaddeus in Greek and in Armenian), but to the teaching (the root is ylp) of Christianity that he brought to Edessa/Urhay, the centre of Syriac Christianity’s language and culture. This emphasis on the importance of education is pivotal in Syriac biographies, whoever is the figure considered. We also have in Syriac a Doctrine of Simon Kepha in the City of Rome (BHO ; CANT ; ed. Cureton : – T, – V) instead of the Acts of Peter. In Syriac, a convert is someone who has received the teaching of the Christian doctrine, and the heroes of Syriac biographies are holy teachers. Since the first and foremost teacher in history is understood as being no less than God, the education of the Christian heroes and their accomplishments as school founders and teachers are firmly highlighted in their Lives (Brock ). Since authors who wrote in Syriac were educated in Greek, they were familiar with several Greek genres such as the Lives of philosophers, encomia, and romances. Since they never had their own state, there is no such thing as encomia of state officials. Emperor Constantine, however, was celebrated in Syriac as the founder of the Christian Empire: Jacob of Serugh wrote a memra (metric homily) on one aspect that was considered a turning point in Constantine’s life as well as in the fate of the Christian world, namely, his baptism (Frothingham ). The prominent figures of the church(es) were celebrated for their social role as well as spiritual endeavours. Two memre about eminent anti-Chalcedonian figures, the memra on patriarch Severus of Antioch by George, bishop of the Arab tribes (W; McVey ) and that on Philoxenus of Mabbug by Elia of Qarṭmin (W, ninth century; Watt ), consciously follow a structure similar to what Greek manuals of rhetoric would recommend. Epideictic
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entered Syriac tradition as Antony Rhetor’s treatise exemplifies, where he describes the structure of a speech of praise in a way very similar to what can be found in Greek (.; ibid.: –). Syriac Lives have so far very rarely been analysed according to the rhetorical models, though rhetorical exercises such as diēgēsis (narration), ēthopoiia (characterization through speech, often in the form of fictive epistolography), ecphrasis (description), and syncrisis (comparison) can be identified in many texts. The rhetorical structure of encomia is also prominent in hagiographical writings (including poetic Lives), just as it is in Latin and Greek. Yet they have remained understudied so far. We also have a verse biography of the eastern maphrian (representative of the Syrian-Orthodox) Bar Hebroyo, composed soon after his death by his disciple Gabriel b. John of Bartelli (d. ), in addition to the autobiographical passages found in his historical works. As in Greek or Latin, writing hagiographies was akin to ‘painting’ literary portraits of the saints as spiritual icons for imitation. The model is the Religious History of the Monks of Syria by Theodoret of Cyrrhus (see Chapter in this volume), which contains biographies of thirty ascetics portrayed as religious models (fifth century). Lives were often written in verse, a distinctive feature of Syriac literature, especially memre. A considerable number of memre were composed on biblical figures as well as saints: we have a memra of Ephrem on Jonas and Nineveh, anonymous memre on Abraham and the prophet Elijah, scores of memre by Jacob of Serugh and as late as the eleventh century a memra on the life of Rabban Hormizd by Emmanuel of Bet-Garmai (d. ). They are not biographies as such but belong to the Syriac classification of ‘narrative’ centred on individuals. A special case are the Lives written by biographers of the late Sasanian period who evidently wrote for an educated audience in a florid style (whereas the distinction between high and low style is generally not applicable in Syriac, most Lives being written in simple prose). The Life of the Persian martyr Ishoʿsabran (E; BHO ) was written by the future catholicos of that church, Isho`yahb III (d. ). The famous theologian of the Church of the East, Babai the Great (d. ) wrote several Lives in a ‘high style’, quite unusual in its long rhetorical features: the outstanding Life of the seventh-century Persian martyr Mihrmahgushnasp-George (E; BHO ) displays a strong polemical flavour against the influential Miaphysites at Khosrau’s court. Other biographies written by Babai of East Syrian abbots, such as John the Arab and Abimelek of Qardu, are lost. Only the prooemium of the Life of the noble lady Christina of Karka d-Bet Slok has survived in the manuscripts, that display an unusual rhetoric over several folios, without even coming to discuss the character.
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.................................................................................................................................. Alexander the Great was a special figure for Syriac Christians since he was considered an autochthonous king who came from Macedonia but (re)founded major cities in the East, including Edessa (the name of a Macedonian city)/Urhay, the cradle of Syriac Christianity. He was also victorious against the Persians (who were a permanent threat to the populations of the borders) and went to the limits of the known world in the East. The Alexander Romance of Pseudo-Callisthenes (on which see Chapter in this volume) was translated into Syriac, with an episode on Alexander reaching China and central Asia not known
elsewhere. An abbreviated Greek Life of Alexander was also translated into Syriac, as indicated by the title, transliterated as Bios and explained as ‘way of life’. The adventures of Alexander in central Asia were the favourite part of his life for the Syriac audience, and a christianized version was produced, probably in the East Syriac tradition, where the pious king is presented building a door to enclose the impure peoples of Gog and Magog on the other side (adapted from Ezek –). This version exhibits a mix of biblical images and folklore, where Alexander is depicted as the saviour of the faithful until, at the end of the world, the door opens and unleashes these people as a prelude to the coming of Christ and Antichrist (all the texts on Alexander were translated by Budge ). Alexander’s figure thus enters Syriac historical apocalypses produced in the seventh century in the aftermath of the Islamic conquests. Alexander receives a new genealogy in the influential Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius in order to trace his lineage to a Cushite (Ethiopian) queen (Reinink ). This distorted biography answers exegetical needs at a time of dramatic politicoreligious changes. The Life of Secundus the Philosopher (on the Greek version, see Chapters and in this volume), known from an incomplete manuscript, celebrates the firmness of mind of the hero, who is killed by a king incensed by his silence. An example of patience and selfcontrol on the part of a pagan philosopher, this Life functioned as a monastic model and circulated in East Syrian monastic circles in the seventh century (Brock a).
F A
.................................................................................................................................. The distinction between fact and fiction may not operate in Christian biographical or hagiographical writings, yet what I call ‘fictional autobiographies’ present a biographic dimension written from the first person perspective (a fact rare enough in Syriac literature to be noted). The story of Ahiqar, the Persian sage, encapsulates in the narrative framework : of Ahiqar’s life at the Assyrian court (during the reigns of Sennacherib and Esarhaddon, : between – ) two sets of proverbial discourses addressed to his nephew Nadan, who plotted against him in order to have the Assyrian king kill him. First attested in an Aramaic fragment from Egypt dating back to the fifth century , Ahiqar is also mentioned : in the book of Tobit (:–) and in Demotic Egyptian fragments. A version associating the narrative and the so-called ‘wise saying’ circulated at some point. No fewer than five versions of his story are preserved in Syriac, going back to an earlier Syriac version. An Armenian version (from which a Georgian and an Old Turkish version are derived), two modern Syriac ones, and Arabic adaptations (themselves translated in Ethiopic) were made from the Syriac. This text illustrates the enduring influence of the traditional genre of proverbs in the Middle East and the power of imaginative writing in the form of fictional autobiographical narrative. It created the figure of an Aramean hero who entered Greek literature in the person of the fabulist Aesop (on which see Chapter in this volume) and is still popular today in Lebanese classrooms (Brock a: –). Writing similarly in the first person, Pseudo-Dionysius presents himself as St Dionysius the Areopagite, an Athenian member of the judicial council, the Areopagus, who was converted by Paul (Acts :). This legendary Life that accredited Dionysius’ identity in
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Late Antiquity exists in two Syriac recensions and an epitome (BHO ) that went with the tremendous success of his works. And finally, the Testament of Ephrem (BHO ; BHG –; CPG II, ), of which there is a Greek and an Armenian translation, has the celebrated Syriac poet and theologian (d. ) speak in the first person. It is centred on instructions concerning his burial (a traditional genre in ancient literature). It evokes also his disciples. It mentions an episode concerning Moses and the magicians, and an encounter between Ephrem and a local noble woman (Brock ). The poet Jacob of Serugh (W.) in the fifth century wrote a supplication situated at the time of his youth, a rare mention of interest on the implications of young age. In the thirteenth century, Giwargis Warda, the most famous hymnographer of the Church of the East, wrote an autobiographical madrasha, hymn intertwined with Old Testament allusions (Pritula ).
B F
.................................................................................................................................. The scriptures (the Old and New Testaments) were a major source of both saintly and literary models for life-writing in Syriac. In the first place, they identified the heroes of sacred history and highlighted the major events in their lives that were deemed worthy of being recorded. However, they rarely gave complete biographies of their heroes, and even the gospels, which tell Jesus’ life and acts, left most of his infancy untold. Biographies of biblical figures hold a special place in Christian literature and are a common literary and religious trove shared by the various Christian churches. These texts circulated widely in translations and adaptations. They are often classified as ‘apocryphal’ because they do not belong to the canon of scriptures. However, they function as hagiographies of the major figures of Christianity (some taken from Judaism) telling episodes missing in the Bible and adding substance to shadowy figures. They played a special role in creating a link between the narrative and places where major episodes of the hero’s life took place (S.F. Johnson ). They also contributed to creating a geographical as well as cultic memory of the biblical figures just as hagiographical texts did for Christian saints and places. A Life of Abel in Syriac and Garshuni1 (still unedited), attributed to a certain Symmachus, has no counterpart in either Greek or Latin and seems to have been composed in Syriac. S.P. Brock (: ) describes it as ‘a consciously artistic product, full of paired phrases carefully balanced off against each other’. Attributed to Basil of Caesarea, the Syriac History of Joseph is both an imaginative and exegetical rendering of the life of the patriarch as told in the Bible, from the history of his parents to his death, deeply permeated by Jewish traditions and interpretations (Heal ). There is also a Syriac translation of the so-called Lives of the Prophets, of which at least six Greek recensions are known, sometimes attributed to either Epiphanius of Salamis or Dorotheus of Tyre. It goes back at least to the sixth century if not earlier. The Syriac version is closer to the anonymous and the Dorotheus recensions. The Lives aim to provide information about twenty-three prophets of the Old Testament, including where they are 1
Arabic in Syriac script.
from, how they died, and their place of burial. Interestingly, the Syriac Lives were incorporated in an abridged form in chronicles, where they are organized according to the supposed historical sequence as pieces of information on biblical history (Brock : –). One of these, the Life of Jeremiah (Nestle ) circulated independently in Syriac and focuses on the story of Alexander the Great and Jeremiah’s bones, also known in late Jewish sources, where Alexander buries the bones of the prophet in Alexandria as a protection against snakes (Midrash Aggadah II, Num :; eleventh century; Debié ). Biblical traditions had thus intermingled with the legend of the world-conqueror. Similar to the deaths of the prophets, the deaths of the twelve apostles became an independent topic. Very early on (probably in the second century), the Greek Infancy Gospel of Thomas (BHG p–pb) tried to fill the gaps of Jesus’ life between the presentation in the Temple and his encounter with the doctors of the Law, imagining how the holy child interacted with his schoolmates, teachers, and parents while learning how to manage his divinity. Translated into Syriac, this gospel was integrated into a History of Our Lady Mary, attested in fifth- to sixth-century Syriac manuscripts and written in order to give a continuous account of the life of the Virgin, who is hardly mentioned in the New Testament. This new biography appropriated several existing texts and filled the gaps in order to constitute a complete life of the Virgin, from the history of her parents to after her death, when Jesus gives her a tour of hell and paradise. The so-called Protoevangelium of James (BHG ), on the Virgin’s infancy, and the Infancy Gospel (on Jesus’ childhood), translated from Greek into Syriac, told the beginning of her life, whereas the six books of the ‘departure’ of the Virgin (also called the transitus, typical of the literary genre of funeral praise, on the anniversary of a dies natalis, and including an apocalypse of the Virgin), probably originally written in Syriac, told the end of her life and her afterlife. This text thus envisioned the miracles that she performed as well as numerous episodes not mentioned in the canonical gospels. The story then developed independently in the Syrian-Orthodox Church and in the Church of the East and had a tremendous success (Naffah ). The writing of the Virgin’s history had a significant impact on art, since many episodes depicted in manuscripts or on church walls came not from the canonical gospels but from the literary traditions of her life. The transitus part of the Virgin’s Life, which belongs to the classic genre of exitus literature, gave way to innumerable pictures of the Virgin lying on her deathbed, surrounded by the apostles summoned for her last moments on earth. The Syriac versions are original in creating from existing blocks (Protoevangelium, Infancy Gospel, and transitus) new narratives or complete Lives, ranging from the history of Mary’s parents to her death and afterlife. Syriac is the only Christian tradition that has produced a full biography of the Virgin. It is associated with the development of the cult of the Virgin and contributed to fix or accompanied the tradition of her feasts in the liturgical year cycle.
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.................................................................................................................................. A biography of the most famous Syriac poet and theologian, Ephrem the Syrian, comes down to us both in Syriac and in Greek and was translated into Georgian (Outtier ; Amar ). The Syriac Life probably dates back to the sixth century. It draws on a number
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of different sources and shows striking anachronisms. An encounter with Basil of Caesarea occupies several chapters in the biography and was taken over from the Syriac Life of Basil, where a ‘Syrian’ informant of Basil is mentioned and identified as Ephrem (he happens to be Eusebius of Emesa, not Ephrem). The encounter never took place, and Ephrem, in all probability, also never went to Abba Bishoi in Egypt on his way to visit Basil. These travels serve symbolic purposes. His Life also anachronistically describes him as a monk rather than a deacon (Mesopotamia had not yet developed Egyptian-style monasticism at the time of Ephrem), a more familiar and prestigious condition for the sixth-century hagiographer. The Life thus creates a false identity, which became standard in medieval icons (except one in Sinai), manuscript illuminations, and wall paintings until today, depicting Ephrem dressed in a monastic habit. A representation of the story of his vision of a vine sprouting from his tongue, reaching up to the sky and producing bunches of grapes—his poems—also stems from his biography (Griffith –; Amar ; Brock ). We also have a panegyric by Jacob of Serugh: A Metrical Homily on the Holy Mar Ephrem (PO .). The Life and encomium of Basil of Caesarea circulated in Syriac under the name of Helladius, bishop of Caesarea and disciple of Basil, and not Amphilochius of Iconium as in Greek (CPG , ). We have a Syriac Life of Athanasius of Alexandria falsely attributed to Amphilochius of Iconium, which, interestingly, claims to rely on ecclesiastical histories and, indeed, relies on what Socrates and Theodoret say about Athanasius in their respective church histories, both translated into Syriac (Hollerich ; ). The epitomizer chose the most dramatic events and vivid anecdotes of Athanasius’ life and presented his hero as a new Job, Moses, and Paul. Attested in Syrian-Orthodox manuscripts and in an Arabic version, this Life may have been composed in the fifth or sixth century, perhaps in northern Syria, since the author mistook Arsenius, a Meletian bishop (an Egyptian faction hostile to Athanasius) for a bishop of the city of Melitene.
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.................................................................................................................................. Writing Lives and developing local cults were two complementary ways of creating a local memory of saints. In Edessa, the cradle of Syriac culture and Christianity, a rich tradition developed of Lives of the famous local men and women, mapping the social background of the city. The Life of the Man of God (BHO –; BHG ; BHL ), originating from Edessa in the fifth century, was to prove extremely influential in both Greek and Latin (and from there into medieval vernaculars). The Greek version gave the originally anonymous hero a name, Alexius. The narrative was expanded and then translated, not only into Latin, but also back into Syriac. The earliest text in Old French happens to be a translation of this Life (Odenkirchen ). Supposedly arriving from Rome, where he fled the marriage that his wealthy parents had arranged for him, the Man of God leads the life of a lonely stranger among the urban poor and strangers in Edessa. He lives and dies like an alter Christus, and many aspects of his life are based on the gospel tradition (Drijvers ). The Life ends with a panegyric for the bishop of Edessa, Rabbula, described as spending the church’s money on the poor, widows, orphans, and strangers.
There exists a literary and structural relationship between the Life of the Man of God and the Life of Rabbula (BHO ), the famous bishop who occupied the see of Edessa from until his death in (Drijvers ). The story of Rabbula does not say a word about the atmosphere in Edessa between the various religious factions. It rather praises Rabbula’s pious and ascetic behaviour, emphasizing his fasting and his almsgiving to the poor and the sick, drawing the picture of a charitable bishop. It consequently omits his activity as a builder. It does not record, as the contemporary chronicles do, that Rabbula converted a Jewish synagogue into a Christian church dedicated to St Stephen (the first martyr killed by the Jews), only that Rabbula converted thousands of Jews, who bitterly mourned after his death, giving a positive image of his endeavours. It also does not mention Rabbula’s actions during the Council of Ephesus () and its aftermath, presenting a defence of the bishop of Edessa against his opponents in bringing to the fore his works of charity and leaving aside his change in doctrinal position and his reputation as the ‘Tyrant of Edessa’. Edessa was a place that produced many Lives: the apostles Thomas and Addai, Abraham Qidunaya, the Man of God, Rabbula, Paul of Qentos and the priest John, Julian Saba and Ephrem (these sometimes copied together), Euphemia and the Goth, and the Edessan martyrs Sharbel (BHO ), Barsamya (BHO –), and Gurya, Shmona, and Ḥ abib (BHO , ). It seems that the local aristocratic milieu sponsored the writing of the histories of their members. Ṭ ur ʿAbdin, the Mountain of the Servants [of God] (current south-east Turkey), is still considered the cradle of the Syrian-Orthodox Church, and this reputation, rooted in the presence of numerous churches and monasteries, rests in the local memory that Lives of the most famous monks helped create. The western Lives of three abbots of the stillfunctioning monastery of Mar Gabriel (Qarṭmin), those of Samuel (BHO –), Shemʾun (BHO ), and Gabriel (BHO ), are known in Syriac and Garshuni. Another text, the Life of Symeon of the Olives (d. ; unpublished) is a fascinating piece focusing on its hero’s entrepreneurship: planting , olive trees; organizing oil fabrication and trade; building churches, monasteries, hospices and mill-stones, and even a madrasha and a mosque in Nisibis; and buying villages, gardens and orchards entailed to the churches and monasteries. Later, a disputation with Muslims taken from the Life of the celebrated Theodore Abu Qurrah (Brock ; Palmer and Tannous ; Tannous ) crept in. Spanning from the youth of Symeon until his death, the Life is nonetheless written as a novel elaborating on the healing miracles performed by Symeon. It imaginatively tells how Symeon’s nephew David, who had been a favourite prisoner of the Persian general Sharbaraz, discovered a treasure in a cave during a hunting party. This treasure gave Symeon the means to carry out his building and commercial activities during his lifetime. Symeon interacts with Sasanians, hostile Nestorians, and then Muslims during the dramatic political changes in the seventh century, which, nevertheless, seem to have had little impact on the local populations and activities. Iyyub, the nephew of David, Symeon’s nephew, purportedly wrote this Life shortly before . It is an entertaining piece because of the uncommon figure of a businessman-like bishop owing his fortune to a hidden treasure at the time of the fall of the Roman and Persian Empires. Another Life of a local bishop, that of Theodotus of Amida (d. ), preserved in Syriac and Garshuni, tells the story of a bishop on the frontiers that separate Arab from Byzantine territories in order to defend the Syrian-Orthodox. Theodotus makes sure that they would
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not be forced to convert or imprisoned (by the Byzantines, who considered them heretics, rather than by the Arabs). He performs healing miracles and deals with demoniacs, such as one suspended in the air who frightened a tax collector sent by the Muslim authorities. As a type of Robin Hood, Theodotus takes the opportunity to make the tax collector give back the money that he had extorted from the orphans and widows. This Life also has autobiographical references to its writer, the monk Joseph, disciple of Theodotus (Palmer ; ). Lively biographies of the Ṭ ur ʿAbdin heroes thus offer the traditional image of the miracle worker and holy man in the setting of the troubled border regions between the Byzantines and the Arabs in a multi-religious and linguistic context where the various Christian denominations were no less hostile to each other than were the empires. The exigencies of monastic life in the Persian Gulf gave rise to biographies imbued with local elements. The extraordinary seventh-/eighth-century Life of Mar Yonan (E.) incorporates fantastic tales of how Yonan miraculously received grapes (that do not grow in that environment) from a raven, healed men who had fallen from date palms, resuscitated the son of a pearl merchant, island-hopped on the back of a giant crab, and travelled at supernatural speed (Payne ; Brock ). This distinctive Persian Gulf atmosphere as well as the imagination of its author created a unique piece combining traits of hagiography and romance. Persian elements might be discernible such as the mention of the spiritual radiance of the soul of an ascetic gleaming across the sea. The word for ‘radiance’, nuhra in Syriac, hints at Middle Persian farr(ah) and is a transposition of a traditional concept in Zoroastrianism applied to an outstanding ascetic and not to the king. Such tales of ascetics who had achieved harmony with wild animals are topoi symbolizing how the saint had returned to the life of paradise, when men and animals lived in peace and Adam had the upper hand over wildlife. Different models coming from literature and folktales were available to the (in all probability) monastic author in his Persian environment. Of the numerous acts of the Persian martyrs (between the third and seventh centuries), not all are biographies (for a guide, see Brock c). Many focus on the martyrdom and have nothing to say about the individual martyrs’ lives. Members of the noble Iranian families, however, stand out in acts that describe the dramatic changes from their former aristocratic way of life as high-ranking Zoroastrians, such as the Life of Mar Qardagh (BHO –). Influences of the Persian epic tradition (The Kār-Nāmag ī Ardašīr ī Pābagān) were detected in this narrative (Walker : –). The fascinating Lives of Ahudemmeh and Maruta of Tagrit (both W; sixth century) shed : light on two Miaphysite monks and bishops in the Persian Empire who converted Arab tribes in a context of harsh competition with the ‘Nestorians’. They follow the traditional Greek model of biography, recounting their childhood and origins while insisting on their particular geographical setting in the desert region of Bet ʿArabaye (Persian Arabayistan) and Tagrit (modern Tikrit in Iraq), respectively. An extraordinary piece is the double biography of Mar Yahballaha III and Rabban Sauma (–). Biography, history, and chronicle at the same time, it recounts the history of two sons of wealthy Christian families, Sauma and Marcos, born in China, who became hermits and decided to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Their trip stops in Mesopotamia where they have to stay in monasteries. When the catholicos of the Church of the East dies, Marcos is elected in his place under the name of Yahballaha. Sauma becomes the ambassador of the Great Khan in Europe. He travels to Rome, Paris, and the south of
France. This part relies on his travelogue. The story ends at the death of Mar Yahballaha (Borbone ; ). It encompasses, in a typical Syriac tashʿitha, the history of Syriac Christianity at its greatest extent during the Mongols’ rule from China to the Mediterranean and shows the globalization of the Church of the East, whose heads were part of the political life of their time.
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.................................................................................................................................. In the first few centuries following the Council of Chalcedon, almost all biography contains an element of theological propaganda. In surviving Greek hagiography this can readily be seen in Cyril of Scythopolis’ Lives advocating the Council. The anti-Chalcedonian counterparts to this, though composed in many cases in Greek, only survive in Syriac (or other oriental Christian) translation. The Life of Peter the Iberian (W; BHO ) is about a Georgian prince who came as a hostage to the imperial court and later became a monk, settled in Palestine, and became a leading figure among opponents of the Council of Chalcedon. He became bishop of Maiuma near Gaza, and wandered in Egypt through Palestine, Arabia, and Phoenicia. This Life was written in Greek by John Rufus but is preserved only in a Syriac translation. Severus, patriarch of Antioch (–, d. ), the key person in the development of Miaphysite theology and in the opposition to Chalcedon, was the object of as many as three biographies (by Zacharias of Mytilene or Rhetor in Greek and by John bar Aphtonia and George, bishop of the Arab Tribes in Syriac). Zacharias Rhetor’s Life deals primarily with Severus’ student days in Beirut and stops precisely when he becomes patriarch of Antioch (in ). The whole purpose of the work is to dispel rumours disseminated by his enemies concerning his pagan origins and alleged participation in pagan sacrifices. Syriac hagiography so successfully suppressed the reference to his pagan background that it was only with the publication of the Coptic version of Severus’ Homily , on the circumstances of his baptism at the shrine of St Leontius of Tripoli, that it became obvious that the Syriac version of the same homily had been heavily edited in order to remove unacceptable facts about the founding hero of the Syrian-Orthodox Church (Ambjörn ; Brock a: ; Brock and Fitzgerald ). Another non-Chalcedonian hero is Jacob Burdʿaya/Baradeus, for whom we have two vitae (anonymous and by John of Ephesus). During the same period were composed several Lives of Miaphysite leaders: John of Tella (two Lives, of which one in verse by Elias of Qarṭmin), Dioscorus of Alexandria, and Philoxenus of Mabbug (d. ), for whom we also have a prose and a verse Life. Two examples where both the dogmatic positions and the polemic outlook come to the fore are the Syrian-Orthodox Life of Nestorius and the Monothelete Life of Maximus (the Confessor), two ‘hostile’ Lives. An incomplete Syriac Life of Maximus survives in a seventh-/eighth-century manuscript of Monothelete origin, and it must have been written within a few decades of Maximus’ death in , perhaps around the time of the sixth Council of Constantinople (). It surprisingly assigns Maximus’ origin not to Constantinople, as in the Greek tradition, but to Palestine. Comparisons of the Greek and Syriac Lives indeed support the Syriac Life’s claim of a Palestinian origin for Maximus (Brock
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; a: ; Boudignon ). Although hostile to the arch-enemy of Monotheletism, the Life preserves valuable information about Maximus’ formative years. The autobiographical statement of Nestorius (the so-called Tragedy mentioned in Abdisho’s catalogue) is lost but contradictory biographical accounts can be found in historiographical texts on this controversial figure. They vary from a very positive image in East Syriac sources, where he is considered a saint, to an extremely negative one in Miaphysite and Chalcedonian sources that describe him as the root of all evil and recount his death according to the model of Arius, the ultimate heretic (Brière ; Koziński ). Another fascinating Life is the History of Sergius Bahira, the Christian monk who bore : witness of the prophethood of Muhammad (a number of Arabs came with the young : Muhammad to his cell, and he had a vision of the greatness of the youth above the latter’s : head). In the Christian tradition he transmitted to Muhammad the Islamic law and beliefs : as well as the Qur’ān. It is both the history of Sergius, from his childhood to his death and, embedded in it, an episode of the life of Muhammad (Roggema ). The story suggests : that Islam is a misunderstood form of Christianity and works as a response to the political, religious and social challenges of Islam. The History of Sergius Bahira : as we now have it in Syriac is clearly a composite text made of two blocks assembled at a later stage. It is also attested in Arabic and the first part in Latin. It takes the form, as is traditional in Christian literature, of a monk’s Life and bears, as is usual in Syriac, the title of ‘story’, tashʿitha. The anonymous author of the text places the first story in the mouth of a monk, called Yahb. In the second story, Yahb hears the story of Bahira’s life from another monk, a disciple of : Bahira, called Ḥ akim. A prophecy of Sergius was added in the first story and an apocalypse : in the second one, making thus more complex the fictional tale and introducing a highly controversial overtone. This biography of Sergius—and henceforth of Muhammad— : constitutes an intriguing piece of Christian-Muslim controversy and dialogue in the ninth century.
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.................................................................................................................................. Most hagiographers were monks for whom writing, copying, or reading saints’ Lives were a spiritual and ascetic practice. Most Syriac Lives have monks as characters and authors. The Greek Life of Antony (dealt with in Chapter in this volume) functioned as a spiritual and literary model for holy monks and ascetics in Christian literature. We know two forms of the Syriac translation of this Life, a long and a short recension. The long recension, which can probably be ascribed to the fifth century, not only exhibits many differences from the Greek, but is also considerably longer. It constitutes an expanded paraphrase rather than a translation and is an attempt to re-present and adapt Antony and early Egyptian asceticism for the benefit of Syriac readers who were familiar with a different indigenous type of ascetic tradition. It went through hagiographical embellishment and introduced archaisms, an interest in angels, a turn from philosophical to biblical vocabulary, changes to accommodate persons unacquainted with Egypt, and theological changes reflecting the controversies in Christian dogma of the fourth and fifth centuries (Takeda a; b; ; Brock a: ; ter Haar Romeny : –).
Two versions of the Life of Symeon the Stylite (BHO , ), the Syrian hero of extreme ascetic practices, whose reputation reached as far as Gaul (and entered the Life of Saint Geneviève), and who became the model of all stylites, are known in Syriac. The oldest was produced in his monastery shortly after his death in . The earliest of the several surviving manuscripts is dated , only fourteen years after his death (British Library, Add. ) and gives a version quite different from the Greek (Lent ). The literary Life accompanied the development of pilgrimages to the saint’s monastery near Aleppo.
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.................................................................................................................................. A notable feature of the Syriac tradition, where the Holy Spirit is feminine and feminine imagery of the divine is especially developed—to the point that it is said that the Virgin Mary engendered as a man—is that women are better represented there than in other Christian literatures (Brock and Harvey ). These Lives nonetheless portray women who have to acquire manliness by their ascetic practices to be deemed equal to their male counterparts. The History of Euphemia and the Goth, which takes place in Edessa, warns against the blandishments of foreigners and describes the miserable life of a girl serving a cruel mistress in a foreign country. To the weakness of a girl without protector is opposed the miraculous power of faith: the ‘saint’ poisons her mistress and is miraculously brought back to her hometown, to the tomb of the Edessan martyrs she had prayed to for liberation. Euphemia, abused by a soldier and turned into a slave, is thus a stereotype of the feminine condition of her time as well as a literary topos popular since the Greek novels. The Edessan Life of Abraham of Qidun and his Niece Maria (c.) is the history of a girl, the servant of her uncle, an ascetic, who is seduced and becomes a prostitute (another topos in the ancient novels; Rizzo-Nervo ). Written for edification, this text displays literary qualities. The Life of Marina survives in many different forms and in many different languages. Two forms exist in Syriac, an earlier one where she is ‘Mary’ (as in Greek) and a later one in the Paradise of the Fathers. Her life follows a topos of feminine hagiography where women enter a monastery dressed as boys and become transvestite saints or are otherwise miraculously turned into men (Briquel Chatonnet ), their true identity being revealed either when they are falsely accused of fathering a child or after their death. Marina’s history is transmitted in a manuscript containing a dozen or so Lives of transvestite saints. There is even a Muslim adaptation of the story, where according to one manuscript, the child turns out to be the future Bahira, the teacher of Muhammad. A sogitha (traditional Syriac : dialogic poem) between Marina and Satan gives the saint a voice to defend women (Brock b). Several hagiographies (E) of martyred noble women of high Sasanian society stand out in both Syriac and Greek. We have a history of Candida, a Roman deportee who was chosen as one of Vahran II’s wives in the s (Brock b; Strong ). There is in Greek a version of the Martyrdom of Shirin (d. /) of Karka d-bet Slok (modern Kirkuk in Iraq) (ed. Devos ). About Golindouch (d. ), the living-martyr, a Georgian and a Greek version (BHG –; CPG ) of the Syriac passion written by Stephen, bishop of Hierapolis (or Mabbug, where she died), are preserved (Peeters ). She might have been
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related to Shirin. A short fragment of the Martyrdom of the noble Christina of Karka d-bet Slok contains only a very rhetorical introduction displaying Babai the Great’s high style (d. ; M. Binder ). The history of Sultan Mahdukht (d. ?) and her brothers belongs to the category of Lives of Persian kings’ children who converted and were consequently martyred (Brock a). In this category also belong Behnam and her sister Sara, about whom nothing is known apart from their Life (BHO ). Women came to life in Syriac literature not only in literary Lives but also, as Brock has shown, in poems (especially dialogic). The shadowy figures of the Bible, both named and anonymous, are given a voice (Brock ): Eve, Sarah, Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, the widow of Sarepta, the sinful woman (Luke :–), the Virgin Mary, etc. Although not an example of a saint’s Life, the ‘Book of Women’, the combined books of Ruth, Esther, Susanna, and Judith, also contains the Life of Thecla, the disciple of Paul, sometimes called the Book of Thecla as if it were a canonical book. It was transmitted as a literary unit in Syriac, and an abbess called Maryam seems to have been the owner of the oldest (sixth-century) manuscript containing these texts (Burris and Van Rompay : ; ; on these feminine collections, see Binggeli : –). In or , John the Stylite of Bet Mar Qanun reused a manuscript to write his Select Narratives of Holy Women (tashʿyatha d-ʿal neshê qadishê; Burris and Van Rompay : ). Finally, the Life of Febronia, a martyr under Diocletian (–), was purportedly written by her fellow nun Thomais, which would make it the only example of a Life written by a woman.
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.................................................................................................................................. The Religious History of the Monks of Syria that Theodoret of Cyrrhus wrote in Greek was the model for all subsequent collective biographies and monastic histories (see Chapter in this volume). Two Lives (of the local saints Julian Saba and Jacob of Nisibis) are preserved in Syriac translations, but fragments of others suggest that more, perhaps even all, had been translated. It served as a model for Barhadbeshabba ʿArbaya’s Ecclesiastical : History (E; sixth century) and for John of Ephesus. The best-known Syriac collection of Lives is indeed that composed in the s by John of Ephesus (W), author of an Ecclesiastical History, which serves as one of the most important sources for the history of the eastern Roman Empire in the sixth century. John’s Lives of the Eastern Saints consists of fifty-eight short narratives concerning holy men and women mainly from north Mesopotamia, most of whom he had known. The Paradise of the Fathers, a work in which the seventh-century East Syrian author ʿEnanisho incorporated many ascetic texts, including the Life of Antony was very influential since it popularized the Lives of the Egyptian Fathers in East Syrian monasticism at a time when the Egyptian forms were prevalent and had been the model for a major monastic reform in the sixth century. The ninth-century Book of Chastity by Ishoʿdnah of Bas: ra (E), on the monastic heroes and founders of monasteries, above all in the sixth to eighth centuries, is a collection of brief Lives focusing on the intellectual and spiritual formation of the oriental monks in the numerous local and advanced schools in the East. Special attention is given to the teachers
and founders of such schools, a distinctive feature of the Syriac, and more specifically the East Syrian, tradition. A more extended work, but focusing on abbots and monks of one particular famous monastery, that of Beth ʾAbe (in northern Iraq), is by another ninthcentury bishop, Thomas of Marga (E), entitled the Book of Governors. We have seen that Lives not only found their sources in ecclesiastical histories but also that many of them in turn entered the ecclesiastical histories and chronicles in an abridged form. In the thirteenth century, the Syriac polymath Bar Hebroyo (–) integrated into his chronicles short biographies of physicians, philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers, possibly under the influence of the Arabic biographical dictionaries. Both he and Michael the Syrian (–), another historian, give a short biography of one of the most significant figures of Syriac Christianity and literature, Jacob of Edessa, both a churchman and a polymath himself (c.–). More broadly, East Syrian historiography relies on the succession of bishops, abbots, and catholicoi understood according to the model of the Lives of the philosophical schools (Debié ). The boundaries between history and biography are blurred in Syriac narratives.
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.................................................................................................................................. We have very few clues about reading practices. We know that saints’ Lives were read— silently and aloud—in monastic circles, but there is no evidence that the literary Lives were read for the saints’ feasts in church (D.G.K. Taylor ), except for the Life of Mihrmahgushnasp/George (who chose that name precisely because the Life of the Martyr George was read to him), which was intended to be read on the martyr’s commemoration day according to its own preface (Reinink : ). The manuscript preserving the Life of Theodotus of Amida (d. ) includes a homily to be read on the saint’s feast-day that is immediately followed by the Life, implying that the Life itself was not read. Homilies (memre) were a major form through which saints’ lives were made known to the general public (Brock ). The poet and Miaphysite theologian Jacob of Serugh (–) in his numerous narrative memre told in hundreds of -foot distichs the lives of the famous Edessan martyrs Ḥ abib (AMS I: –) and Shmona and Gurya (AMS I: –). He and Isaac of Niniveh also wrote memre on Sergius and Bacchus (AMS VI: –).2 These Lives were generally abbreviated in the liturgical books. Madrashe (stanzaic poems) and sogyatha are other poetic forms transmitted in the liturgical books (Fenqyotho in the western churches, Ḥ udra for the choir in the eastern church) and sung—often by alternate choirs of men and women, introducing thus a distinctive sensorial narrativity. The entertaining aspect of biography/hagiography should be emphasized: it created a more active participation of the reader than other genres did, through some form of identification with the hero(ine). Ephrem (d. ) wrote madrashe on local saints, Abraham Qidunaya and Julian Saba, and on Nisibene bishops where the narration is almost absent. The East Syriac poet Giwargis Warda in the thirteenth century wrote narrative ʿonyatha (liturgical poems in seven feet with a refrain after each stanza) on martyrs: Saint George, 2
Isaac’s memra is still unedited: ms. Dayr al Suryan syr. (f. v v).
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Saint Stephen, the Zoroastrian convert Tahmazgerd, biblical figures, and individual saints and monks (St Paul, St Hormizd, Sabrišo of Bet-Koke; Pritula ). These were sung during weekday and Sunday services (except during the Lent period when no saints’ commemorations took place) and played a special role in the education of school clergymen. These texts followed the liturgical order of the year and were not Lives proper, but they were pivotal in disseminating information about the heroes of the church and in creating a local and ecclesiastical memory.
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.................................................................................................................................. Very little has been done concerning the literary aspects of Syriac biographical writing and the genre has seldom been considered as such—that is, as biography. The purpose of hagiography tends to erase personality traits but family and regional provenance, education, and individual career remain at its core. The impression that the transmission of traditional education in Late Antiquity came to a halt because of christianization has made it difficult to trace the classical background that still permeates hagiography in Syriac just as well as in Greek. The classical heritage was still alive in Syriac through the persistence of paideia in the numerous schools in the Roman and Sasanian Empires and later on under Islamic polities. Syriac never was the language of official encomia, except from within the churches. Rival celebrations of individuals took place throughout time in each church and denomination. Biography was also an instrument for defining orthodoxy: since heretics were leading figures, who attracted followers, their personality played a role in the success of their ideas. Rival biographies functioned thus as attempts at praising or condemning them, according to the position from which members of this or that denomination wrote, hence sometimes positive and negative biographies of the same individual appeared. Biographical writing was very much a propagandistic tool, especially in Syriac where several churches developed. It is not in this case imperial, but ecclesiastical, propaganda that followed ancient patterns of rhetorical writing that never entirely disappeared. Celebration of saints came through literature and the performative aspects of commemoration were accompanied and sometimes preceded by literary compositions: homilies, hymns, acts, or Lives. Statues of heroes and gods went out of fashion in a monotheistic Christian world but painted and written icons took the lead in presenting saints and Christian heroes (including Constantine or, more surprisingly, Alexander the Great) picked from scriptures, monasteries or villages as exempla. These made good stories that created ecclesiastical and local memories as much as their literary colours were intended to delight readers and audiences: the travelogue of Rabban Ṣauma from China to France and the story of the giant crab that ferried Mar Yonan in the Persian Gulf are not interesting for the distinction between fact and fiction but function as nice stories, presenting inspiring models or simply imaginative ways of life.
F R The most useful starting points for further study are Brock (a; a).
......................................................................................................................
......................................................................................................................
A the study of Coptic literature advances, so does the pessimism of those studying it, informed by the realization of the sheer quantity of material that is lost or still in need of patient reconstruction. While in the s, in The Coptic Encyclopedia and other works, Tito Orlandi was offering an overall framework for its development, in , Stephen Emmel gave an overview displaying much greater awareness of the vast losses it has undergone and the difficulties inherent in any presentation of the subject, which has to navigate the narrow waters between the dependence on scant surviving evidence and reliance on ‘hypothesis and speculation’ (Emmel : ). Five years later, Anne Boud’hors gave a thoughtful and forward-looking assessment of the field, also noting, however, that one has to do with ‘shreds of literature’ rather than a full and coherent corpus (Boud’hors ). It is indeed ironical that while Egypt is famous for the preservation of everyday documents on papyrus, which were most often discarded by their users, it should have lost such a great number of the precious parchment codices that were carefully produced to be kept and looked after. The growing self-consciousness of the field, its overwhelming focus on the immediate needs of identification, reconstruction, and edition of the extant texts, the concern with their value as a source of historical information, and the near-fixation on the theme of Christological controversy (admittedly very prominent in many texts, but by no means entirely dominant) have had an inhibiting effect on straightforward literary study of the existing corpus in line with current developments in literary history. If the long-standing reluctance of classicists to include hagiographical writing in the broader definitions of ‘biography’ has only been overcome relatively recently and still needs to be justified in volume introductions, it is fair to say that Copticists are not even at the stage of being reluctant. The question of biography in Coptic has hardly been raised as a literary question. The reluctance in ancient studies to see hagiography as a form of biography is all the more surprising as already in , Walter Berschin published the first volume of his monumental Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter (Berschin –) which eventually covered, in four consecutive volumes, what is usually described as ‘hagiographical’ literature from the third to the thirteenth century. Berschin was breaking new ground not so much by asserting the biographical nature of hagiography, but by using the forms and styles of biography as windows onto the wider socio-cultural context, and by
including other forms of life-writing in his survey, from annals to laments for the dead, even if they contained only fragments. Paying close attention to the origin of manuscripts, to literary and historical context, to language and authorship, he delivered a work that proved foundational for the subsequent study of medieval Latin biography. Nothing could be further from the lavish amounts of material at Berschin’s disposal than the ‘shreds of literature’ for which Copticists have to settle. Yet an approach of Coptic biographical texts along the same lines is entirely possible and certainly a useful angle of approach to Coptic literary production. This short survey is necessarily very different in scope, but it is an attempt to classify the surviving biographical texts primarily on the basis of their form and function, rather than that of their genesis, and to present a selection of texts in each category. It is clear that despite their similarities, and their usual grouping under the label ‘hagiography’, religious biographical texts are of very diverse nature, and so are their literary forms. Biographies proper are texts pertaining essentially to ascetic figures, and later to bishops, the latter being an offshoot of the former. These texts attempt to edify, but many are also foundational narratives for the monastic communities that produced them. Martyrologies are very unbalanced biographies, if not outright partial, focusing on the last part of the martyr’s life, and they served the very different purpose of promoting a shrine, while at the same time entertaining and reinforcing the social cohesion of the relevant congregation. Finally, other literary texts contain more or less extensive elements that are distinctly biographic, as do some documentary texts on papyrus, constituting one of Egypt’s most original contributions to ancient life-writing.
M L S
.................................................................................................................................. The origins of Christian biography are closely bound with the beginnings of monasticism. The genre, like the movement it underpinned, were both very successful, but also, from the very start, very diverse. From individuals living alone with their demons to group leaders creating new institutions and advocates of resistance to authority, the subjects treated called for stories with different focal points. The original Greek version of Athanasius’ Life of Antony (on which see Chapter in this volume), celebrated as the earliest Christian biography, had an impressive afterlife judging from the number of copies that have come down to us. Of its Coptic translation, made towards the end of the fourth century, we only have four manuscripts, three of which are fragmentary and come from the library of the White Monastery. Although many more could be lost, it does not seem to have had as much success as it did outside Egypt. The translation is masterfully done, making the best of the linguistic contrast between Greek and Egyptian in which Athanasius couched his opposition of worldly and divine knowledge.1 1
For a thorough literary analysis of the Vita, see Hägg (), as well as Rubenson () and Rousseau () on aspects of its biographical ascendancy. For the quality of the Coptic translation, see Vivian and Athanassakis () and Browne (). The Greek text is edited in Bartelink () and the Coptic version in Garitte ().
The Life of Antony had a considerable influence on subsequent literature. The description of an individual’s quest for liberation from human passions, using the theme of repeated and ultimately unsuccessful attacks by demons in order to highlight the strength of the ascetic’s resolution and faith, became one of the stock motifs of monastic biography. Authors of later ascetic Lives used its themes creatively, and introduced their own. An example of this is the Life of Paul of Tamma, only fragments of which are known today, from a dismembered manuscript also from the White Monastery (see Orlandi ). It is a first-person account by its purported author, Ezechiel, who was Paul’s disciple, and uses the theme of the quest by describing a physical journey undertaken by the two through the desert from Memphis to the area of Panopolis in search of famous anchorites such as Aphou, Apollo, Phib, or Ieremias. During the journey, with some other anchorites they come across the apostles Peter, Paul, and John, who pray to Jesus first to send them bread, and then an altar and a chalice full of wine so that they can take communion in the desert. When Paul of Tamma meets Apollo, he is greeted as he ‘whom the Lord resurrected five times from the dead, and will resurrect once more’. The account of those resurrections is not preserved in the Coptic version of the text, but they are known from the Arabic translation preserved in a number of manuscripts (Coquin a). The Life of Paul of Tamma conforms to the great lines of a biographical account, and is not a disguised ‘history of the monks’, as René-Georges Coquin suggested only to reject the idea (ibid.). It follows Paul from birth to death through his quest for holiness. Like the Life of Antony, the plot takes off with his conversion to the ascetic life, and then develops gradually in sequences of initiation and discovery. The series of resurrections, which are presented as validation of his practice on the part of the divine, are a unique case in ascetic biographies, but find parallels much later in a group of martyrologies. The individuals mentioned in the Life are either founders of Middle-Egyptian communities that functioned as a network, or famous ascetics of the area, and separate biographies were no doubt composed for each of them separately, even if they are not all extant today. An anonymous Life of Phib, a companion of the founder of the now-famous monastery of Bawīt:, Apollo, reproduces part of the content of the latter’s lost biography (Orlandi and Campagnano ). For the communities in question, these biographies formed the history of their origins and grounded them firmly in the already prestigious anchoritic tradition. They represented their common textual heritage and created the sense of belonging to a community with a common genealogy and common references. Significantly, all these biographies cross-refer to each other and to the same group of individuals and communities, but ignore other obvious ascetics that were in the area at the time: they constitute the memory of a very specific network, not that of the monastic movement as a whole. The Life of Antony, and concerns about community memory, are also essential elements in the most important biographical dossier that has come down to us from late antique Egypt, that of Pachomius. There are extant today several texts in Greek and in Coptic, with a complex and partly still unclear textual history.2 It is probable that a Greek and a Coptic biography were written independently of each other within the community, which was
2
This is analysed in detail by Armand Veilleux in his Introduction to the translation of the texts (Veilleux : ) and presented more succinctly in Rousseau (: ).
organized in ‘houses’ and included one for the Greek-speaking members.3 The only Coptic version that is preserved almost complete is the one in the Bohairic dialect, a later and more developed version of the earlier Sahidic. The Bohairic Life of Pachomius, which is discussed alongside its Greek version in Chapter in this volume, is a very long and detailed text: ‘It appeared that through his progress he became a perfect monk. We ought therefore to recount all the details of his life from childhood’, states the author (, Veilleux : ). It begins in the shadow of the Life of Antony, setting up Pachomius as someone with a very similar vocation who left home to find an anchorite, Palamon, who would initiate him to the ascetic life. The foundation of a koinōnia based on a strict set of rules is not presented as Pachomius’s initial aim, but as the result of the difficulties that arose when an important following had gathered around him and needed direction. There is something aetiological about this presentation, which legitimizes and justifies the existence of the rules, and reasserts the community’s adhesion to them. In that sense, the Lives are inseparable from other pieces of the dossier, which contains the Rules and a number of Letters by Pachomius.4 The veneration of the founder held the community together, and his words and deeds acquired the quality of communal memory. The Life’s self-referential account of how it came to be shows this very clearly. Pachomius’s close disciple and successor, Theodore, worried about the wavering and loss of steadfastness of some members of the community, speaks to them at length: Listen to me, my brothers, and understand well the things I am telling you. For the man whom we are exalting is truly the father of us all after God. . . . For he I am speaking of our righteous father Pachomius is also one of the holy men of God and one who did his will always and everywhere. I am fearful that we may forget his labours and actually be unmindful of who it was who made this multitude one spirit and one body. It was accomplished by means of him and of our other holy fathers who aided him in the establishment of this holy institution . . . Now then, let us not be negligent and forget his laws and his commandments, which he gave is while he was still with us in the body. (; Veilleux : )
After some considerations on how Theodore ‘strengthened’ the brothers by telling them about Pachomius, the biographer notes that he used to tell them, ‘Pay attention to the words I am speaking to you, because a time is coming when you will not be able to find anyone able to recount them for you’ (; ibid.: ). At Theodore’s death, the new head of the community makes the same point while addressing the monks: ‘Now then, my beloved brothers, let us always remember his labours, his ascetic practices, and the tears which he shed in the Lord’s presence day and night on our behalf, that this word of Scripture may not apply to us: They quickly forgot his deeds and did not keep his counsels’ (; ibid.: ; Ps []: ). This insistence of the biographer on living memory and on the genealogical continuity of the leaders of the community with the founder highlights the role of the biographies as foundational and institutional narratives shaping the group’s historical identity and reinforcing its ‘Wir-Gefühl’, as it has been eloquently put for early medieval Saxony.5 3
See Papaconstantinou () with further references. A general presentation of the Pachomian corpus in Veilleux () and Rousseau (: ); texts in Lefort (). 5 Eggert and Pätzold (). 4
One might have expected to have a parallel biographical dossier for Shenoute, the polygraph and charismatic head of another famous monastic community. Yet what is known as the Life of Shenoute attributed to Besa has been shown to be but a collection of ascetic anecdotes adapted and put together under the name of Besa at a later stage.6 Monastic biographies continued to be produced well beyond the early period, and do not always concern founders. They are nevertheless often linked to specific institutions, and among the great deeds for which their subjects are remembered is their fight for orthodoxy and their resistance to the imposition from above of what they saw as misguided—if not outright diabolical—doctrines. The strong position taken by much of the Egyptian monastic world against the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon offered plenty of matter for such texts. From the late fifth century onwards, and most prominently in the sixth, monastic biographies were above all polemical. They used the same literary tropes of abstinence and a quest for God’s will to build strong—and not always subtle—anti-Chalcedonian arguments. Such sixth-century texts as the Life of Abraham of Pboou, the Life of Manasse, the Life of Moses of Abydos, or the Life of Daniel of Sketis, are characteristic examples of this tendency, which also touched the biographies of bishops.7 The anti-Chalcedonian position in biographical writing remained the norm well into the eighth century, while there still seemed to be something at stake. One of the last such biographies to come down to us complete in its Coptic version is the Life of Samuel of Qalamūn. The narrator, Isaac, presents himself as a priest and monk in the monastery of Qalamūn, and claims to have written the account ‘because some God-loving men and holy elders urged him to’. He relied on the accounts of ‘our holy fathers’, who ‘heard from their fathers who were before them, and they heard from their fathers, who were the disciples of the great one . . . those who have seen with their eyes and heard with their ears, their hands have touched him . . . ’ (, Alcock : ). The biography starts in the usual way, describing childhood, vocation, and departure to join a monastery in Sketis. The plot takes a new turn with the arrival of Cyrus, the new governor and patriarch sent by Heraclius to reconcile the anti-Chalcedonians with a new doctrine on ‘one energy’. Samuel—or his biographer—brands this as ‘the tome of Leo’ and tears it to pieces, whereupon he is expelled from Sketis and after a number of adventures ends up in the abandoned Qalamūn, where, reassured by an angel, he sets up a new community. This composite text, with passages and a writing style reminiscent of eighth-century martyrologies, is also part of the historical memory of a specific community, whose foundation is construed as a heroic act of anti-Chalcedonian defiance sanctioned by God himself.8
6
This has been shown by Nina Lubomirski in her dissertation, the many results of which are presented in Lubomierski (); see Amélineau () for the text and Bell () for an English translation. 7 Life of Abraham: Amélineau (: ); Life of Manasse (ibid.: ); Life of Moses (ibid.: ); see Campagnano (a; b). For the Life of Abraham, see Goehring (; ), and for a reconstruction of the texts Campagnano (). For the Life of Daniel: I. Guidi ( ). 8 A very perceptive analysis of the community’s textual production can be found in Zaborowski (), which connects the Life of Samuel with the later Apocalypse of Samuel of Qalamūn, preserved only in Arabic.
B B
.................................................................................................................................. Bishops were often styled as monks, and their biographies to a large extent take as their literary model the monastic vita. They cannot be reduced to that, however, as they also integrate political elements and refer to the administration of an episcopal see. The only see of late antique Egypt to have produced a complete series of biographies of its occupants was Alexandria. A Coptic Ecclesiastical History, composed some time after the mid-fifth century, consisted of a translation of Eusebius up to the fourth century and then proceeded bishop by bishop from Athanasius to Dioscorus, deposed in after the Council of Chalcedon (Orlandi –). It is only preserved in fragments, but seems to have formed the basis for the early sections of what came to be known as the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria. It was put together and translated into Arabic in the early eleventh century by Mawhūb b. Mans: ūr b. Muffarij (see Chapter in this volume) from a series of previous collections in Coptic.9 We do not know exactly at which point the biographies of the bishops of Alexandria started being collected as a continuous narrative of the history of the see, and whether—or when—those that did not exist had to be written, but the basic form of the work was already in place by the end of the seventh century. Because of their different authors and dates of composition, but also of the personalities of the bishops, the biographies of the History of the Patriarchs are varied in length, style, and content. On the whole, even though many borrow motifs from the monastic Lives, their genre is much more that of ‘life and times’, insisting heavily on the political and historical developments of each bishop’s tenure. In that sense, they are much closer to the genre of basileiai, political history written through biographies of kings. Through their collection and presentation in a continuous way they created an institutional memory that became the received version of the history of the Coptic church. A number of biographies of Alexandrian bishops are also known independently of the History of the Patriarchs. We know of at least two biographies of Dioscorus of Alexandria dating to the tumultuous period that followed Chalcedon. One, attributed to Theopistus the deacon, is preserved in Coptic, and another is known by an Arabic summary found in the medieval Synaxarion and is attributed to the deacon Timotheus.10 The Coptic Life of Isaac of Alexandria, who occupied the see between and , written by the then bishop of Nikiou Mena, successor of the famous John, is longer and much more detailed than that of the History of the Patriarchs, which concentrates only on some basic events of his short tenure. The Coptic Life, on the other hand, displays the usual obligatory passages of the monastic genre, intended to establish that the patriarch had first been an accomplished The complex textual history of the History of the Patriarchs was first seriously discussed in den Heijer (; see the summary in den Heijer ), and it has taken a new impetus with the recent work of Perrine Pilette: see especially Pilette () and den Heijer and Pilette (). 10 The Synaxarion is a compilation of more or less abridged saints’ Lives in the order of the liturgical calendar, used over the year for the commemoration of the respective saints. In that sense, it was a living text that continued to be updated throughout its history. The text generally referred to in the Middle Ages goes back to the fourteenth century and has been edited in two different versions, one in a series of volumes of the Patrologia orientalis, and the other in the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, see Coquin (; b). 9
monk, and that it was the holiness of his ascetic life that made him the best person for the job (Amélineau ; Bell ). The domination of the Egyptian church by Alexandria—and later Cairo—was such, that no other episcopal see emerged with enough prestige to have its own local history written. A few individual bishops did stand out, however, although not always specifically for their episcopal action. One of them was Aphou of Pemje (Oxyrhynchus), whose Life is usually given as the one extant example of anti-Origenist polemics. Indeed, that is its major theme; yet it is also a classic statement of the topos of the episcopal appointment, and thus a typical bishop’s vita. A rather strict anchorite in Middle Egypt until the beginning of old age, Aphou is one day surprised by the doctrine of the sermon he hears for Easter. An angel tells him to go to Alexandria and ‘correct those words’. Aphou goes to the capital and confronts the patriarch Theophilus on the issue of the image of God. Theophilus, convinced by Aphou’s arguments and impressed by his skill and holiness, appoints him bishop of Pemje when the holder of the post dies some time later (Orlandi and Campagnano : –). A very interesting case is that of the texts concerning Pesynthius, bishop of Keft/Koptos in Upper Egypt in the first half of the seventh century. The recent discovery of a late seventh-century manuscript in Sheikh Abd al-Qurna has shed a new light on the group of Lives already known from later manuscripts in Bohairic, Sahidic, and Arabic. In an intriguing frame story, the text is presented as the transcript of an encomium by one of his successors called Moses, which has been vetted, so to speak, by Pesynthius’ own disciple, John. Moses clarifies that his account is not a Life, but an encomium, because a biography would have gone against the humility of Pesynthius. This authorship consortium is quite unique, and could be linked to the proximity of the text to the death of Pesynthius in : the version of what is essentially the same text in a later manuscript (of ) has been transformed into a ‘Life’ according to its title. The structure of the text does support Moses’s claim, in that alongside its narrative sections, where Pesynthius is mentioned in the third person, there are also direct invocations addressed to him in the second person.11
M T S
.................................................................................................................................. Stories about martyrs were clearly a popular genre, although their success did not come as early as that of the monastic biography. They only started circulating widely towards the middle of the sixth century, just after the explosion of the number of chapels and churches dedicated to them. On the whole, Coptic martyr stories fall into the same categories as the Greek ones, either acts, which are more or less sober accounts of the trial and execution of their subject, or passions, which are romanticized tales extolling the hero’s virtue, strength, and capacity for resistance. While acts are not strictly speaking biographies, recounting only the final episode of the martyr’s life as much through dialogue as through narrative, passions are more directly inspired by the biographical form, even if they also focus on the
11 I have drawn here on the excellent analysis of the as yet unpublished early text of this Life by Renate Dekker, who is preparing its critical edition: see Dekker (). The later version is published in Budge ().
final part of the subject’s life (see Chapter in this volume on these categories in the Graeco-Roman Christian tradition). Many Coptic martyrologies are translations from Greek that have not been reworked, and for the sake of brevity I shall not cover them here, preferring to focus on those that are specifically Coptic in their literary form. These are mainly the texts that Theofried Baumeister defined as belonging to the ‘koptischer Konsens’ (Baumeister ) and that felt so foreign and repulsive to Hippolyte Delehaye.12 Coptic martyrologies focus on one martyr or a group of related martyrs. They do not describe the life of their subject ‘from birth’, but from the moment when they become involved with the persecution—overwhelmingly, in these texts, that of Diocletian. Their narrative structure follows an entirely predictable pattern. The narration generally starts with Diocletian’s edict, discusses preparations for its implementation in Alexandria, and then jumps, with very little by way of transition, to the presentation of the martyr(s) whose story is about to be told. This consists of some basic information characterizing them, describing more or less briefly their place of origin, their family, their lifestyle, and good deeds. Again with hardly any transition, they are found out by the persecutors—sometimes because they go and seek them out by helping other martyrs. The main body of the narration consists of the confrontation with the local persecutor, often Arianus, or Culcianus. Asked to sacrifice, the martyr resists, provokes the fury of the persecutor, is painstakingly tortured— which involves long passages of gory descriptions—and is healed by an angel either during the scene or during a respite in prison. The same sequence is repeated several times, until the moment comes for the martyr(s) to die. The implication is that the death is voluntary and accepted, and that after having shown that their powerful divine patron can make them indestructible, they will now join that patron in one final, glorious moment. In the narrative, that moment is signalled by a short speech addressed to the martyr by Jesus, a set piece which contains the essence of what those texts were trying to achieve. I quote from the Martyrdom of Paese and Thecla: Fear not; it is I who will protect your bodies, and will cause a martyr shrine to be built for you in my name; and whoever shall give an offering to your shrine, I will fill his house with every good thing on earth; and I will cause my angels to protect their bodies and their souls in the aeons of the light. Whoso shall write the book of your martyrdom, I will write his name in the Book of Life. And I will set my blessing and my peace in the place where your bodies shall be laid. And behold, I have set the angel Raphael to minister to your shrine; and great numbers of sick people suffering from diverse diseases shall come to your shrine, and obtain healing, and go home in peace. And whoso shall give alms to a poor person, or a stranger, or a widow on the day of your commemoration, I will not leave him lacking for any good thing for ever. Fear not, but be strong and firm; for I am with you. (Reymond and Barns : )
Apart from the narrative function of announcing the end of the story, this passage is obliquely addressed to those who are listening to it, most probably at the very shrine that it describes. The insistence on its efficiency, and the barely disguised call for offerings, are typical of this literature, produced as a form of promotional literature for the various
12
Delehaye (: esp. ).
sanctuaries that were in competition. It is also a sobering moment that precedes the final climax of the narrative, which has proceeded in a series of climactic moments, with successive rises and falls of tension. The literary form of the Martyrdoms of the koptischer Konsens is indeed, to give Delehaye his due, full of ‘commonplaces’, defying ‘history and common sense’, and displaying ‘a taste for exaggeration that does not fear the absurd’ (Delehaye : ; my translation). In fact, these are the elements that bring martyrologies much closer to entertainment literature than any other form of hagiography.13 They are the type of narratives described by Umberto Eco in his Il superuomo di massa: an invariable basic structure with a Manichaean ideology built around elementary oppositions, where the pleasure does not come ‘from the incredible and the new, but from the obvious and the usual’ (Eco : ; my translation); a literature whose function is to restate and reaffirm the validity of a cultural system of expectations, and whose appeal is principally ‘the return of the déjà vu’, more precisely its cyclical return not only in a single work but in a series of comparable narratives (ibid.: ). Their focus on an individual, and their assumption of the (semi-)biographic form help them fulfil this function: through their identification with the hero and the values he or she represents, the public, despite being primarily entertained, gradually acquire a sense of common identity and shared values. Like fairy tales, such narratives help create and maintain forms of social memory (Fentress and Wickham : –).14 If we see the stories in this light, what was felt as gory and repulsive by Delehaye (‘boucheries répugnantes’, : ) can instead be understood as grotesque and intended to amuse the audience. Some of the scenes described come very close to modern slapstick comedy. A brief example from the Martyrdom of Shenoufe and his Brethren illustrates this: It befell that when she had said this, the governor was angry and he caused her belly and her breasts to be cleft open; and he had pepper and salt and mustard and acrid vinegar brought, and he had them applied to her belly and her breasts. And through the power of God her breasts ceased bleeding and they issued forth milk, and sprinkled the tormentors who were torturing her. (Reymond and Barns : )
One can picture the scene—as the audience certainly did when the text was being read out to them. Although falling short of theatrical performance, such readings were nevertheless powerfully performative and conjured up a whole universe of images that went from the sublime to the grotesque and back again.15
As recognized by Alexander Kazhdan, hagiographical texts were ‘the mass media of the time’, crammed as they were ‘with sujets that attracted the average listener: travels and shipwrecks, natural disasters, fantastic beasts, incredible healings, murders and thefts . . . ’ (Kazhdan : ). 14 There are many more important issues relevant to Coptic martyrological literature, but I will leave them aside because they do not pertain directly to the topic of biography; see the relevant studies by Tito Orlandi in the bibliography. 15 See the analysis of martyr stories as performative texts in Grig (). 13
‘T B’: F L-W
.................................................................................................................................. Biographic elements can be found in many different forms and sizes, and, as Part V of this volume explores more widely, in many different media. They differ from formal biography in that they do not focus primarily on an individual’s life from the cradle to the grave, even though they can give more, and more precise, information about some sections or aspects of an individual’s life. Some forms can be extensive, others short vignettes. The list is infinite, and therefore I will focus on three categories that appear significant in Coptic. First, several Coptic life stories are known to us through encomia. These were composite texts, including partial accounts of an individual’s life, but adding rhetorical elements such as invective, exhortation, explanation, or invocation. They routinely address the audience as well as the honorand, thus breaking the continuity of the narrative. Encomiastic literature is one of the most well-furnished sections of Coptic literature from the late sixth century onwards. Encomia were pronounced about martyrs or monks, and could be turned into anything their author wanted, with the biographic element often offering a welcome pretext. The Encomium of Antony by John of Shmun is a textbook piece of epideictic rhetoric weaving information from the Life by Athanasius to extol the virtues of Antony as a symbol of the holiness of the land of Egypt itself (Garitte ). The Encomium of Victor the General, falsely attributed to Celestinus of Rome, consists mainly of comparisons of Victor with various famous saints corresponding to aspects of his own holiness, all addressed to Victor himself (‘Who shall I compare you with . . . ?’), interwoven with a series of very moralistic miracles whose point is additionally driven home by addressing the audience directly to make the morale explicit (Budge : –). The Encomium of Colluthus by Isaac of Antinoe, although only preserved in fragments, must have contained a proper biographical account as one of the fragments narrates his childhood (Schenke : –). The second group is made up of what we might call mini-vitae. These are life-narratives that are embedded in longer biographies, introducing one of the characters of the subject’s entourage. Several of these are found in the Pachomian biographical dossier, some very short, others quite developed.16 The stories of his two successors, Horsiesius and Theodore, are a case in point. They are introduced in a fragmented manner throughout the narrative, but it is possible to reconstruct what was probably a continuous text used by the compilers. Another biography contained in the Bohairic Life at its most complete is that of Theodore the Alexandrian, a character described as a central figure in the overall organization of the community under Pachomius and his successor Theodore. He is presented as a young man from a pagan family of Alexandria who wanted to become a monk, and eventually becomes the community’s chief interpreter and head of the house of the Greek-speakers.17 This relatively short narrative starts in the standard form of a monastic biography, especially 16 The Life of Abraham mentioned above is another case in point, as it is largely reconstructed from a digression in the Life of Manasse: see Goehring () and Campagnano (). 17 Bohairic Vita , Veilleux (: ).
until Theodore joins the monastery of Pachomius. The sections that follow, although still telling Theodore’s story, are subordinated to the master narrative of Pachomius’ life, in such a way that Theodore’s life becomes a sub-narrative, evolving always in a dialectical relation with the main narrative line: Thanks to his steadfastness and to his intelligence [Theodore] understood the Egyptian language. At the time when our father Pachomius was speaking the word of God to the brothers, Theodore would hear from his mouth; and on returning to his house he would repeat in Greek to those he served as interpreter. Like a nurse comforting her children, he comforted them with the words of life of our father Pachomius, with which he instructed them and which he recommended they put into practice and keep carefully in their hearts.18
The thread of Theodore’s life is entirely interwoven with that of Pachomius, of whom he almost becomes the linguistic mirror figure, communicating through his master’s words instead of his own. In this sense, Theodore’s life story serves to enhance the authority and stature of Pachomius. It is also a life story that, just like those of other disciples and his two successors, remains incomplete, as the master narrative ends with the death of Pachomius and the establishment of his succession, leaving the end of the disciples’ life open. The third group constitutes an unexpected place for biographical fragments to crop up: deeds and documents. Although Coptic literature produced no biographies of secular individuals, we do, paradoxically, have life fragments from the man and the woman in the street, preserved, like so much everyday information, in documentary texts on papyrus. This is principally the case in private legal documents which describe the circumstances that brought them into being. Wills, and inheritance or divorce settlements, contain passages that narrate episodes, or even summarize essential aspects of the life of the parties. Terry Wilfong was able to extract a substantial amount of information about two women from the Upper Egyptian village of Jēme from a group of deeds produced in relation to an inheritance dispute. Apart from the standard information about one’s family that comes in the preamble of such documents, the narrations can give many personal biographical details:19 In those troubled years that are past, you, my husband Abraham, went south to Syene, your city. You sold your house the one that came to you from your parents and you received solidi of gold . . . You brought them to me with the entire wealth of your parents, including iron, bronze, from the most valuable to the cheapest. . . . [follows a description of various transactions] . . . We have received them ourselves together, me with you, and Maria, my mother, as she had become old, and Georgios, this one whom I bore with my first husband Loule . . . God knows that from this day I have carried out fully for him the inheritance on behalf of his late father Loule, and God knows that from this day he has received from me another solidi and a tremis. I, and my husband, and my small children see I owe them, and God knows that I have done enough good for him until he has grown up and left me and left me in debt.20
18 19 20
Bohairic Vita , Veilleux (: ). Wilfong () makes excellent use of those narrations in Chapter : . P.KRU , ; ; ; trans. in Wilfong (: , ).
The most interesting documents in that respect are twenty-six deeds of donation through which parents transfer the ownership of their children to the monastery of St Phoebammon in western Thebes.21 These contain a narrative section of varying length which describes their wish for a child, the vow made to the monastery to donate the child if they had one, their hesitation in fulfilling their vow once they had brought up the child, their punishment by Saint Phoebammon through the illness of said child, and the eventual capitulation represented by their signing the document before them. After the mercy God has ordered and my son was born, I thought of my sins and decided that, if he would live, I would give him to the monastery of Apa Phoibammon for the salvation of my soul. But when the little boy grew up and made good progress, I intended to break my vow that I had settled with God and his Saint. After that, the little boy fell into a great and very severe disease, and we had much grief about the little boy and we were envious to see all the healthy little children who are the consolation of their parents. We discussed I and his mother that perhaps God and his Saint had done this for us, since we had infringed the alliance that we had formed with him. We consulted together: ‘Let’s set off and take the little boy and go to the holy monastery and request the holy martyr: “Forgive us the boldness we have done!” Perhaps he will ask God and he gives healing to the little boy.’ Then we took the little boy and brought him into the holy monastery. We always besought God and his Saint, the holy Phoibammon, we cried and besought the martyr: ‘Forgive us the sin we have done!’, and we always received the holy Communion together with the little boy, and after a period of one month, he who had listened to the prayers of the blessed Anna, the mother of Samuel the prophet, also listened to us. He gave healing to the little boy, and we went back home, praised God and reflected: ‘This little boy was counted among the dead before he received healing. But now, he has got well. So he may become a servant of the holy monastery, the place where he received healing.’22
The resemblance between these narrative sections and some contemporary miracle stories is striking, both in plot and style. It demonstrates the importance of the common textual memory created by the stories that circulated. Strictly from the point of view of the biographic, however, these texts have an immediacy and an authenticity that literary compositions lack. Above all, they are written in the first person, thus constituting rare examples of the auto-biographic form in Coptic. They are also prime examples of standardized and repetitive biographical writing, where personal details are simple variations inserted within a pre-existing narrative: indeed, the text of those vignettes was not authored by the parents themselves, nor even by the notary who drew up the document, but by an individual who at some earlier point had drawn up the documents used as models for those deeds. Within that very formulaic frame, such ad hoc details as a boy falling into a fire were inserted for specific stories (Papaconstantinou forthcoming).
21 On the biographic narratives of these documents, see the beautiful and detailed study by T.S. Richter (), and the analysis in Papaconstantinou (forthcoming). 22 P.KRU , ; trans. T.S. Richter (: ).
C
.................................................................................................................................. What has been said above does not exhaust the subject of Coptic life-writing, far from it. Identifying its various strands and forms, however, can open up new avenues for the analysis of Coptic literature. On the whole, the rise of the biographic that has been noted more generally for Late Antiquity is greatly felt in Coptic texts, perhaps even more strongly than in other languages as a proportion of the overall production. In many ways, the impulses of classical biography can be found in Coptic texts: they are used to define morality, provide examples, obtain adherence, persuade, justify, or legitimize. From the self-denying exemplum to the incredible superhero whose adventures inspired a mix of entertainment, suspense, and fear, the range of admirable individuals was broad. What brings all of those life stories together is their general lack of individuality in the characterization. Just enough is said to make characters recognizable in the narrative, but even that is chosen among a set of normative virtues rather than an attempt at individualization in the modern sense. The stress of these stories is on the authority embedded in a number of exemplary individuals, and the true source of that authority comes from conformity to a model and a set of received criteria. Accordingly, the genre is not at all introspective, despite the meta-discourse on introspection that pervades the ascetic biographies. The cultural role of those life stories for Coptic self-perception was certainly enormous. The history of the community is construed as the succession of the actions of great men (and a handful of women), and from the level of the village or monastic community to that of the Coptic church as a whole, these stories were read, heard, discussed, and repeated, creating overlapping forms of communal historical identity and reasserting cultural values and social cohesion.23
F R There is hardly any work discussing the biographical aspects of Coptic literature per se. General overviews are given by Orlandi (; ), Emmel (), and Boud’hors (), and for hagiogra phy more specifically Orlandi (b) and Papaconstantinou (). The most thorough overview of late antique Egypt (to the late fifth century) is Bagnall (). More general and shorter are sections of Bowman (), Keenan (), and Papaconstantinou (). The lavishly illustrated Gabra () covers a longer period but offers sections on many different subjects. For the world of Egyptian monasticism in general, see Goehring (; ), Rousseau (), and Wipszycka (). On the cultural role of martyrologies, see Papaconstantinou (); interesting examples of recon structions of life stories from papyri in Wilfong () and Papaconstantinou (forthcoming); and finally, on the translation of Coptic texts into Arabic in the Middle Ages, see Rubenson ().
23
See Papaconstantinou (), as well as van Minnen (), who describes hagiography in general as an aspect of Egyptian cultural memory.
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I
.................................................................................................................................. T diverse Armenian biographical material to be investigated here was transmitted directly or indirectly in written form and hence dependent on the existence of a writing system. Particular historical forces converged to realize this project as part of a process to diffuse literacy in Southern Caucasia in the early fifth century (Cowe : –). Initiated primarily as a means of advancing the cause of Christian proclamation and solidarity in the region, the movement to inaugurate a literate tradition inspired the participation of pluralist trends in Armenian society to employ the medium to engage in dialogue on issues of collective identity and values. By the end of the Umayyad era that process of exchange had resulted in the construction of a relatively connected master narrative of Armenian origins and the course of secular and sacred history that included a gallery of variegated portraits of the pre-eminent figures that shaped these developments, a selection of which will form the focus of our discussion. The criteria for selection include literary significance, the prominence of the individuals portrayed, and the texts’ rhetorical impact on Armenian society in both the religious and cultural spheres. To contextualize that history and its literary and biographical articulation, it may be useful to consider briefly Armenia’s geopolitical transformation over the preceding millennium within the broader sphere of regional developments. While all of Asia Minor was engulfed in the Achaemenian Empire of Persia from the fifth century , the satrapies of Cappadocia and Armenia were only loosely confederated under Alexander’s empire, and achieved independence after his death. In the course of the first century , however, they acknowledged Roman suzerainty, and this led inexorably to Cappadocia’s annexation under Tiberius. Though Trajan reduced Armenia to the status of province briefly in , it returned to its position as client kingdom under Hadrian, yet the contiguous area of Lesser Armenia was annexed in . Wars with the Sasanians that occupied a large part of the third and fourth centuries culminated in the division of suzerainty over the remaining state of Greater Armenia between the combatants in , an event that contributed to the
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invention of the Armenian alphabet about two decades later in the eastern section of the country under Persian influence (Hewsen : , ). Thus, whereas the centralizing structure of Roman provincial administration and the pervasiveness of Greek in Asia Minor had stifled the inauguration of an indigenous literary tradition in the western portion of the landmass, the more devolved Persian power structure and the gradual elevation of the status of Armenian in the multilingual environment of Greater Armenia conspired to crystallize one unitary higher register above the level of dialectal diversity under the favourable conditions of entente between Yazdgard I and Theodosius I that continued into the twenties of the next century.1 Though none of the genres to be considered can be described as biography in the narrow sense, oral tales, historical writing, hagiography, and hymnography all afford examples of preoccupation with the motivations and actions of certain prime individuals, who serve as pivots around whom the narrative is constructed. Indeed, as we are dealing with the symbiosis of oral and written streams and the gestation of the latter out of indigenous narrative structures together with models of Syriac and increasingly Greek provenance, we observe that these early works do not frequently conform to rigid generic classifications, sometimes weaving elements of several genres within their texture.
H O T P G
.................................................................................................................................. Oral narratives glorifying the aristocratic lifestyle and martial ethos performed by bards (gusan) at feasts were an integral aspect of the aesthetic disseminated by the Parthian dynasty,2 and we are fortunate that elements of these have been preserved in the ‘history’ (patmut‘iwn) traditionally attributed to P‘awstos Buzand probably composing in the s, who relies heavily on a series of oral tales in praise of the Mamikonian house as a major source for fourth-century Armenian events (Garsoïan : –). Building on the foundation of literate narrative laid by Koriwn and Agathangelos, P‘awstos treats the intervening period from c. to the division of Greater Armenia between Rome and Persia in mentioned above. Since the second half of that timeframe was characterized by almost perpetual warfare between the two regional powers, the role of the Mamikonians as hereditary commander-in-chief (sparapet) of the Armenian forces was pre-eminent in unifying the local aristocratic contingents to defend the territorial integrity of the realm. Although the underlying oral narratives were previously regarded as constituting an integral epic (Abełyan : –, –), it is more likely that they represent a loose series of tales, each clustering around the leading representative of the house. This reflects the characteristic repertoire of the oral aesthetic in omitting secondary details of time and place and any strict chronological framework to centre the action on the interchange 1
For the political background to the entente, see McDonough (), and for the contrasting Persian and Roman administrative styles, see Areshian (: ). 2 On this genre, see Boyce (), and for its continuation into the Sasanian period and beyond, see Shayegan (: , ).
between the protagonists. As such, the narratives afford a decidedly biographical focus, highlighting the individual’s activities from assuming the office of sparapet until death. As the material devoted to Mušeł Mamikonian is most complete, it will form the basis for our discussion. Though each hero emerges as a distinct figure, certain recurring features are handled generically through the use of formulae, which often embody hyperbole (Garsoïan : –). The cycles offer a realistic depiction of the aristocratic lifestyle revolving around the pursuits of feasts and associated drinking bouts, together with the hunts and warfare. Mušeł’s prowess in military skills is epitomized in his title as ‘the rider on the white horse’, while the physique, stature, and strength of his nephews Manuēl and Koms are extolled in the larger-than-life account of how the one carried the other most of the way back to Armenia from Persian captivity (Patkanean : (Armenian); Garsoïan : (English)). While the spectacle of military lustre is powerfully evoked by reference to the ‘resplendent banners and unfurled standards’, the narrative clearly presents the underlying hardships Mušeł faces in holding together Armenia’s loose social hierarchy between an array of noble families eager to preserve their local prerogatives under a relatively weak king as primus inter pares vacillating between Roman and Persian suzerainty. Granted the endemic volatility of the changing balance of power and the continual round of temporary alliances, pragmatics often prevailed over principle in determining policy, hence the premium placed on loyalty to the ‘true lords’ of the Arsacid house occupying the Armenian throne. Here the narrative deftly distinguishes the self-serving approach of other aristocrats from the prevailing sense of duty typifying Mušeł’s outlook. This attains its apogee in the exchange between King Pap and the sparapet during the battle at Mount Npat. The atmosphere of sedition has raised royal suspicions of Mušeł’s trustworthiness, to which the commander replies, ‘I shall live and die for you as my ancestors did for your ancestors.’ His sincere confession then elicits the monarch’s contrite acknowledgement both of Mušeł’s personal valour as well as his family’s lineage, having held kingship among the Čenk’ before settling in Armenia (Patkanean : ; Garsoïan : ). While Mušeł was ruthless in executing punishment on traitors, such as exposing the Mardpet Glak to his death on a frozen river in winter or the flaying alive of six hundred men in the Persian camp as vengeance for Šapur II’s similar treatment of his father Vasak, he was also capable of acts of great forbearance. Probably the most signal of those was his gallantry towards the Persian king’s wives who were captured on campaign and assured safe passage back to Persian territory. This is particularly significant in terms of recent : history when the same king, having brought the Armenian queen P’aranjem to his capital, had subjected her to debauchery and death. The narrative records that Šapur was so moved by his benevolence and nobility that he had a cup fashioned with Mušeł’s image on horseback emblazoned on it with which he would toast him while feasting (Patkanean : ; Garsoïan : ).3 Towards the end of his life the tale celebrates Mušeł’s virtues in a consummate paean that encapsulates the essence of his unflagging dedication to build up the realm and regain all the territory lost to Persia. This he did to maintain the fabric of Armenian society and 3
For the significance of the image of the horseman, see Harper ().
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defend ‘God’s covenant’, the good estate of the Christian communion in Armenia (on the term, see Garsoïan : –). The portrayal is a fitting contrast to the narrative of his death, murdered ironically at the behest of the Arsacid king Varazdat to satisfy the scheming of another noble when incapacitated by wine at a feast supposedly held in his honour. In typical devotion to the military ethos, his final words were ‘Would that it had been met on horseback’ (Patkanean : ; Garsoïan : ).
T T L B F: K’ L Mš‘
.................................................................................................................................. The introduction of literacy in Armenian led to the formation of a new cultural aesthetic characterized not only by its medium but also by the new scribal class it generated, the more overtly Christian ethos it imbued, and a more definitively articulated severing of affinities with Persia. Its debate with the typology of the older oral tradition is manifest in the first indigenous hagiographical work from the mid-s devoted to Maštoc‘, the creator of the alphabet, initiator of an impressive programme of translation of theological and liturgical texts, who is also cited as the author of certain tracts (Cowe : –). The book was composed by his pupil Koriwn who frequently obtrudes himself in the narrative as a witness to the veracity of what he recounts.4 Enunciating the watchword of innovation throughout, the author displays a general dependence on Greek biographical and other prose models in structure, style, and morphology, notable in his exuberant coining of neologisms. Anticipating criticism from traditionalists, he distinguishes his project from ‘old tales’ by which he is presumably alluding to the aristocratic lays discussed above and the mythological tales to be discussed later (Pivazyan : – (Armenian); (English)). In contrast to narratives embellished with ‘false eloquence’ for entertainment, his memorial (yišatakaran) to his master, to which later scribes have accorded the title vark‘ (vita), is intended as a factual account with the more edifying purpose of presenting his teacher as a standard for emulation by his ‘spiritual sons’ for generations to come.5 Indeed, the miraculous is limited to the flight of evil spirits in response to his preaching on one occasion and the appearance of a luminous cross above him at his death (ibid.: , ; , ). His anticipated opponents appreciate the oral lays’ glorification of the aristocratic lifestyle in celebrating the heroic exploits of scions of noble houses as a champion (nahatak) on the battlefield and query his presumption, first, in selecting as subject a figure who was neither from the upper nobility nor associated with military prowess and, second, in transmitting his work in writing. Significantly, although Koriwn states Maštoc‘’s birthplace and father’s name, he does not include his gentilic or other indication of family (ibid.: ; ). Nevertheless, he must have possessed a certain status to be trained in Greek 4 5
For the significance of personal experience of the subject rather than hearsay, see Hägg (a: ). For emulation of the subject as a goal in ancient biography, see Hägg and Rousseau (: ).
and to serve in the office of the chiliarchate before becoming a hermit. The hagiographer counters the anticipated charge by a number of stratagems, first, by portraying monastic asceticism in battling the demons as a pursuit equally demanding of physical fortitude to endure deprivation in the rigorous West Syrian mode ( ibid.: ; –). These then justify the hagiographer’s categorizing Maštoc‘ as a martyr (lit. ‘witness’: vkay) to Christ in ‘crucifying’ his flesh to discipline it spiritually in section . He also appeals to the precedent of scripture and patristic tradition in section for the probity of preserving a written record of the ‘perfect’ (ibid.: ; ). His authorization derives from the Bible’s explicit injunction, which applies to all nations, envisaging a universal process into which Armenia is now being drawn as it becomes more thoroughly integrated into Christendom. Though not of noble birth, the scriptural examples display nobility (aznuakanut’iwn) of action, heroism (like Job), and virtue. Moreover, Koriwn undermines the priority of the military ethos by emphasizing that some of those worthy of commemoration were women (e.g. Rahab, the Canaanite woman). Exploiting his newfound voice, the author contends that ultimately it is not birth and rank that determine merit, but the action of divine grace, before which the appropriate attitude is humility. In the final analysis, Maštoc‘ afforded a more elevated model for adulation, being filled with the Spirit, rather than inebriated from an aristocratic drinking bout (ibid.: ; ). The narrative provides a connected chronological account of Maštoc‘’s career as a missionary to the outlying less-churched provinces (sections –), converting them from their ‘native traditions’ of paganism to Christianity. Grasping from this experience the utility of an alphabet and written culture to impact the community more effectively over the longer term, he travels to the Mesopotamian cities of Edessa and Samosata in the Roman sphere for assistance in the project, after which he inaugurates a network of schools. His task of bringing the new gift of literacy to other borderlands in the south and north is interspersed with journeys to Iberia and Caucasian Albania to replicate the production of indigenous writing systems, as well as sending petitions to Theodosius II for permission to introduce Armenian scribal arts in Lesser Armenia, which had been under Roman control since (ibid.: –; –). Thereafter, sections – offer a summation of his activities in monastic training, translation, and writing in defence of Nicene orthodoxy against Arian subordination, other Christian heresies, and pagan polytheism.6 In contrast, the s elicit little comment until the description of the death in of catholicos Sahak, the primate, his co-worker of many years, whose loss he bears with deep sorrow. Before his own death in the next year, one of Maštoc‘’s final tasks is to designate a successor from among his pupils. Born in Tarōn, the province under the jurisdiction of the chief-bishop of Greater Armenia and hence probably the most christianized, Maštoc‘ did not hail from the conventional priestly caste, and entered ecclesiastical service after a secular career. Similarly, his post as chorepiscopus differed from the regular episcopacy in granting him a peripatetic care over much of the country rather than a single diocese. Consequently, the hagiographer characterizes his roving ministry by innovation in form and methods. Frequently, he is likened to the apostle Paul in his journeys, the evangelists in preaching,
6
For the parallel of Athanasius’ Life of Antony where the author, reaching a convenient plateau in his chronological narrative, expands on a range of activities by his subject, see ibid.: .
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Christ in teaching, and Moses, the subject of his syncrisis in section , both in terms of the ‘God-given characters’ of the tablets on Sinai and those of the first codex in the Armenian alphabet that Maštoc‘ was taking back to his homeland and the orthopraxy he inculcated in his ethical instruction (ibid.: ; ).7 As a result, the author associates his subject directly with the apostolic era, omitting almost all reference to the intervening centuries. Like many early Armenian literary works, Koriwn’s composition embodies a utilitarian aesthetic, and was an official commission by his fellow pupil Yovsēp’. The harmony the author presents as typifying the polity in the early decades of the century and the synergy : between the monarch Vramšapuh, the hierarch Sahak, and Maštoc‘ under Yazdgard I’s support for religious minorities fragmented under his son Bahram V, leading to the abolition of the Arsacid house and a period of direct Sasanian rule, paralleled by the direction of the Armenian church by a series of Persian-approved candidates over the decade –.8 The situation was further exacerbated by the accession of the new king Yazdgard II whose reign witnessed a return to older policies of persecuting religious minorities and seeking to impose Zoroastrianism throughout the realm. As Maštoc‘ provided legitimacy for the hierarchy that could not win ratification from the Persian court, so this text enshrining his principles and ethics inspired the primary movement to defend Armenian Christianity with the ideals of unity, solidarity, and cooperation.
T C B T S G I
.................................................................................................................................. Yazdgard II’s policy of imposing Zoroastrianism in Armenia in the s, dispatching mogpets to inculcate the tenets of Mazdaeism and committing sacrilege against churches, transforming them into fire temples, exacerbated divisions in the Armenian polity. One faction of nobles under the marzpan Vasak Siwni from a province bordering Persia and with close social affinities enjoyed legitimacy and supported the policy, while another led by the Mamikonians and the church revolted against these measures, arguing for the alien nature of Zoroastrian lore and rites in Armenia. To advance their cause this party compiled a life of St Gregory the Illuminator, the baptizer and first organizer of Armenian Christianity in the early fourth century, in which they portrayed him as the originator of all major facets of Armenian doctrine and canon law, seeking thereby to demonstrate rhetorically, in parallel with writers in Cappadocia and Pontus, that Christianity was well established in Armenian society over several generations (Van Dam : –). Addressing by means of a vaticinium ex eventu the existential aporia of how the Christian God could permit his shrines to be desecrated and his faithful to be oppressed, those events were depicted as part For a discussion of the biblical worthies assuming the place of pagan mythological figures as a basis for comparison, see ibid.: . 8 For the biographical stratagem of employing silence to circumvent unpleasant subject matter, see ibid.: . 7
of the divine plan vouchsafed in a vision to Gregory over a century earlier, which culminated in the symbolic heavenly crowning of the martyrs who died in a crucial battle at Avarayr against the Persian forces in and the descent to hell of their adversaries (Thomson : –). This composite work currently bearing the generic (and clearly secondary) title History of Armenia is an amalgam of materials in different genres: history, romance, hagiography, martyrology, catechetical exposition, etc. (Cowe : –). Moreover, granted the martyrological imperative of presenting the account as that of an eyewitness, authorship is ascribed to a fourth-century court scribe Agathangelos (lit. ‘bearer of good news’), whose narrative was subsequently rendered into Armenian. In foregrounding St Gregory’s paramount role in establishing Armenian Christianity, the text not only seeks to counter alternative narratives of Armenia’s affinities with Persian Zoroastrianism but also with the Syriac tradition associating the region’s evangelization with Thaddaeus. Indeed, the ‘teaching’ (vardapetut’iwn), which the saint delivers to the Armenian court over several days in preparation for baptism, may be intended to parallel that of Addai/Thaddaeus in Edessa.9 Meanwhile, several other facets of the second part of the Life involving missionary journeys and the erection of schools seem to have been drawn from Koriwn to indicate that concerns for the church’s embrace of the whole country and its attention to clerical literacy (at that point in Greek) had characterized Christianity in Armenia from its very origins. In this way, the work represents a growing text building on original oral material, combined with various written sources that coalesced into various forms in its developmental process into the early seventh century.10 One of its putative redactions dated to around the s became a model for P‘awstos portrayal of several of St Gregory’s descendants in the primatial office in the mid-fourth century, particularly Nersēs, about a decade later, endowing them with sermons and paraeneses, as well as ex eventu predictions regarding Greater Armenia’s partition in that presuppose a later vantage point, one aspect of which is the heightened anti-Persian rhetoric, which likely reflects Armenian reaction to Yazdgard II’s demarches in the midfifth century.11
L P‘‘’ H T B S
.................................................................................................................................. Writing at the end of that century, Lazar P‘arpec‘i, another author composing under Mamikonian patronage, embodies several of the above perspectives in his history, which 9 G. Howard () for the Syriac original and Anonymous () for the early Armenian redaction of the text. 10 Van Esbroeck () and Thomson (). For the possible connection of these redactions to the unfolding Christological debates associated with the Council of Chalcedon (), see Cowe (: ). 11 In this regard it is valuable to compare the impact on Armenian society of Šapur II’s attempts to introduce Zoroastrianism with the assistance of the Armenian noble Meružan Arcruni in the s and that of Yazdgard II with Vasak Siwni in the s.
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continues those of Agathangelos and P‘awstos, tracing the century from Greater Armenia’s partition in until the appointment of Vahan Mamikonian as governor (marzpan) of the territory under Persian suzerainty in . The work is divided into three sections (druag), each of which is dominated by one central figure, thus betraying the author’s biographical interests: the first devoted to Sahak Part‘ew, final chief-bishop of the Gregorid line, the second to Vardan Mamikonian, the martyr-hero of Avarayr (Cowe : –), and the third to his nephew Vahan. His didactic purpose in writing is manifest in his comments on recording ‘the excellence of valiant men and the virtues of spiritual men’ (Kouymjian : (Armenian); Thomson : (English)).12 Moreover, he infuses his narrative with a certain unity, tracing the powerful role, which he contends Persia had progressively exercised in Armenian internal affairs from the last quarter of the fourth century up to the mid-fifth century, after which he highlights Armenian efforts to defend their religious distinctiveness, concluding with an account of how autonomy in that sphere was ultimately conceded by the new shah Bałaš. At times we observe a tension between the details of events at the micro level and his overarching focus. In his introduction Lazar indicates his familiarity with the canons of rhetoric and historical writing and outlines his efforts to discuss particulars with eyewitnesses to supplement written sources (Kouymjian : –; Thomson : ), and his work reveals the appropriate use of speeches to convey to the reader his understanding of the speaker’s primary motivations. Nevertheless, a number of cases can be found, mainly in the first section, where his account diverges from others for partisan purposes. Similarly, while he maintains Sahak Part‘ew’s perspective in speeches that the Arsacid dynasty constitutes the Armenians’ natural lords and that the nobles should pardon the last scion’s indiscretions (Kouymjian : ; Thomson : ), the historian frequently comments on the house’s debauchery and unworthiness to rule. In this, he is following P‘awstos’ depiction of St Nersēs’ curse on the royal family to the effect that their iniquities will precipitate the division of . As previously noted, Lazar views that watershed as the opportunity for greater Persian interference in Armenia, and hence his disparagement of the Arsacids may be viewed as a strategy to heighten the Mamikonians’ moral justification for adopting a leadership position in the Armenian polity. Likewise, although he frequently describes the Persian king as a tyrant and heathen and his people as ‘impious’, the historian exploits his position as head of state on occasion to underscore his protagonists’ exalted status when they are received at court with honour and deference (Kouymjian : ; Thomson : ). His eulogistic depiction of Sahak Part‘ew in the first section begins by extolling his aristocratic lineage. This emerges most prominently in his encounter with the Persian official Surēn Pahlawuni, described as issuing from the same noble Parthian family, who accords him great distinction during his visit to the capital Seleucia-Ctesiphon (Kouymjian : ; Thomson : –). This theme is reiterated at several junctures in Armenia as large contingents assemble to beseech the hierarch to undertake some task or to learn his viewpoint on an issue of critical moment. The presence of members of the upper nobility in those assemblies is mentioned as a matter of particular satisfaction to Sahak. The prelate is also hailed as a fitting descendant of his father Nersēs and of Gregory, the originator of the 12
On didacticism inspiring biography, see Hägg and Rousseau (: ).
line. As such, he is continually called upon to emulate their glorious deeds, and this in turn leads to his presentation as a figure of exceptional erudition and unique abilities. Portrayed as following the mould of Gregory and Nersēs as elaborated by Agathangelos and P‘awstos in being vouchsafed a divine vision explaining future events, Sahak is presented as symbolically witnessing the removal of the Arsacid dynasty from the Armenian throne in and that of the Gregorid line from the office of chief-bishop in his own demotion for refusing to sanction direct Persian rule (Kouymjian : –; Thomson : –). Like Gregory’s account, Sahak’s also offers consolation by a positive conclusion, foretelling a reaffirmation of those families and a return to their rule (Kouymjian : ; Thomson : ). The description of the first hierarch of this renewed line as one who officially retains only the rank of priest obviously denotes Yovsēp’, catholicos in the s–s whom we have already encountered, who, if not directly descended from the family of St Gregory, certainly maintained the policies and perspective associated with them. The secular realm is not as clearly delineated, but would seem to refer to Vahan Mamikonian’s accession as marzpan, thus securing Armenia’s internal autonomy. As the Mamikonians had intermarried with the Arsacids in the fourth century, Vahan was patently related by blood. Moreover, there are indications to suggest that the historian supported Mamikonian aspirations to gain the crown as well, though this latter goal was never realized.13
B T S Ḣ ’̄ F H
.................................................................................................................................. A secondary subject intertwined with St Gregory’s life is the martyrdom of the : Hrip’simeank’, a group of virgins who had fled to Greater Armenia to escape Diocletian’s persecutions, but are put to death at Trdat’s command and given burial by the saint.14 The narrative is embellished with romance motifs from the genre of the ancient novel (Mahé : ), presenting the protagonist St Hrip’simē as a high-born lady selected to marry the emperor, furnished with a struggle with the king parallel to the martyrology of St Thecla, and punctuated by long prayers following biblical precedent articulating her fervent expectation of union with her bridegroom Christ (Terian ; ; Pidejian ). The close of the long gestation of the tradition surrounding St Gregory coincided with the Byzantino-Persian war of –, which led to a second partition of Armenia between the two powers and a parallel theological division between the Chalcedonian sphere on the Byzantine side and the Miaphysite domain, on the other. Several Armenian churches with dedications relating to the contested saints that were destroyed in the course of the hostilities were reconstructed by catholicos Komitas Ałc‘ec‘i ‘the Builder’ (d. ), including : that of St Hrip‘simē in Vałaršapat (Plontke-Lüning : , , , ). Replacing the original martyrium with a larger church still standing today, the hierarch composed a festal Kouymjian (: (corrupt Arsacids), (righteous Mamikonians)); Thomson (: (corrupt Arsacids), (righteous Mamikonians)). 14 For the frequency of Christian biography of women in contrast to classical precedents, see Hägg (a: ). 13
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hymn (kac‘urd) for its inauguration, which represents an impressive rhetorical tour de force. Influenced by the Syriac liturgical genre of madrasha, an extensive hymn in isosyllabic lines with alphabetic acrostich, but maintaining continuity with earlier forms of Armenian verse in rhythm and in the use of alliteration and assonance, the work reflects on the deeper religious significance of the martyrs’ biography (Cowe : –). Each four-line stanza explores a discrete aspect of the whole, revolving cyclically between themes in the exchange of antiphonal choirs in contrast to the vita’s rectilinear motion. A celebratory tone pervades the work, contextualizing the actions through typology and symbol, creating arresting expressions to memorable effect. The virgins’ exceptional beauty provokes the passionate arousal of the heavenly host (tarp‘ac‘eal), while their high status and association with the imperial capital add to their social appeal. Continually the author strives for the rhetorical goal of paradox, evoking wonder and marvel at the operation of divine providence. Combining the indigenous male imagery of the champion in battle and the Roman image of the athlete at the games with the gospel parable of the ‘wise virgins’ (Matt :–), he synthesizes the martyr’s crown of victory with that of marriage, depicting the virgins as an anticipation of the church entering the heavenly bridal chamber of Christ.15 The final apostrophe similarly portrays them as unifying the various polarities of existence, joining the earthly with the heavenly, while serving as a model for believers, of holiness for women and teaching for righteous men.
T O M H
.................................................................................................................................. Practically the only late antique account treating the Armenian ethnogenesis and preChristian lore is the history of Movsēs Xorenac‘i. In so doing the author has recourse to a variety of oral myths and legends still transmitted in the province of Gołt‘n in particular, which he integrates into his overarching schema (Thomson : –). The author presents himself as a pupil of Maštoc‘, but modern scholarship has uncovered a range of material embedded in the work that suggest either that a later date be ascribed to the whole or that we must postulate the involvement of one or more redactors moulding the work into its current form (Sahakyan ). Employing the architectonics of Eusebius’ Chronicle, fully preserved only in Armenian translation, Movsēs pegs the heroes of ancient Armenian oral tradition to the biblical genealogies of the Patriarchs, integrating into the narrative data deriving from earlier Greek historians cited by Eusebius (Abelean and Harut‘iwnean : –, – (Armenian); Thomson : –, – (English)). Granted the nature of his sources, rather than elaborating extensive socio-political and economic trajectories, he focuses on the activities of the worthies and kings, tracing their origin from Japheth via the Armenian eponymous progenitor Hayk. As a result, the first book of his enterprise provides several biographical vignettes, of which one of the most striking is his narrative of the Assyrian queen Semiramis and her relations with the Armenian king Ara (Abelean and Harut‘iwnean : –; Thomson : –). 15
For Christianity’s role in the wider dissemination of Hellenism beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire, see Hägg and Rousseau (: ).
The episode is worthy of attention from a number of perspectives as an illustration of the writer’s method in combining diverse narrative genres in his work, retooling them to reflect his fundamentally realist historical perspective. In this case the process requires the harmonization of a mythological stratum originally depicting the death (and rising) of a vegetation deity, the appropriation by Armenian legend of the interchange between the states of Urartu and Assyria in the late ninth and early eighth centuries ,16 and later Greek literate traditions elaborating on Semiramis’ achievements as the first woman in the Near East to rule without sharing power with a male figure.17 In continuity with the Sumerian Dumuzi(d) and Inanna, Akkadian Tammuz and Ishtar, Phoenician Adonis in later Greek guise with Aphrodite, and Phrygian Attis and Cybele, the mythological substratum underlying Movsēs’ narrative associates Ara and Semiramis (Armenian Šamiram) with the theme of death and rebirth in the annual cycle of nature.18 As in the case of Adonis and Attis, the comely youth becomes the source of attraction for a goddess (Persephone, Cybele), who seeks to wrest him from a liaison with another female (Aphrodite, Attis’ betrothed), so here Ara ‘the Handsome’ becomes the object of Semiramis’ passionate desire to win him over from his wife. Similarly, as the vegetation deity’s demise is mourned after the summer solstice and marked by the planting on the rooftop of a ‘garden of Adonis’ with herbs of brief lifespan with expectations of his revival thereafter, so here when Ara is killed in battle against the Assyrians, Semiramis brings his lifeless body to her palace roof to seek to revive him in the season of summer. However, as mentioned above, Armenian tradition had superimposed this vegetation myth on its oral legends regarding political relations between the states of Urartu (out of which an Armenian polity was to emerge) and Assyria, as illustrated by the fragmentary Primary History (Thomson : –). As a result, the deities now appear as monarchs, the goddess’ passionate intervention becomes expressed as warfare, the youth’s descent to the underworld is portrayed through Ara’s human mortality, while the youth’s subsequent transformation is depicted through Semiramis’ subterfuge of having one of her paramours dress like Ara to deceive the public into believing her sorcery has actually revived him. Similarly, as Greek historiography had endowed Semiramis with enormous prowess and creativity as the initiator of vast construction projects, plausibly embellishing accounts of the historical personage Shammuramat, wife of the Assyrian king Shamshi-Adad V who ruled for several years after her husband’s death around the turn of the eighth century, so Armenian oral tradition attributed to her many of the building activities undertaken by contemporary Urartian rulers.19 Drawing on these disparate elements, Movsēs weaves them together with an eye to heightening historical plausibility in the nexus of events. Rather than the goddess of the mythological substratum, he presents Semiramis as an exceptional individual, breaking all
16
This narrative parallels the legendary history of early Rome. For example, D.S. Bibl. . . 18 In this regard, Armenian folklore features a number of legends depicting Ara as a vegetation deity associated with his consort Całik (lit. Flower) who unite in summer (May July), the period of their pilgrimage rites, after which they spend the rest of the year in a cave or in the underworld. See Simonyan (: ). 19 These include the founding of Van as state capital by King Sarduri I (c. ) and the erection of a multiplicity of inscriptions and various irrigation canals by King Menua (c. ). 17
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social norms and gender stereotypes, and devotes much effort to developing motive and agency as she reacts to circumstances. Her passion for Ara was conceived during her husband’s last years as successive reports spoke of his beauty, and while decorum curbed her infatuation during her husband’s lifetime, thereafter she embarked on a series of embassies to persuade him to unite with her. Once more, the historian justifies the war she declares on him as provoked by pique at his repeated rejection of her overtures, wishing only to reduce him to submission rather than have him killed out of anger. Likewise the theme of his revival is broached not only in the queen’s unsuccessful attempt to consummate her love with Ara, but also through the substitute motif as a political stratagem to pacify the Armenian populace that had taken up arms to avenge their king’s murder. The original mythical significance of summer in relation to the enervation of plant life and the division of the vegetation deity’s year between one part on earth and the rest in the underworld is also humanized and personalized. Transferring her affection from Ara to Ara’s land [Ayrarat] through folk etymology, Semiramis stays in Armenia and engages in her building projects because of her attraction to the natural beauty of the countryside then in bloom after the long harsh continental winter. As a result, she decides to spend one quarter of the year there and the rest in the Assyrian capital of Nineveh to the south.
T M H S A ‘A
.................................................................................................................................. As the Armenians had supported the Umayyads in their struggle against the new dynasty in the mid-eighth century, they endured various reprisals from the victors in consequence. This, in turn, provoked a series of revolts in , , and –, which set the scene for a reversal in the rising fortunes of the Arcruni family currently expanding their holdings in Vaspurakan, south and south-east of Lake Van (Hewsen : ). The clerical author presents a certain rapprochement between Armenia and Byzantium, as the standard-bearer of eastern Christianity, while polarizing wider relations between the Christian and Muslim polities by means of the biblical precedents of Israel and Egypt at the Exodus and Senekerim and the raising of the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem under Hezekiah (Anonymous : –). His theological worldview also introduces the categories of divine and demonic intervention in human events, yet these are mainly restricted to the realm of motivation and do not impinge upon the agency of the main characters. Though likely elaborated by later copyists, the work’s title, Martyrology of the holy princes Hamazasp and Sahak, high nobles of Armenia, from the House of Arcruni, well captures the ambience of aristocratic literary commissions of this era (Ter-Davt’yan : –). Moreover, while the siblings emerge as fitting representatives of their class, they remain very individualized, particularly the elder brother. On his accession in , the caliph had dispatched a new representative (ostikan) to Armenia, before whom, as conventionally in this genre, some of their peers, envious of their good standing, queried their loyalty. As a result, together with their third brother Meružan, they were summoned to his new seat in Partaw (Bardha’a) where they were presented with the ultimatum of apostasizing or facing harsh torture and death. The latter adopts the
pragmatic choice, accepting circumcision as a pathway to power. Nevertheless, the author orchestrates his return to Vaspurakan with hyperbolic pomp in order to underscore his fall. No sooner does he arrive than he is decapitated by another noble to remove the stain from the house’s reputation (ibid.: ). The brothers’ plausible reaction to this is to hasten their death by short-circuiting the trial through exacerbating the official personally and dishonouring Muhammad. The final sentence ushers in a series of touching exchanges between them as the elder displays his care and affection for the younger and arranges for him to go first so as to encourage and support him through the process (ibid.: ). Precedence at official occasions was a matter of great moment in aristocratic circles, so that the step is interpreted as one of prestige to be seated first at the heavenly banquet and to drink first the cup of salvation. Similarly, as maintaining one’s good name was of paramount concern in the competitive world of Armenian politics, so the brother argues Christ’s name will be glorified by his martyrdom, suggesting not only the act’s impact at the macro level of Christian-Muslim interchange, but also the positive effect it will have on Arcruni standing in Armenian society. With great verisimilitude the author then depicts the brother’s own concerns. Approaching his destiny, he reveals his solicitude for his ancestral region and its good government by his successors, for the stability of the church in Armenia, and for the country’s victory in its wars against its enemies (ibid.: ).
A
.................................................................................................................................. As in the Roman Empire, autobiography serves as the medium for an apology or defence of one’s conduct and style of life. One example from this period is the work On the Conditions of his Life, composed by the seventh-century scientist and mathematician Anania Širakac’i (c.–c.), who represents a much rarer class of scholar in late antique and medieval Armenia, that of the lay intellectual who proceeded to the quadrivium and sought to advance those disciplines by research and teaching.20 Making the transition from pupil to instructor, Anania was surprised at the superficiality of his student body and their unexpected ingratitude at the education he wished to offer them. Not only that, they had the audacity to query his credentials and experience, thus prompting him to write this rebuttal in the form of an apologia highlighting the very different learning process he had undergone as a salutary example for future generations. At the same time, the work affords a fascinating vignette into pedagogical practice in the period immediately preceding the Arab wars and the incorporation of Armenia within the Umayyad Caliphate. The writing is completely framed in first person narrative, and whereas the style betrays the impact of the elevated Greek register in tropes like hyperbaton, it is largely couched in a smooth simple idiom readily accessible to the general reader. In the century and a half that had elapsed since Lazar’s study, Armenia was by now well equipped not only with scholars and textbooks to train students in biblical studies but also the curriculum of the trivium, having translated Dionysius Thrax’s grammar, the rhetorical manuals of Theon of
Ter Vardanean (: ). Some religious works were later ascribed to him of uncertain attribution. 20
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Alexandria and Aphthonius, and the logical corpus of Porphyry and Aristotle (Ter Petrosian : –). However, students desiring to advance beyond this stage would normally pursue those higher disciplines abroad, as Anania did in arithmetic. The author’s portrayal of his sincere desire for knowledge and the lengths he was prepared to go to in order to attain it clearly paints an idealized picture of his quest. Leaving Greater Armenia for Constantinople, he came upon a friend en route. The latter redirects him to the scholar Tychikos at Trebizond who enjoyed such a reputation in the capital that streams of students flocked there to attend his classes. There he remained eight years to acquire a thorough grounding in arithmetic as well as what he refers to as a ‘smattering’ of other fields such as philosophy, grammar, history, medicine, and chronicles, all of which were represented in the master’s wellstocked library (Ter-Vardanean : ). While the above term may immediately strike us as a sign of modesty, on further reflection it underscores the distinction he will make later between himself and those who studied with him, in that he possessed sufficient training to discern what he knew from what he did not, a level he argues that they did not attain. Having described his own dedication to learning, Anania portrays his teacher as a worthy counterpart. A graduate of the best schools of the era, he had studied three years in Alexandria, one in Rome, and several in Constantinople. An ideal scholar with impeccable credentials, Tychikos is depicted as loving his new charge like a son. In a brief excursus the author informs the reader about the reason behind this special treatment. His friend had already mentioned that Tychikos was familiar with Armenian language and literature. Later the master himself divulges that he had acquired it on military service in Armenia under the emperors Tiberius (–) and Maurice (–). Subsequently wounded during the Persian assault on Antioch (), he had vowed he would devote his life to scholarship if healed (ibid.: ). Anania’s bitter experience of bringing to Armenia what he calls ‘scholarship sought after by kings’ to a disheartening reception by the student body and without any outside support leads him to the conclusion that Armenians have no thirst for higher learning. His view represents the narrow circle of cognoscenti devoted to indigenizing the Hellenistic educational project in Armenia in Late Antiquity. Moreover, his narrative confirms both the creation of lay schools at this time also surmised from contemporary works like the anonymous Ašxarhac’oyc’, a geography of the world based on Ptolemy via Pappus of Alexandria, and earlier translations like the Alexander Romance (Ter Petrosian : –). The lack of strong centralized rule in Armenia militated against the emergence of institutionalized structures like the university at Constantinople and the ‘Abbasid House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Consequently, secular schools were destined to remain individual initiatives unable to establish continuity.
C
.................................................................................................................................. The time frame under discussion reveals a fascinating variety of perspectives represented and media employed in articulating different biographical interests. Greater Armenia’s
political fluctuation between the spheres of Rome and Persia significantly affected it in the social and religious domains where a related oscillation in the role and perception of Syriac and Greek is observed. The adoption of writing in the early fifth century added a further dimension to the debate on identity with far-reaching consequences for the future. Through the genre of the heroic tale, oral culture afforded a milieu for biographical treatment, narrating the deeds of valour of successive generations of the principal aristocratic houses. This tradition found its direct continuation in the epic Daredevils of Sasun in gestation in our period, which presents a cradle-to-grave account of the life of four generations of the noble house of Sasun, which was sustained by oral transmission in regions near Lake Van until the early twentieth century (Yeghiazaryan : –, –, –). Granted the author’s limited education and exposure to Greek paideia, P‘awstos’ work betrays striking continuity with that tradition, abbreviating and restructuring the oral narratives within the new context of a connected history of the mid-fourth century. Moreover, despite Lazar’s pride at gaining a schooling in Greek, the social imperatives of the oral tale in rank and status find powerful expression in his panegyrics of Vardan and Vahan Mamikonian, as in his redaction of Koriwn, eulogizing the hierarch Sahak. Gradually the champion (nahatak) of oral epic transitioned into the martyr (vkay) of the church’s sanctoral, highlighting now the steadfastness with which the subjects met their death for the faith.21 Resistance to increasingly harsh ‘Abbasid tax exactions in the second half of the eighth century provided the backdrop to a number of such martyrdoms in battle, harking back to the Maccabees’ resistance to Seleucid incursions in the mid-second century (Boyarin ). The powerful alliance between the Mamikonians and the Gregorid chief-bishops in the fourth century became all the more consolidated after the marriage of Hamazasp to the last hierarch’s daughter Sahakanoyš. In addition to Lazar’s treatment of Sahak already discussed, it is likely that Mamikonian patronage underlies the initiative to document the activities of the originator of the house, St Gregory, the Illuminator of Greater Armenia through baptism and its first overseer. Significantly, the work is the first to allude to the martyrdom of Vardan Mamikonian and his forces at Avarayr. More broadly, it encapsulates both houses’ priorities in favouring Greek and adopting a pro-Roman orientation. The series of historical works over the fourth to the fifth centuries that appeared under their aegis have done much to shape posterity’s understanding of this important period of transition. Granted that the Mamikonians had migrated to Armenia from the Čēnk’ at some point, it is understandable that they would be less motivated to support an account of ancient Armenian history in which they would not be represented. Instead, Movsēs Xorenac‘i undertakes this enterprise under Bagratid patronage, portraying the family as being relocated from Israel to Armenia under Tigran II in the first century (Abelean and Harut‘iwnean : –). Approaching his task with more concern for the application of historiographical principles such as chronology, Xorenac‘i exploits the opportunity to incorporate discrete elements of oral mythology and legend into his overarching framework, applying to them the same requirements of causation and motivation.
21
For the powerful rewriting of Scripture in the narrative of the martyrdom of the Maccabees in the Armenian version, see Cowe ().
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In the initial period, literate creativity in Armenian is largely the domain of the church, sustained by the institutions of the scribal schools and monasticism. Naturally, the latter espoused an outlook radically contrasting with the aristocratic world-view, advocating the renunciation of secular positions of power to devote oneself to spirituality and ascetic labour. Though the call was heeded by a few representatives of the nobility like Ałan Mamikonian and Prince Vač’ē of Utik’, socially the movement was much more diverse. Clearly, Koriwn depicts his teacher Maštoc‘ as a proponent of this path, and one facet of his biographical narrative is as a protreptic for others to follow in his footsteps. Though the movement was active and drew inspiration from contacts with Palestine, it was largely from the tenth century that coenobitic monasticism began to expand under royal and aristocratic subvention and generate spiritual biographies (Cowe : ). The third institution, about which we are least informed, is that of the lay intelligentsia pursuing either medicine or facets of the Hellenistic quadrivium in Armenia, seeking to replicate at home in Armenian the course of study that previous generations of local scholars like the sixth-century Neoplatonic philosopher David the Armenian had engaged in at major centres of the eastern Mediterranean, especially Alexandria.22 As a rare mouthpiece for the concerns of this community, Anania’s apology affords a remarkable insight into the group’s dedication and passion for learning as well as the precariousness of their enterprise. It seems such schools died out by the end of our period and, when reintroduced in the eleventh century, remained individual initiatives lacking continuity.
F R : After becoming acquainted with the biographical details of Vardan Mamikonian and St Hrip’simē, one might recommend investigating the depiction of Vardan’s daughter St Šušanik (c. ) as another powerful Christian woman in the longer Armenian version of the saint’s martyrology. On this text, see Ter Davt’yan (: ), Muradyan (: ), and, for an English translation, Maksoudian (: ). Another suggestion relates to Lazar Pʿarpecʿi’s letter to his patron Vahan Mamikonian, a rare example of autobiography from the early period in the form of private correspondence. The work traces the writer’s close affiliation with his correspondent from childhood up to the present, revealing traits of character such as his pride in his Hellenic higher education. It also affords candid revelations regarding the tense relationship the writer has with the Armenian upper clergy in an atmosphere rife with factionalism, as well as details of the intrigue perpetrated against him that had occasioned his hasty retreat, permitting a fascinating insight into both the man and the setting of his life.
22
For Armenian literary contacts with Alexandria, see Zuckerman ().
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T genre of biographical writing is a celebrated, multifaceted, and widely practised field of Arabic literature. Basic forms of biographical compilation can be traced from the first century of Islam (seventh century), initially orally transmitted and later in writing. The Arabic biographical tradition was mainly developed from within Islam, to which it owes its distinctive character. It probably originated from the earnest aspiration of generations following the initial period to preserve knowledge about the central figures of that era. For that reason, biographical transmission, initially, was a highly religion-orientated discipline. Nevertheless, or perhaps even due to this stimulus, there developed a huge field of different biographical genres and specialized life-story writing. The current term in Arabic which covers the notion ‘biography’ is the word sīra: the course of life and conduct of a person. A smaller set of biographical data is often referred to as tarjama. Other terms for traditional forms of biography like maghāzī (expeditions), fad. ā’il (virtues), manāqib (feats) are also in use. The term tārīkh (history) occurs several times in the title of works which are, in fact, biographical compilations.
G
.................................................................................................................................. The oldest information preserved in early biographical writings comes from so-called akhbārīs, the transmitters of akhbār, i.e. reports, communications, stories, and personal data and events in the lives of the Prophet Muh.ammad and his companions and the successors of the following generation. The function of akhbārī may go back to a preIslamic profession of men (and women?) bearing knowledge of genealogies (nasab) and feats (manāqib) of families, clans, and tribes. In pre-Islamic society, striving for, safeguarding, and spreading the honour and nobility of the tribe were an existential part of the way of life. Since (noble) descent played an important role in this, it was vital to know and bear witness to the tribe members’ genealogy. The akhbārī-transmissions found their way into later written biographical works, where they are attested in many citations. The information included in names was a valuable source to identify a person’s background and the starting point for biographical writings. Names in Arab communities
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reflected the names of older generations, as is the case in many traditional societies. Surnames were or could be extended with a patronymic (‘son of ’ or ‘daughter of ’: ibn, bint), qualifications of relationships (e.g. belonging to a clan), or a toponymic (e.g. ‘al-Lībī’, ‘from Libya’). Names could be further enlarged with an agnomen (kunyah; ‘father of ’ or ‘mother of ’), a nickname or honorific (laqab), such as a profession (‘the carpenter’) or a physical disposition (‘the cross-eyed’). In this way, the nomenclature forms a rich source of rudimentary information about a person. This information was easily expanded with short narratives about ancestors. For example, the name of Khālid ibn Sa‛īd ibn al-‛Ās. ibn ‛Umayya ibn ‛Abd Shams ibn ‛Abd Manāf ibn Qus.ayy1 provides the following information: his first name was Khālid, he was the son of Sa‛īd, the descendant of another five generations of forefathers, and a member of the Mekkan clan of the Banū ‛Umayyah (whose descendants were to found the dynasty of the ‛Umayyads). Finally, the theophoric names of two of his forefathers, ‛Abd Shams and ‛Abd Manāf, meaning ‘Servant of the Sun’ and ‘Servant of Manāf ’ refer to deities worshipped in pre-Islamic times, obviously because Islam abolished the polytheistic cult, including such names referring to it.
P B: S ̄
.................................................................................................................................. The akhbārīs were the first providers of reports which lay at the basis of biographical writing, but they gradually lost their position as reliable transmitters of knowledge because they were not well versed in producing consistent, unbroken chains of transmitters going back to the first source—which became the pivotal standard of H.adīth (Islamic Tradition). Nevertheless, their reports continued to play an important role in the biography of the Prophet, in historiography, and the recollection of all kinds of information about individuals that otherwise would not have survived (Duri : –). The earliest known version and most celebrated example of biographical writing was the Biography of the Prophet Muh.ammad, known as al-Sīra al-Nabawīya. This Sīra is ascribed to Ibn Ish.āq (d. ), whose original text, probably entitled Kitāb al-Maghāzī (Book of Campaigns or Book of Expeditions), did not survive; however, it became known, and is presently extant for a large part, in the versions transmitted by Ibn Hishām (d. ) and others. Ibn Ish.āq’s version was composed on the basis of reports that were preceded by those of other transmitters of akhbār, such as Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī (d. ). The latter’s information harks back to the authority of ‛Urwa ibn al-Zubayr (d. ), a nephew of the Prophet Muh.ammad’s wife ‘Ā’isha bint Abī Bakr, among others.2 Another of his sources was the famous akhbārī, Wahb ibn Munabbih, who was well versed in Isrā’īlīyāt, the knowledge of Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian traditions, and the author of a Kitāb
A biographee in Ibn Saad (ed. Lippert : ). Aspects like authenticity, reliability and historicity of the sources of the Sīra and their transmission, are under a long term debate and will not be discussed here. I refer to Görke, Motzki, and Schoeler (; ). 1 2
al-Mubtada’ (‘Book of Beginnings’) and a Kitāb al-Mulūk al-Mutawwaja (‘The Book of Crowned Kings’) about the H.imyarite kings of Yemen.3 The first composite biographies of the Prophet consisted of a miscellany of data: genealogy, campaigns, lists of their participants, statements, and reports of events, Qur’ān verses related to them, poems, anecdotes, and manifestations of prophethood (dalā’il al-nubūwa). The arrangement is largely chronological, and the order reflects the intention of surveying the preceding events in a coherent time- and place-related framework. Ibn Ish.āq’s biographical survey placed the life of the Prophet in a historical framework, positioning his ancestry, lifecycle, and the Revelation as a matter foreshadowed in the history of mankind from Adam and all the subsequent prophets. The fact that lineage was an important issue also in early Islam is attested by a pronouncement in the Sīra composed by Muh.ammad al-Bustī (d. ), saying that the messenger of God (the Prophet Muh. ammad) said: ‘God chose [Kināna] from the sons of Ismā‛īl, and He chose Quraysh from the Kināna, and He chose the Banū Hāshim from among the Quraysh, and He chose me from among the Banū Hāshim’, referring to his own ancestry and prophethood.4 Stylistically, Ibn Ish.āq’s account is interspersed with poetical verses, a continuation of the style used by the akhbārīs. Poetry was, and still is, one of the pillars of Arabian tribal culture and its frequent use remained a very common stylistic element in elegant Arabic prose literature. For a modern reader this requires some adjustment of attitude, because the biographical information is interrupted by these poetic embellishments. In its cultural context, however, it appears to have been considered natural and relevant, in the sense that the verses may have evoked reminiscence of the addressed themes, emphasized their significance, or confirmed their genuineness. This may be illustrated by the following section in the Sīra on the Persian affairs in Yemen. It was handed down on the authority of al-Zuhrī and it is said here that the Persian King Kisrā (Khusraw II, d. ) had written to his satrap Bādhān in Yemen. The king wanted to be informed about ‘a man of the Quraysh operating in Mekka, who asserts that he is a prophet’. In the subsequent correspondence between this Bādhān and the Prophet Muh.ammad, the latter then predicts the day that Kisrā will be killed. The redactor of the Sīra, Ibn Hishām, affirms that Kisrā was killed indeed by his son Shīrawayh (Siroes) and he then cites a poem by Khālid ibn H.aqq al-Shaybānī: When Kisrā was killed by his son, And they cut him into pieces like a piece of meat, The fate of death arrived for him at the precise moment, Just as the fixed time to deliver arrives for every pregnant woman.
As a reaction, it is said, Bādhān and other Persians in Yemen converted to Islam.5 The serial sequence of the akhbār in the biographies is structured according to a recurring principle. The communication starts with the author’s name (or that of the transmitter). Then, the chain of the transmitters is revealed, followed by the actual subject, which may be an anecdote, an event, or a pronouncement. A chain of transmitters is not given for all of the 3 The earliest surviving fragments of Sīra literature are preserved in the Wahb papyrus. See Khoury () and Kister (; ). 4 5 al H Ibn Hishām, ed. al Dābūlī (: .). . afiz. (: ) and Lippert (: ).
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subjects in the Sīra. Sometimes there are only short references, like the following: ‘Ibn Ish.āq said: “I was told by Muh.ammad ibn Sa‛īd ibn al-Musayyab6 that ‛Abd al-Mut.t.alib ibn Hāshim [the Prophet Muh.ammad’s grandfather] had gathered his daughters, when he perceived death and knew that he would die soon” ’ (Ibn Hishām, ed. al-Dābūlī : .). In many other cases, a more detailed chain of transmitters occurs; we often find it in a more or less similar way, as presented here: Ibn Ish.āq said: “I was told by ‛Ās.im the son of ‛Amr the son of Qatāda [the Prophet’s companion] on the authority of Mah.mūd the son of Labīd, on the authority of ‛Abd Allāh the son of ‛Abbās that he said: ‘I was told by Salmān the Persian that he said in his own words: ‘I was a Persian from the people of Isphahān, from a village called Jayy . . . ’.’” (Ibn Hishām, ed. al Dābūlī : .)
We observe a different structure in another early biographical work on the Prophet, also called The Book of Expeditions. It was compiled by Ibn Ish.āq’s contemporary Ma‛mar ibn Rashīd (d. ). The original does not survive, but it was preserved in a recension of Ma‛mar’s student ‛Abd al-Razzāq al-S.an‛ānī (d. ). Ma‛mar’s work apparently has not embedded the Prophet’s life and deeds in a framework of the history of creation and on some points the thematic organization has outranked the chronological order. We find a short chapter on the marriage of the Prophet’s daughter Fāt.imah at the very end of the book. The report is said to go back to Asmā’, the daughter of ‛Umays, and is introduced with the following chain of transmitters: ‛Abd al Razzāq [the redactor] reports on the authority of Ma‛mar [the compiler], on the authority of Ayyūb, on the authority of ‛Ikrimah and Abū Yazīd al Madīnī, or one of the two (the doubt is Abū Bakr’s), that Asmā’ bint ‛Umays said: ‘When Fāt.imah was brought to ‛Alī as a bride, we found nothing in his house save a floor of packed sand, a pillow stuffed with palm fibers, and a single earthen jar and jug . . . ’7
The Prophet, as the father of the bride, plays a role in this event in which Asmā’ offers assistance to accompany the bride at her marriage. This account occurs at the very end of Ma‛mar’s book, though it took place earlier in time. In this case the chronological order has been disrupted in favour of the partly thematic organization of the book.
I T: B R H . ī B T
.................................................................................................................................. Parallel to the interest in the biographical aspects of the Prophet Muh.ammad runs the awareness of the need to preserve his sayings, conduct, lifestyle, and teachings and those of 6 7
A grandson of a companion of the Prophet. Translation Anthony (: ).
his followers. This resulted in compilations, referred to as H.adīth, which formed the basis for the gradually recorded (prophetic) tradition, the Sunna. For the Islamic religious ritual and legal system the Sunna became the second source, next to Qur’ān, on which prescriptive regulations and the legal system were built. The collections of H . adīth contain a formidable portion of the initially gathered biographical material. In the course of the ninth century, serious efforts were made to systematically assess the authenticity of the reported traditions. This resulted in the ‘Kutub al-Sittah’ (six books), of which two in particular, the collections of traditions by Muslim and al-Bukhārī, were widely accepted as completely trustworthy and eventually they became canonical texts. These two collections, the S.ah.īh. (‘Trustworthy’), are structured either thematically or according to transmitter. A sine qua non for the authorization of a h.adīth was a strong, unbroken chain of reliable transmitters, muh.addithūn, going back to the Prophet and his Companions, or at least to the first and second generation of Muslims. These criteria for the assessment of genuineness in their turn prompted the compilation of biographies of the transmitters themselves and the discipline of scrutiny of the reliability of these sources, ‛ilm al-rijāl (‘science of trustworthy authorities’). The authenticity of traditions and, for that matter, the authenticity of the matn (the report proper) could be evidenced by weighing the conditions. The reliability of the transmitters and an uninterrupted chain of trustworthy transmitters was far more an element of scrutiny than the contents of the report itself, which hardly could be verified, asserted, or rejected. The study of rijāl resulted in the compilations of books with lists of names of authorities and transmitters of h.adīth, the reliability of whom was either affirmed or suspect, the socalled kutub al-jarh. wa-l-ta‛dīl (the ‘books of disparaging and authentication’). The information given in these works was when and where they lived, with whom they studied, who were their students, and when and where they died. The instigator of this criticism of transmitters is considered to be Shu‛ba al-Hajjāj (d. ), a highly praised h.adīth transmitter himself, living in Basra, who studied and collected traditions with numerous masters.8 He was famous for his expertise in classifying h.adīth transmission and distinguishing between false (kādhib) and trustworthy (s. ādiq) reports. One of the many surviving such works is the Kitāb al-Jarh. wa-l-Ta‛dīl by ‛Abd al-Rah.mān ibn Abī H.ātim al-Rāzī (d. ). He arranged the names of the h.adīth transmitters alphabetically, in sequence of their first name, followed by the patronymic. The biographical information is often succinct and where necessary provided with a critical note. About a man called Ah.mad ibn Ibrahīm al-H.alabī, for example, al-Rāzī writes: He transmits [Traditions] on the authority of ‛Alī ibn ‛Ās.im and al Haytham ibn Jamīl and Qubays.a and al Nufaylī on whose authority [also] transmits Ah.mad ibn Shaybān al Ramlī. We were told by ‛Abd al Rah.man that he said: I asked my father about him [the above Ah. mad] and I presented him with what he [Ah.mad] had told me and he said: I don’t know him and his h.adīth transmissions are false and the whole issue is baseless, and his words show that he is a liar. (al Rāzī, ed. Anonymous : .)
8
Juynboll (: ).
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.................................................................................................................................. In this context of tireless listing, classifying, assessing, and collecting, the discipline of biographical writing opened new ground. Most noticeable in this respect is the genre of biographical dictionaries, a discipline which began in the ninth century and continued to flourish well into the nineteenth century. This kind of literature evolved, as Wadād al-Qād.ī (: ) points out, ‘at the time when [Islamic] civilization was beginning to develop a clear self-image’. Smaller, average-sized, and sizable dictionaries of different content, motivation, method, and selection of topics all appeared. Particularly during the Abbasid period (–) and later, an extensive corpus of biographical dictionaries was written. This enormous field cannot be covered here in its entirety (see Khalidi ; Young ; al-Qād.ī ; Jaques ). Rather, I will highlight a small selection. One of the oldest extant works in this genre is the celebrated Kitāb al-T.abaqāt al-Kabīr (The Great Book of Classes) by Muh.ammad ibn Sa‘d (d. ; ed. Lippert ). It consists of a compilation of biographical entries, among them some about women. The book was concerned with collecting biographies of .tabaqāt— ‘generations’ or ‘classes’—of people involved in forwarding, and being part of, religious tradition. Ibn Sa‛d collected biographical records of all the known h.adīth transmitters of roughly two centuries, from the beginning of Islam up to his own time. Preceding the entries of transmitters, the book opens with a lengthy biography of the Prophet, the ultimate source of Islamic Tradition. Subsequently, the book surveys the biographical information on the Prophet’s Companions and the Successors of the next generation. Together they constituted the most important personae in the early history of Islamic civilization. Ibn Sa‛d’s organization of the material reveals the pioneering stage of the genre.9 There is no alphabetical order of names, as in the above-mentioned Book of Disparaging and Authentication by al-Rāzī from approximately a century later. In the arrangement of the entries various criteria alternate. Sometimes the compiler applies the so-called sābiqah criterion, which means that the earlier date and order of conversion to Islam of the biographee rule the order of the biographical notices. In the last part of the book, in which the Successors and later generations are treated, the entries are grouped according to city, starting with Medina and Mekka and, subsequently, fourteen other cities and centres of religious learning. The biographical dictionaries were not confined to the predominant discipline of h.adīth and traditionists studies, but they focused on a wide range of fields. In the course of time they involved compilations of professionals and famous people in the classes of jurists, Qur’ān-reciters, judges, exegetes, but also in the disciplines of the ‘humanities’: poetry, philology, grammar, belles lettres, wisdom literature, philosophy, music, and scientists and physicians.
9
See C.F. Robinson () and Jaques (: ) on this early stage.
Biographical Dictionaries of Professionals A specific type of dictionaries are those presenting professionals or specialists excelling in their field, for example, in criticism of poetry. It was the polygraph Ibn Qutayba (d. ) who set new standards of quality, which are expressed in the introduction to his anthology, Kitāb al-Shiʿr wa al-Shu’arā’ (The Book of Poetry and Poets; ed. Shākir –). He states that poetry of his own time was not necessarily always less in quality than that of the ancients. He also provides information about the poets which sketches their entourage and poetry: nicknames and genealogy, quality and methods, stories, events, and anecdotes, in short, ‘illustrative material’ (Fahndrich : ). In his Kitāb al-Shi‛r Ibn Qutayba applies chronological order. This, theoretically, opened possibilities for later generations to add new entries of poetry and poems to the compilation he made up to his day. Some centuries later the philologist Ibn al-Anbārī (d. ) composed the biographical history of philologists Nuzhat al-Alibbā’ f ī T.abaqāt al-Udabā’ (Amusement of the Intelligent about the Classes of Authors), in which he devotes a concise entry to his celebrated predecessor, Ibn Qutayba. After the personal details he adds a touching anecdote about the author’s death: Ibn Qutayba ate harissa [a dish] and he became feverish and gave a loud scream. Then, he lost consciousness until noon; then he became in a state of restless shaking and then calmed down. Then, he continuously pronounced the credo ‘lā ilāha ill’ Allāh’ until dawn, when he passed away. This was on the first night of the month Rajab of the year two hundred and seventy six, and he died during the caliphate of al Mu‘tamid ‘Alā ’Llāh, God is Almighty.’ (ed. Abū al Fad.l : )
Another interesting development within the category of professionals and specialists are the dictionaries dedicated to physicians and philosophers. The combination of the two professions or competences is very common and probably goes back to the compilations of wisdom literature containing the biographies of various ancient philosophers and physicians, such as Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Dioscurides, and others. A remarkable example is the T.abaqāt al-At. ibbā’ wa ’l- H.ukamā’ (The Classes of Physicians and Philosophers). It was composed by the Andalusian Abū Dāwud Sulaymān ibn al-H.assān, known as Ibn Juljul (d. after ). He was trained in grammar and h.adīth studies and at the same time was a respected physician. His work was probably the first dictionary focusing on this professional group of physicians and sages, for which he apparently also used the Latin works by Orosius, Jerome, and Isidore of Seville (Sayyid : ). Ibn Juljul divided his biographies into nine classes, six of which group physicians and philosophers from ancient and pre-Islamic times, and three of which are dedicated to men excelling in these disciplines in the Islamic era (in particular in the Maghreb and alAndalus). Other than this vague chronological order and topographical arrangement, there is no systematic organization of the subjects. Ibn Juljul’s biographical notes are not complete biographies; often the information is quite concise and eclectic. However, the author seems to have a predilection for amusing anecdotes, which give a vivid portrait of special characteristics of the biographees and their medical practices (Álvarez Millan ). An example: about Ish.āq ibn Sulaymān al-Isrā’īlī, an eloquent physician from Egypt,
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specializing as an eye doctor and living in the Maghreb, Ibn Juljul reports that he was at least years old. However, he adds, the man did not have a wife or any offspring, but wrote unsurpassed books, like his Book about Urine, books on diets, nutrition, medicine, philosophy, logic, and other topics. People asked him: ‘Would you be pleased to have a son?’ He said: ‘Well, no, when my Book of Diets was born that pleased me more.’ He means, Ibn Juljul points out, that his memory would be sustained through the Book of Diets, rather than through offspring (Sayyid : ). Ibn Juljul’s book, containing less than sixty biographies, was elaborated on by later compilers in much more complex forms. One such work was the ‛Uyūn al-Anbā’ fī T.abaqāt al-At. ibbā’ (The Best Tidings, about the Classes of Physicians) by Ibn Abī Us.aybi‛a (d. ) from Damascus (Savage-Smith et al. ). It consists of biographies, arranged according to generations and classes of nations and regions. Ibn Abī Us.aybi‛a also revised much material from the works of his predecessors such as Ibn al-Qift.ī’s (d. ) Tarīkh al-H.ukamā’ (History of Wise Men; ed. Lippert ). He highlights medical sciences and the philosophy of the ancients: Asclepius, Hippocrates, Galen, the school of Alexandria, Christians, Arabs, Syrians, the translators of Greek works, and from Mesopotamia, Diyarbakir, Persia, India, the Maghreb, Egypt, and Syria. Ibn Abī Us.aybi‛a has an entirely different approach to life-writing. He tends to present a complete biography of his subject, including witty anecdotes and poetry. His Life of Aristotle runs for more than twenty pages, whereas that in Ibn Juljul’s work hardly covers two. He also used and named sources other than Ibn Juljul and Ibn al-Qift.ī: H.unayn ibn Ish.āq (d. ), Abū ’l-H.asan ‛Alī al-Mas‛ūdī (d. ), and Al-Mubashshir ibn Fātik (d. c.). The biography contains Aristotle’s genealogy and provenance, his career, many events in his life, anecdotes, his physical appearance, his affiliations with other philosophers, his tutorship of Alexander the Great, his testament, his statements and sayings and the titles of his works and treatises with data based on different sources. Extensive as these compilations of biographical data may be, the narrations never transcend the character of prosopography (Jaques ).
Biographical Dictionaries of Local Orientation Local dictionaries related to places and regions list particular individuals who had in some way played a significant role in their local context. Ah.mad al-Khat.īb al-Baghdādī (d. ) composed an impressive work, Tārīkh Baghdād (The History of Baghdad; ed. al-Khānǧī ), which had , entries on scholars, h.adīth transmitters, and other people connected to the city, among them women, who had played a role in its cultural and political life. Although it concerns a biographical dictionary, the use of the term tārīkh (history) in the title points to its literal meaning of ‘dating’, which in this case implies the registration of dates of birth and death of the people mentioned in the biographical entries. It may also give an indication of al-Baghdādī’s opinion that history is built on what individuals contribute to society. In the introduction to his book, he explains it as follows: This is the book of the history of Madīnat as Salām [City of Peace, i.e. Baghdad] and the report of its construction and the commemoration of its great residents and settlers and listing the names of its learned men . . . We were told by ‛Abd al ‛Azīz ibn Abī al H . asan
al Qarmīsīnī that he said: I heard Umar ibn Ah.mad ibn ‛Uthmān saying: I heard Abū Bakr al Nīsābūrī say that he heard Yūnus ibn ‛Abd al A‛lā saying: al Shāfi‛i said to me: Oh Yūnus did you enter Baghdad? He said: I said no. He said: Then it is as if you have seen nothing of this world (or its people). (vol. : )
This anecdote shows that the author’s approach to historiography of the city is not to write about events but to recollect the well-being and woes of notable people and present their biographies. Immediately after this introduction he starts discussing legal aspects of the property market in Baghdad, in particular the questionable practice of selling and buying houses on illicitly usurped ground. Several small chapters follow with miscellaneous information about the city. All the data and anecdotes in these chapters are presented with long chains of transmitters. It shows that the author observed the ruling method of h. adīth transmission and considered that system just as compelling for this more or less kindred discipline of biographical historiography. The structure of the work also reveals the religiously oriented approach of al-Baghdādī: he opens his systematic compilation of biographical entries with the name ‘Muh.ammad’. His work was continued by a later fellow-citizen, named Ibn al-Najjār al-Baghdādī (d. ; Caesar ). After more than years, this historian and important muh.addith of the Shāfi‛ī school wrote his Dhayl Tārīkh Baghdād aw Madīnat al-Salām, in which he continued the biographies of people in the category of al-Baghdādī’s book up to his own time. The method of writing an extension (dhayl) to earlier biographical dictionaries first originated in the west of the Islamic world, Andalusia and the Maghreb (al-Qād.ī : , n. ). Another such local ‘history’ is the Tārīkh Madīnat Dimashq (The History of the City of Damascus), composed by the famous ‛Alī ibn Asākir (d. ). It is a voluminous work, of which the printed compendium extends to volumes. The beginning of the book has introductory chapters devoted to the history of the world and the local history of Damascus, but for the main part the work is a biographical dictionary. It arranges all the people of importance, who were in some way connected to the city, in alphabetical order. The biographical entries mostly have a systematic structure, starting with genealogy, often even variant versions, followed by pronouncements of people about the biographee, anecdotes, and a death date. Combinations of different types of dictionaries also occur. The Classes of Magistrates in Egypt written by Al-Kindī (d. ), is an example (Gottheil ). It is arranged in a sequence of successions and appointments of the Egyptian judges by a certain caliph. It starts with an editorial declaration of intent, after which follows the entry of the first magistrate appointed in Egypt. The entry includes a number of reports preceded by long chains of transmitters, giving various, and sometimes subsidiary, information about this appointment, its starting date and duration. Various notices follow. The judges are portrayed in the sequence of the chronological order of their period of duty. The biographical data of each of the magistrates are presented in a survey of reports and anecdotes, always accompanied by a chain of transmitters. Only sporadically, personal or family matters are involved. In general, it concerns factual matters, such as the name of the caliph under whose reign the biographees were appointed. Sometimes we are given information about their situation or profession before they were called to the magistracy; about their salary, various readings of events, about their ways of working or judicial issues they
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introduced, about their cases and verdicts and, at the end of an entry, regularly the date of death and years of office are mentioned. There is no rubric to the entries. In fact, the tasmīya (naming) of the qād. īs (magistrates) is integrated into the chronological framework.
Later Developments: Variegated Biographical Dictionaries A later development of the genre of biographical dictionaries is the format of ‘a wide range of fields and classes’. There are several important and authoritative works of this kind. In the first place the sizable dictionary by Shams al-Dīn ibn Khallikān (d. ), Wafayāt alA‘yān wa-Anbā’ Abnā’ al-Zamān (Obituaries of Eminent Men and Tidings of the Sons of the Epoch). His book is a treasure-trove for information about all kinds of ‘men of intelligence and of general excellence’ of all walks of life in the different regions of the Islamic world. He did not include the biographies of the Prophet, the Companions, the Successors, and the caliphs because their lives had many times been documented by others. He also, exceptionally, left out chains of transmitters. Ibn Khallikān’s Wafayāt has been much appreciated, not only as source of information, but also as a work of refined informative literary writing. It was ‘continued’ by Ibn Shākir al-Kutubī (d. ), who compiled Fawāt al-Wafayāt (Beyond the Obituaries). His contemporary, al-S.afadī (d. ), combined the two dictionaries in his even more extensive compilation Al-Wāfī bi ’l-Wafayāt (Completion of the Obituaries). Another work in this category was written by the historian and theologian Shams al-Dīn al-Shāfi‘ī al-Dhahabī (d. c. ) and was entitled Ta’rīkh al-Islām (History of Islam). It covers the period from the beginning of Islam until the year , arranged in classes of seventy decades. For each year general historical information is given in different paragraphs, as well as ‘strange events’. For example, an affair happening in the year of the Hijra ( ) is described thus: The change of a girl into a man. Ibn al Athīr said: ‘I was in the Peninsula [Mesopotamia] and we had a neighbour who had a daughter, named S.afīya. She was a girl until she became about fifteen years old. All of a sudden she got male genitals and she developed a growth of beard. She had the appearances of a female and the sexual characteristics of a male.’ (al Tadmūrī : )
Al-Dhahabī presents the names of the biographees in alphabetical order of their first name, arranged according to their year of death (wafayāt). It concerns the lives of the caliphs, local rulers and functionaries in the military and administration, jurists and theologians, scholars and poets. It was al-Dhahabī’s intention to be all-embracing, including history and biography of the entire Islamic world—also the rulers of the western caliphate—and the different schools of law (madhāhib). In the later Middle Ages, the genre of biographical dictionaries continued. Prominent scholars excelled in this discipline of centennial dictionaries, like Shihāb al-Dīn ibn H.ajar al-‛Asqalānī (d. ), who wrote Al-Durar al-Kāmina fī A‘yān al-Mi’a al-Thāmina (Hidden Pearls about the Eminent Men of the Eighth Century). He arranged the biographical notices of ‘eminent men’ of all sorts who died in the th century of the Islamic calendar (th century) in alphabetical order, year by year. Another great scholar and biographer
was Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūt.ī (d. ). His contribution to Islamic intellectual civilisation is unsurpassed. He was a prominent scholar, traveler, and prolific writer in the wide range of religious sciences, philology and medicine and one of the two compilers of the Tafsīr al-Jalalayn, the Qur’ān commentary by the men both named Jalāl al-Dīn. His contribution to the biographical tradition is his Tārīkh al-Khulafā’ (History of the Caliphs). Despite the word Tārīkh (history) in the title, he has a clear view about the distinction between the function of annalistic history and biography (Cooperson : ). His work covers the lives (and history) of all the caliphs, from Abū Bakr () until Abū al-Sabr Ya‘qūb alMustamsik bi-’Llāh, al-Suyūt.ī’s contemporary, who was called to the sultanate of Egypt in , and it includes an overview of the Umayyad dynasty of Spain. In one of his very extensive and full biographies he records a citation spoken by a Kufan in favour of the fourth caliph, ‘Alī ibn Abī T.ālib: ‘By Allāh, Amīr al-Mu’minīn [commander of the faithful], you have ornamented the caliphate and it has not ornamented you. You have raised it up and it has not raised you up. It was in more need of you than you were in need of it.’ (A. Clarke : ) As the genre of biographical dictionaries expanded more and more, also the different schools of law, the Shāfi’ite, Hanbalite, Malikite, Hanafite, Shi’ite, Sūfī, Mu‘tazilite, Ash’arī schools and other groups like ascetics and mystics had their own biographical dictionaries, dedicated to their specific religious communities (Grimwood-Jones et al. : –).
I B
.................................................................................................................................. Apart from the extensive genre of biographical dictionaries, there are also single biographies on individuals. There are the historically based siyar (biographies) such as, for instance, about Mah.mūd of Ghāzna (d. ), Salāh. al-Dīn (d. ), the famous Saladin, and sultan Baybars (d. ), to mention just a few. The great scholar Ibn al-Jawzī (d. ) dedicated a huge work in hundred chapters to Ah.mad Ibn H.anbal (d. ), the founder of the H.anbalī school of law, which stands midway between biography and hagiography (Cooperson ). Also, a remarkable work has been devoted to al-Iskandar (Alexander the Great, d. ). Although he was a historical figure preceding Islamic times, Arabic literature possessed a full biography of him, which ultimately harks back to Ps.-Callisthenes’ Greek Alexander Romance (on which see Chapter in this volume). It was an exemplary and influential text which has been reworked, adapted, and translated from Arabic several times for many purposes (Doufikar-Aerts : –). As in the case of Ps.-Callisthenes, the Arabic Alexander biography is partly legendary. In the Arabic tradition, there are also epic texts, referred to in modern literary criticism as ‘popular romances’, siyar sha‛abīya. These long texts (sometimes extending to thousands of pages) have as their subject the sīra—biography—of a historical figure, but the ‘biographies’ hardly contain any historical or ‘genuine’ information about the protagonist. Nevertheless, they form part of a long-standing narrative tradition, which represents a shared cultural heritage; the commemoration of, and identification with, the lives of Islamic and preIslamic heroes from the past (Lyons ; Canova ).
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C I H
.................................................................................................................................. It should be noted that Arabic-speaking Christian communities from old had a rich tradition of hagiography. Apart from the oral transmission, much hagiographical material has been recorded in written form, much of which has not yet been edited. The extensive field of Christian Arabic hagiography has been examined by some scholars, but it has remained a relatively untrodden field. Many hagiographical texts were not written in Arabic originally, but translated from Greek, Syriac, and Coptic, the languages of the older Christian communities in the Middle East. Arabic hagiographies in their turn gave way to translations into Ethiopic and conversions into Garshuni (Arabic in Syriac script), and formed a ‘catchment field’, as it was called by Swanson (: ). Broadly speaking, there are separate Lives of individual saints, martyrs and Church Fathers, monks, and ascetics, on the one hand, and collective hagiographical texts, on the other. The vast quantity of vitae of saints and martyrs originated in line with the traditions of the Melkite, Coptic, and other oriental Orthodox churches, often written or transmitted in Arabic. The vitae have many different forms and recensions and the tradition is still very much alive, not least because martyrology is a characteristic feature in the liturgy of the eastern churches. The synaxarions used in the eastern churches contain the vitae of martyrs, saints, and Church Fathers attached to the day of the calendar on which their names and lives are celebrated. They mostly present the saints’ lives in summaries. A fine sample of a complete hagiography devoted to an individual saint is the Life of Kolouthos (see Zanetti ). Another part of the corpus consists of Lives in the Liber Pontificalis or Book of the Lives of the Patriarchs,10 a work on the Coptic Church Fathers from the first-century Saint Mark up to the fifty-second patriarch, in the middle of the ninth century, named Joseph. (On its Coptic background, see Chapter in this volume.) The evangelist Mark’s biography (sīra) is a typical martyr’s Life, and it is much longer than the short notices of the subsequent eleven patriarchs. The twelfth patriarchate, from –, was held by Demetrius, to whom a long chapter is devoted. It describes the way in which he miraculously became patriarch, although he was married, but to a holy woman, for that matter, and they lived together as brother and sister. Many events happen during his life as a patriarch, such as his involvement in, for instance, the excommunication of Origen of Alexandria. His holiness is corroborated by the fact that he ‘displayed much learning and wisdom, although he had formerly been ignorant and unable to read or write; and all his spiritual children were continually admonished by him’ (Evetts : ). Islamic hagiography, for its part, has been covered to some extent by the above survey of the biographies of the Prophet. However, one other genre has not yet been dealt with. First, the category of vitae prophetarum, the Lives of pre-Islamic prophets and saints. These are transmitted in the compilations of Qis. as. al-Anbiyā’ (Tales of the Prophets). One of the most 10
The work is known under several titles (History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Liber Pontificalis, Historia Ecclesiastica) and ascribed to Sawīrus (Severus) Ibn al Muqaffa‛, bishop of al Ushmūnayn (tenth century), but was probably compiled by Mawhūb ibn Mans.ūr ibn Mufarrij (eleventh century). See den Heijer (; ; ).
celebrated compilations is ‘Arā’is al-Majālis fī Qis. as. al-Anbiyā’ (The Highlights–‘Brides’–of the Enlightening Sessions on the Tales of the Prophets) by the theologian al-Tha‛labī (d. ). It starts with the story of Creation, followed by the stories about Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the angels, and subsequently the vitae of pre-Islamic prophets— according to the Muslim tradition—starting with Noah, Hūd, Abraham, and many others, including Jesus the son of Mary and Ğirğīs (St George). The Life of Ğirğīs is a typical martyr’s Life (Brinner : –). The chain of transmitters goes back to the well-known Wahb ibn Munabbih, mentioned above, and the report contains specifics about Ğirğīs’s confrontation with his oppressor, tortures, and miracles which are reminiscent of some details in the life of Saint George in the Arabic Synaxarion used in the Coptic church.11 The Shi’ite communities also developed a strong tradition of martyrs and miracles, with its own specialized vocabulary. It focused from the start on the martyrdom of al-H.usayn ibn Abī T.ālib, the grandson of the Prophet Muh.ammad, and on the latter’s family (ahl-albayt) and the heirs of the Imamate. In the field of vitae prophetarum Shi’ite works regularly give prevalence to other characters in their collections of prophets’ Lives, and on certain points stress other qualities and events. For example, a Shi’ite compiler, ‘Abd Allāh al-H.usaynī, portrays the young Daniel in the role of a saviour, as known from Susanna and the Elders in the Septuagint.12
C
.................................................................................................................................. The above synopsis gives an impression of the rich tradition of biographical writing in Arabic. It shows a particular brand of cultural expression of self-awareness within a primarily religious paradigm. The selection of examples is not exhaustive, but it has been illustrative of the main features.
F R With the focus on four prominent historical figures in Islamic history, Cooperson () gives a valuable overview. Besides her many contributions to literary history Wadād al Qād.ī dedicated her farewell address () once more to the spectrum of biographical dictionaries and in particular their reputation. A recent contribution from a more specialized but highly important perspective is Winet (). In the specialist field of medieval and Near Eastern hagiography, the volume by Papacon stantinou, Debié, and Kennedy () stands out. Arabic autobiography, which is not dealt with in the current chapter, is covered in an informative volume by D.F. Reynolds ().
11
Summaries of these Lives are found in O’Leary (). Book Daniel (). Al H . usaynī’s compilation refers to early Shi’ite sources. See Aichele () and Doufikar Aerts (). 12
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MEDIA .............................................................................................................
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Displaying Selves and Lives in Ancient Egypt ......................................................................................................................
I standing in the sun-soaked forecourt of a tomb chapel cut in the escarpment overlooking the Egyptian city of Elkab, which lies some miles south of the ancient city of Thebes, modern Luxor. On stepping through the doorway into the dim interior of the chapel, a long hieroglyphic inscription, carved in forty columns on the chapel’s east and south walls, becomes visible, partly lit by the sunlight streaming in through the door (Fig. .). A large figure of the tomb’s owner, a man called Ahmose, is depicted on the wall with the text emanating from him in columns, as if it is his voice speaking. This performative effect is heightened by the fact that, unusually, the hieroglyphs are carved in reverse (retrograde), so that they face away from him towards the end of the inscription, and through the door towards the outside world. The smaller figure at his feet is his grandson who probably commissioned the composition—one of his titles given here is ‘overseer of works in this tomb’ (Baines : –). The inscription presents events in Ahmose’s life, beginning in his youth but centred on his exploits and achievements as a soldier under three kings who ruled around – , the beginning of the Egyptian New Kingdom. I was born in the city of Nekheb (Elkab), my father being a soldier of the Dual King Seqenenre, true of voice . . . After I had established a household, I was taken to the ship (called) ‘Northern’ because of my valour. I followed the sovereign (life, prosperity, health) on foot when he paraded in his chariot. When the city of Avaris was besieged, I fought bravely on foot in the presence of His Person (the king) . . . I made a capture and carried off a hand, so when it was reported to the royal herald, the gold of valour was given to me. (Sethe : . ., trans.: Lichtheim : )
This is an example of the genre normally referred to by Egyptologists as ‘biography’ or ‘autobiography’, comprising texts which recount, in various forms, events in a non-royal person’s life and/or aspects of their moral character. Such biographies are attested from the third millennium to Roman times, making them one of the longest-lived and most characteristic textual genres known from ancient Egypt. They were usually placed in mortuary settings, either inscribed on the walls of tombs or on commemorative statues
. . The biographical inscription of Ahmose in his tomb at Elkab. Source: Photo author’s own.
and stelae set up in temples. They articulate and celebrate aspects of a life, developing themes concerned with the individual’s relationship to the human sphere (including the dead), the king, and the gods. These compositions were generally intended for display—carved in hieroglyphs, the display form of the script, in contexts that were at least ideally visible to human audiences, the individual’s family, peers, and future visitors (for discussions of exceptions: Baines ; von Lieven ), as well as to the gods. Thus, these texts are products of, and expound, a predominantly elite male world-view concerned with the public actions and character of men who held official, titled positions in the domains of the court, the administration, the priesthood, and the military. These were the men who could afford, or whose families could afford, to commission monuments. It is therefore unsurprising that Egyptian biographies are idealizing, almost always presenting the protagonist as a successful official who thought, spoke, and acted appropriately. References to untoward experiences or an individual’s ‘private’ or ‘inner’ life are rare. In verses omitted from the extract quoted above, Ahmose mentions that he served in his father’s stead before he took a wife. This mention of a wife, and the later reference to establishing a household, are relatively unusual evocations of what we might consider private life, and here they probably underscore distinctions and transformations in his status. Similarly, biographies of women, who normally were not title-holders in Egyptian hierarchies of power, are also unusual, and their occurrence is
often associated with changes in the configuration of elite society and in the biographical genre in the first millennium (see e.g. Jansen-Winkeln a; Baines : –). Within such seemingly normative contexts of composition and display, a highly developed and distinct sense of individual identity can be created, and this was evidently a priority for some Egyptian elites (cf. van Walsem ). Thus, biographical monuments are not only rich sources of social and political histories, which have been the traditional focus of scholarship, they also offer insights into processes and priorities of individual self-fashioning, how these changed over time, and how they operated, for example, in relation to audiences, other monuments, and the architectural spaces and landscapes in which they were set up.
D
.................................................................................................................................. ‘Biographies’ encompass many styles of text found on monuments of non-royal people, ranging from narratives like Ahmose’s, which present a significant event or a number of events in a person’s career, to expository descriptions of an individual’s character, often without any narrative frame: ‘I was silent with the wrathful, one who mingled with the ignorant, for the sake of quelling aggression. I was cool, free from haste, knowing the outcome, one who foresaw what would come’ (stela of Ineni, th dynasty; see Table . below for dates; Parkinson : ). Lengthy narratives like Ahmose’s were relatively rare in all periods, and biographical epithets are generally the most widely attested formulation. These condensed declarations of adherence to codes of moral and ideal behaviour are often part of justifications in funerary wishes or incorporated into title strings: member of the inner circle of the king, to whom the king spoke in private, master of the secrets of the king in his every place, who loved his lord and was beloved of his lord, overseer of north and southbound river traffic, who was dressed as a pure one of the king in the king’s own cloth, who did what the god of his town loves every day, who did not allow a prisoner to languish in misery . . . the prince Somtutef[nakht]. (statue of Somtutefnakht, th dynasty: translation after Leahy : )
Table 34.1 Chronology of Dynastic Egypt Period
Dynasties
Old Kingdom First Intermediate Middle Kingdom Second Intermediate New Kingdom Third Intermediate Late Period Graeco Roman
4 9 11 13 18 21 25
8 11 13 17 20 25 30
Dates c.2575 c.2125 c.1975 c.1630 c.1539 c.1075 c.715 332 BC
Note: date ranges are approximate until 664 BC, and are BC except where noted.
2150 1975 1640 1520 1075 715 332 AD 395
Epithets can be ordered chronologically, thus mobilizing narrative potential (e.g. Dorman ), or focus on a specific and individual action or event, such as the safe delivery of a foreign royal wife: ‘royal messenger in every foreign land, who returned from Hatti bringing its princess’ (stela of Huy, th dynasty: Kitchen : .–.). The styles of text encompassed by ‘biography’ or ‘autobiography’ in Egyptology are thus substantially and materially different from those designated by these terms in Classics and for modern literature, and Egyptian texts are indeed rarely included in discussions of the development of forms of life-writing (e.g. Jolly ). A phrase like ‘self-presentation texts’ might avoid the connotations and expectations those terms bring with them from other fields of enquiry (e.g. Morenz ) and would encompass context more fully (Baines : –). However, since these texts, including epithets, do present an account of a life and self, however formulaic and idealizing, ‘biography’ and ‘autobiography’ continue to be used. Autobiography tends to be preferred since it is seen as reflecting the first-person voice of the majority of texts. This voice is a fiction, vividly evoking the immediacy of personal presence, just as Ahmose stands before, and seems to speak, his story. The texts were almost certainly commissioned rather than authored by their owners, so that scholars who use ‘autobiography’ accept the fictional identity between author, narrator, and subject (e.g. Gnirs : –). I use ‘biography’ partly because it leaves these relationships between subject and implied author, and subject and ‘self ’, open and multiple (see Vernus : esp. –). This flexibility is valuable for texts that make play with the potential voices of biography through use of the second and the third person (e.g. Frood : –, –; : –). ‘Biography’ also makes wider reference to ‘life-course’—we speak of the biographies of cities, buildings, and objects, as well as people. Such broader frameworks, especially as developed in archaeology (e.g. Gosden and Marshall ; Langdon ), are useful because they can encompass the physical and social contexts of biographical monuments, including the landscapes in which they were set up, which are vital to their interpretation. Biography (or autobiography) is normally used to describe texts set up by non-royals, although royal monumental texts from most periods also use the first person to recount the achievements of kings. These are often comparable in language and tone, sometimes including subjective quality, to their non-royal counterparts: ‘I have made my boundary, out-southing my forefathers. I have exceeded what was handed down to me. I am a king, whose speaking is acting; what happens by my hand is what my heart plans . . . As my father lives for me, I speak true; there is no boastful phrase which has come from my mouth’ (boundary stela of Senwosret III, th dynasty: Parkinson : –; discussions: Eyre ; ). The compositional milieu and audiences of non-royal biographies and royal historical inscriptions were very close, if not identical, so comparative analysis is valuable, from the linguistic to the material (also Eyre : –); Andrea Gnirs observes that the syntax and phrasing of parts of Ahmose’s text draw on those of royal annals (Gnirs : n. ). However, in most periods, the king’s semi-divine status made him absolutely distinct from other humans, and the purposes and aims of royal texts should also be understood as distinct. Royal material is not included in the discussion here. The intertextual relationships that biographies have with other genres, from royal inscriptions to poems, religious texts, and letters, have been one focus of analysis (e.g. Eyre ; Gnirs ). In many periods, biographies are also mixed, or set in meaningful
association, with other genres that were traditionally included on non-royal monuments, such as hymns and songs (e.g. Gnirs : –; Frood ). These connections mean that biographical texts should not be defined rigidly. The same applies to texts that are more specifically biographical in content and inscribed in comparable contexts though not conventionally considered biographies. These include legal texts (e.g. Frood : –, –) and texts and images recording an individual’s appointment to office and reward by the king (e.g. ibid.: –, –). Extended texts inscribed in the early th-dynasty tomb of the high official Metjen (c. ), which are usually understood to be the earliestknown exemplar of the genre, comprise records of land endowments and include the description of an orchard (Baines a: –; Strudwick : –). The equally complex interplay with elements of monumental context, including pictures, is discussed below. Although Egyptian biography, like any genre, is unstable, and has shifting, fuzzy boundaries, the degree of continuity in context and content across millennia shows that it was a recognized text type that was commissioned deliberately by officials and their families for monuments, always individualized to a greater or lesser extent, modernized (or not, therefore fashioned in an antique style), and occasionally subverted. An example of ancient awareness of the genre’s potentials and limits is the fictional poem the Tale of Sinuhe, composed in the early second millennium , which begins as a traditional biographical text before utterly subverting that type in order to recount an individual’s self-imposed exile from Egypt and the ideals of Egyptian life (Parkinson ; discussion: Parkinson : –). Verses from the poem are quoted in biographies hundreds of years later, probably without mobilizing the faultlines that they create (Parkinson : –). Similarly, a small number of biographical texts are explicitly framed as tales (e.g. Vernus ; Frood : –, –; J.P. Allen ; Baines forthcoming), integrating them with these high-cultural forms and pointing to play with the fictionality of ‘the self as a tale told’ (A. Hahn : ) inside the normalizing framework of official, monumental discourse, as Sinuhe does outside it (Parkinson : ).
S A
.................................................................................................................................. The self that is fashioned in biographical texts and through the monumental contexts in which they are inscribed is largely relational: the individual is often defined through his actions for, and the responses of, gods, the king, and people, including his peers and dependants, as well as the dead, with whom he is at least partly assimilated. Scholars therefore often use biographies as primary sources for examining these social connections, how they are expressed, and their changing implications for political and social history. A simple example is provided by themes of self-regulation, self-reliance, and care for one’s own town or region, which are characteristic of texts from the First Intermediate Period (c.– ), a time of political fragmentation when some local areas were largely or entirely independent (but see Strudwick : –). Biographies have been productively integrated with other textual and archaeological evidence to explore a range of questions for this period and for the adjacent Old and Middle Kingdoms (e.g. Kóthay ; Moreno
García ; ; ), notably social structure, patronage networks, and non-elite communities. In treating biographies as historical sources, a primary approach is to study their phraseology by breaking texts down into their component parts, producing at minimum catalogues of phrases that are organized and analysed according to themes, such as relationships to social spheres including the king (e.g. Guksch ; Doxey ) or the treatment of indigenous concepts like maat, ‘truth’ or ‘justice’ (Kloth : –). Such lexicographic studies illuminate broad themes and allow nuanced analysis of continuity and change especially when integrated with discussions of whole texts (e.g. Rickal ). However, the isolation of phrases from their textual and spatial contexts can elide difference and diversity, as well as directing analysis away from the individual who constituted the ultimate focus of these texts. These approaches also centre almost exclusively on the texts, in keeping with the previously dominant trend in the subject. Holistic studies that assess whole texts on something like their own terms, such as Eberhard Otto’s () thematically organized analyses of Late Period and Graeco-Roman Period biographies (also, e.g. Lichtheim ; ; Rickal ), treat context as an important framework but its implications remain underdeveloped. Fuller treatments of text, image, and physical context have tended to be in article-length, case-study analyses of single monuments or small groups of them (but see Bassir ). Particularly influential have been examinations of the earliest attested biographical inscriptions and their implications for the development of fictional literature (Baines a; b; Baud ). These studies emphasize the potential of a whole tomb space to thematize a life, an approach that is also relevant for later sources. Modelling related practices in temples is more difficult but is being developed (e.g. Baines ; Leahy : esp. –; ; Zivie-Coche ; Frood ). Such total analyses highlight individual choices and selections and can elucidate the meanings of personal monuments more broadly—what monuments do and how they do it (cf. Ma ). At the opposite level of detail, biographical texts have been a primary source in studies of syntax, while the particularities of their formulations have only recently become a strong focus (e.g. StauderPorchet ; Coulon ; Stauder ; Vernus ).
I C, B L
.................................................................................................................................. The earliest surviving biographical texts were inscribed on tomb walls in cemeteries near the major northern city of Memphis (south of modern Cairo) around , during the th dynasty. They seem to have developed out of extended title strings, which were the earliest form of written self-presentation (Baud : –). Biographies are then almost continuously attested, in some form or other and with varying degrees of popularity, until the Roman conquest in . Unlike earlier periods, including the preceding Ptolemaic dynasty, this conquest signalled a fundamental break in many traditions, including the inscription of biographies, which are attested by a single known outlier in the mid-second century (see Baines ). This section highlights some developments in biography
over these millennia through discussion of elements of context and content. For reference, Table . gives conventional period designations with rough date ranges (from Baines and Malek : –). The physical context of monumental inscriptions is fundamental to any analysis of their meaning (e.g. E. Thomas ). For Egyptian biography, context encompasses media—the location of a text within a tomb and its relationship to other images and texts, pictures on a stela, the form of a statue—and landscape—the location of a tomb in a necropolis, visibility and proximity to other tombs, the position of a statue in a temple, the association of one text with others carved on a quarry wall. The dynamics of biography in different spaces and landscapes are variable and must be taken into account. The narrated selves of biography are shaped by, and shape, the spaces in which they are inscribed. Egyptian biography was originally a tomb genre, inscribed, like Ahmose’s, on walls or other architectural elements as part of decorative programmes in the accessible, ‘public’ parts of monumental complexes. Tombs centre on the body of the deceased, marking his burial place, which was normally underground and inaccessible after the funeral. They also ensured the perpetuation of his cult and memory after death through the public areas, which could encompass a room, or series of rooms, and courts, ideally decorated with scenes and texts and often statues. The content of decorative programmes is diverse and changed over the millennia, but in many periods included images of ‘daily life’ (e.g. agriculture, hunting and fishing, games and music) and/or ones relating to the tombowner’s official duties and activities (e.g. tax-collecting, royal audiences, supervising workshops). Biographies tend to be inscribed in outer areas that also bear less sacred material, as opposed to primarily religious scenes and texts, such as those relating to the funeral, images of ritual, and images of gods. These scenes celebrated the deceased and his lived world, as well as inviting visitors to maintain his cult, particularly through offerings, ideally ensuring the individual’s continuing role in this world and his survival in the next. Each owner and his family created his own distinctive tomb by adapting and transforming a general model (e.g. Hartwig ; van Walsem ). Biography was one possible component of the model, adding dimensions of meaning to the whole space. An example at a detailed level is an unparalleled scene in the New Kingdom tomb of Amenemhab showing him confronting an impossibly large hyena, ‘an imaginary depiction, perhaps of a nightmare episode with personal importance for Amenemhab, which resonates with the fictionalizing and dramatizing biographical text inscribed nearby’ (Baines : –, with Fig. ). These implications extend to landscape, as Janet Richards (; forthcoming) shows through her studies of the dynamic political and religious landscapes of late third millennium Abydos, at the heart of which lies a biographical monument of one high official. Potential locations for biography diversified at the end of the third millennium , when inscriptions recording expeditions through deserts and into quarries included biographical statements (e.g. Strudwick : ). By the First Intermediate Period, biographies could be inscribed on stelae and statues that were set up in places of cult and festival other than cemeteries. No later than the Middle Kingdom, these included temples for gods. Temples were dwelling places for deities and stages for the ritual performances that surrounded them, including festivals. By setting up stelae or statues in temples, or by dedicating them for family members and colleagues, people sought to maintain their own cult, while also
. . Limestone biographical statue of Nespaqashuty (height: cm) from the temple of Amun at Karnak. Source: after Legrain (: pl. ).
asserting their presence in the temple and ongoing participation in the divine cult and festivals. Biographical monuments are increasingly well attested in temples from the early New Kingdom onwards, concomitant with massive royal investment in temple-building. Nonroyal temple monuments reached a high point during the Third Intermediate Period and Late Period in Thebes, when many hundreds of statues, often bearing biographies, were dedicated in the temple complex of Karnak (e.g. Jansen-Winkeln ; ). This development may have been stimulated in part by changes in burial practices, at a time when monumental tombs had largely ceased to be built in the area, so that temples were the prime loci for individual commemoration. The content of biographies changed too, including revelatory descriptions of the experience of temple space, such as that inscribed on the rear surface of the statue of the nd-dynasty vizier Nespaqashuty (Fig. .): ‘I saw (the god) Amun in his akhet-horizon in the hall of images, after he emerged from the bakhu-horizon, and then I understood that the gods are his manifestations, since I saw them before him arranged in two rows; I was (appropriately) robed, bearing the insignia of
Maat’ (Jansen-Winkeln : ). There was a resurgence in tomb-building and tomb biography in the Late Period, but temple statues and stelae remained central media for these texts into Ptolemaic times. The claim to temple space made by dedicating a stela or statue was extended and transformed by a biographical text. As the most strongly individualizing text type, biographies had the potential to personalize and individualize the spaces in which they were set up. Statues, which depict a person in however conventional and idealizing a manner, encapsulate this potential most powerfully because they could be agents. A statue of the New Kingdom high priest Roma, set up in the temple of Amun at Karnak, speaks about its presence in the temple, requesting that it ‘be established on earth, my name carved and visible on it for eternity . . . so that (the god) Amun address it each time he appears, and (the gods) Mut and Khonsu assent to it as they do to the great ones’ (Kitchen : .–; Frood : ). The statue also bears a biographical text describing Roma’s service for Amun and the roles his sons took up in the temple, binding the separate lives of statue and person, the expectations and practices that encompassed them both, and the prospect of its and his endurance down the generations. Moreover, when temple walls became a medium for non-royal self-presentation in the New Kingdom—formal temple decoration was usually restricted to images of kings and gods—biographical material is prominent (e.g. Caminos : –, pls. , –; Frood : –; and see Bickel ). Tombs, monuments in temples, and inscriptions carved in quarries or on expedition routes represented investments by individuals in perpetuating themselves and their memories beyond death, but they were also immensely important for the living. I began this chapter with Ahmose’s tomb and his biography, partly to give a sense of engagement with material that might be unfamiliar; such compositions also raise questions about the ancient experience of these texts, especially audience and performance. Who would know of them? Who would read or hear them? Members of the individual’s group—family, colleagues, friends, dependants—as well as his superiors, sometimes even including the king, would have been aware that a monument was being commissioned, and that a biography was being composed. A text inscribed on the th-dynasty false door stela of Niankhsakhmet, which records his request for this false door from the king and the king’s subsequent gift of two, acknowledges the social institutions that could surround monument creation: The great controller of craftsmen and a workshop of craftsmen then set to work on them (the doors) in the presence of the king himself. This work was carried out daily and the results were apparent every day during the palace tour. His majesty arranged for pigment to be placed on them, and they were decorated in blue. (translation after Strudwick : ; see also Baines b: ; cf. Chauvet )
The ceremonial palace tour was probably a regular event including members of the court, so the prestige Niankhsakhmet accrued through this remarkable royal favour was also highly competitive. For many texts, reading, in the sense of reading by and for oneself, is unlikely to have taken place for a number of reasons, from the basic issue of limited literacy through to the practicalities of reading a temple statue such as Nespaqashuty’s (see Fig. .), which probably would have sat in the bright sunlight of an open court that was perhaps cluttered
with other statues. Oral performances are easier to model. Although the gap between spoken and written language was significant in most periods, something like a biography would, at least ideally, have been declaimed during the funeral, the dedication of a monument, or as part of significant occasions during a life, such as promotion or reward (Eyre ; : esp. –). Verses inscribed on Niankhsakhmet’s door voicing his praise for the king may relate to a ceremony in which he offered the king thanks for the gift, as well as to events connected with its presentation to him (Baines b: –, also –). Biographies like Ahmose’s mobilize this possibility explicitly by being framed as an address: ‘The crew commander Ahmose son of Ibana, true of voice, said: I speak to you, all people! I let you know what favours accrued to me . . . The name of the brave man is in what he has done; it will not perish in the land forever’ (Sethe : .–.). That proverbial sentiment would have been known to an elite audience, and would have had a powerful effect when uttered. Imagining some sort of spoken performance sits well in tombs, which were places of return for the living and the dead. Similar addresses are attested on temple statues (e.g. Salvador ), which could have been the subject of performances relating to the texts inscribed on them, for example, when they were dedicated or a priest was initiated (Baines : ). Audiences may have been comparable too: temple space, especially the major state complexes from which much provenanced material comes, was probably restricted to staff and officials, groups that might have been substantial for some temples and at particular times such as festivals, which also provided occasions for performance. Biographies are sources for other biographies. The transmission of formulae such as ‘I gave bread to the hungry, clothes to the naked’ across millennia suggests that there were repositories of phraseology (see e.g. Coulon ). There were also probably models of whole texts. One quite personal example is where stanzas from a temple statue of a thdynasty high priest were copied a century and a half later in an inscription belonging to another high priest, then more than five hundred years later found on another statue, all three being set up in the same temple (Frood : ; Heise : –, –). Some texts were known and sought out. The physical inscription remained vital, not just for its presence, but for details of its content and the materiality of its carving.
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.................................................................................................................................. The relationship of biographical texts to spoken address is intertwined with the notion, stated explicitly from the Middle Kingdom onward (e.g. Posener ), that they could be teachings, offering models of behaviour and character along lines also found in the wisdom literature (but see Jansen-Winkeln b): ‘He says, in an instruction to his children: I speak so that I may cause you to hear what happened to me since the first day, since I came out between the thighs of my mother’ (tomb inscription of Amenemhet, th dynasty: Helck : .–.). Among the very diverse contents of biographical texts, service to superiors—including the king and the gods—responsibilities for dependants, and proper conduct in speech and action are often central. There was a productive tension between generalized, conventional statements of adherence to norms and
traditions and the articulation of distinct, unique lives and selves: ‘Come and read this inscription which is on it (this stela). I have reported what actually happened to me; this is not something heard from the mouth of another’ (stela of Khereduankh, Ptolemaic: translation after Jansen-Winkeln : ; and see also Coulon ). Many biographies include only formulae relating to moral character, but they too exhibit meaningful variability in selection, patterning, and context (e.g. Stauder-Porchet : –). A number of important biographical topics emerged in the th dynasty, crystallizing in the th. Texts changed gradually from short reports of single events, often formulated in the third person, to potentially lengthy first-person compositions sometimes encompassing whole careers (Stauder-Porchet ; ; : –). They also came to incorporate statements of ethical and moral values (for which see Lazaridis ; Moreno García ). ‘I said what was perfect and repeated what was perfect. I spoke and acted truly. I gave bread to the hungry, clothes to the naked. I was respectful of my father and kind to my mother as far as I was able. I never said anything evil, unjust, or devious to any man’ (tomb inscription of Idu, th dynasty: Strudwick : ). Variations on these themes and on parallel phrases are attested on monuments into Ptolemaic times, extending core meanings with sometimes elaborate imagery: ‘I am . . . a refuge for the wretched, a float for the drowning, a ladder for him who is in the abyss . . . I have done what people love and gods praise, one truly revered who had no fault, who gave bread to the hungry, clothes to the naked’ (Statue of Harwa, th dynasty: Lichtheim : –). Themes of social responsibility assert the protagonist’s superior status and resources. This inequality, as well as the need for actions to sustain it, resonates with wider principles of elite ideology—the maintenance of harmony, balance, and justice (maat)—as expanded in the wisdom literature. While most encomiastic biographies tend to be utterly secure in such claims to right action, others, as also in the wisdom literature, hint at the contingencies of lived experience, as in Idu’s qualification above ‘as far as I was able’ (also Parkinson : ). The king is a primary point of reference and motor for action, especially when the theme centres on events or career (e.g. Stauder ). In most periods, power and position are said ultimately to derive from him: he recognized potential, rewarded service, gave promotions and gifts, granted tomb sites, and commissioned works and expeditions. Formulations along these lines can seem all-encompassing, but the king also recognizes a person’s inherent qualities, so character prefigures and stimulates favour. Biographies evoking palace life give some sense of the ritualized etiquette that surrounded the king and of how his presence regulated everything from speech and movement to accoutrement: Favourite of the king in his palace, in keeping commoners distant from him, to whom grandees came bowing at the gates of the palace . . . one whom grandees greeted, who was in front of the courtiers who approached the palace, who knew [what was secret] on the day the courtiers spoke, incense laden, possessor of dignity on the day the poor could enter, one who reported to the king in privacy, whose seat was near (him) on the day of assembly. (Stela of Intef, th dynasty: translation after Lichtheim : ; Coulon )
The final verses in this quotation assert the protagonist’s privileged proximity to the king, in contrast to ordinary people as well as his peers. Themes of intimacy are developed in myriad ways, from a childhood spent at court—‘he received swimming lessons together with the royal children’ (ibid.: )—through patterned statements of service and reward like
Ahmose’s, to emotive reports of the experience of royal favour: ‘One (the king) gave thanks to the god for me because of it (my deeds). He dispensed rejoicing and it filled my body; jubilation pervaded my limbs’ (Baines : ). However, some of the earliest biographical accounts present an intimacy that could be problematic for the individual and the king through descriptions of illness or accidents. An inscription from the massive th-dynasty tomb complex of Rewer narrates how the king inadvertently struck Rewer with a club during a ritual, requiring this potentially dangerous contact to be neutralized (J.P. Allen ; Baines b: –; Strudwick : –). This stresses Rewer’s prestige through proximity, and the value he was deemed to have, while the presentation of the king’s fallibility humanizes his ideological position a little. Expressions of comparable intimacy with gods are rare before the late second millennium , in keeping with restrictions in decorum around the representation of gods in nonroyal contexts (e.g. Baines and Frood ). The increasing significance of temple environments as locations for biography from the Middle Kingdom onward influenced developments in this direction, as suggested by the emergence of priestly texts offering detailed accounts of cult performance: I was a pure priest of the lord of Armant, libationer for the king of the gods, who entered the temple door (called) ‘lasting of years’, who broke the seal in the sanctuary, who embellished the interior of the chapel, who removed impurities with his hands, who revealed those who are before him (images of gods). (Stela of Samontu, Second Intermediate Period: translation after Kubisch : )
Possibilities for expressing unmediated relationships with gods expanded in the late second and first millennium (overview: Luiselli ). Some texts present conversations with gods, dreams about them, divine punishment, and forgiveness, while some, like Nespaqashuty’s quoted above, give a vivid sense of personal experience of the divine through ritual. In such accounts of the impact on the self of superior beings, who can ‘penetrate minds, perceive hearts, and know what is in bodies’ (translation after Frood : ), biographies open up to ‘unexpected registers of feeling’ (de Waal : ). Texts occasionally allude to subjective experience, like the account of joy in royal favour quoted above; the king’s accident in Rewer’s text might be comparable to this. Some focus around inner worlds of thought and feeling rather than external matters: ‘He searched within himself and found (the goddess) Mut at the head of the gods’ (Frood : ). The diversification of ways experience can be thematized and expressed intensifies in the first millennium with the emergence of new voices and themes in biography, alongside new media, such as coffins and sarcophagi (Baines : –; also Derchain ). For example, a text on the thdynasty sarcophagus of the dwarf Djeho articulates the aspirations of his patron Tjaiharpta rather than his own (Baines ). Graeco-Roman Period biographies of women, although still composed by men, can express particularities of female experience: I was pregnant by him (the high priest) three times but did not bear a male child, only three daughters. I prayed together with the high priest to the majesty of the god . . . he heard our pleas, he hearkened to our prayers. . . . In return he (the god) made me conceive a male child. (Stela of Taimhotep, reign of Cleopatra VII, ; Lichtheim : )
The companion stela of Taimhotep’s husband is a little more conventional in content, but the greatly desired birth of the son is still defining (Baines : –; : –). Thus,
while traditional frameworks for biographies remained in place, the pluralistic Hellenistic world offered expansive and very distinctive alternatives for self-fashioning (also, e.g. Vittmann ; Coulon ). Many biographies, including some quoted here, emphasize ‘perfect speech’ and the protagonist’s education, including his skill in writing (Ragazzoli ). These themes not only assert elite ideals of eloquence and literacy, they also relate to the artfulness of the texts themselves: biographies were meant to delight as much as to teach. Clever word-plays developed through meaning and through the visual potential of the script, literary allusions, quotations, proverbs, vivid metaphor, and complex formulations all contribute to their aesthetic impact. This impact encompasses their material qualities, as is powerfully evoked in a Middle Kingdom artist’s description of his unsurpassed skill in carving pictures, including hieroglyphs: ‘I know the goings of male figures, the comings of female figures, the attitude of the eleven birds of prey, the convulsions of an isolated prisoner, the glances of one eye to its fellow, the expression of fear in the faces of enemies’ (stela of Irtisen, th dynasty: translation after Andreu in Andreu et al. : –). This account also describes reflexively the beauty of the monument on which it is inscribed.
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.................................................................................................................................. Egyptian biographies are texts of mediation and transformation, as Ahmose’s text vividly illustrates. It mediates between his transfigured self and the outside world in multiple, highly self-reflexive ways, from its frame as a voiced address to the living, one that was very obviously made posthumously, to the way the inscription itself is carved to lead a ‘reader’ out the door. Despite such complexity, it can be tempting to discuss these texts in narrowly functional terms—one can say that they are almost entirely celebrations of individual and group qualities, competitively asserting status and prestige. That is, of course, part of their point. But there is resonance with other features of the lives told in the classical world, from the aesthetics of their composition and settings to the desire to articulate a contoured and distinctive self within the boundaries of established discourse. We can ask comparable questions about how we get from a life to a text (e.g. in classical sources), to a text on a monument (e.g. in Egyptian). In all these contexts, the construction of a self-presentation is obviously more likely to be reflexive than daily, lived experience where such issues may play out in different ways. As is so often observed (e.g. Assmann : ; A. Hahn : –), the necessary brevity and selectivity of a self-presentation make it more cohesive than is possible in lived experience, but it retains flexibility and multiplicity, the potential for which is further extended in ancient Egypt by the monumental context. It is important to do as the texts ask and pay attention to this complexity, this art, this vibrant diversity and individuality.
F R The most detailed overview of the genre, geared to specialists, is Gnirs (; brief English summary: ). An edited volume by Stauder Porchet, Frood, and Stauder (), also for specialists, treats various aspects in detail. Anthologies of translations, organized by periods and often with useful
introductory discussions, make a range of texts accessible to non specialists, e.g. E. Otto (), Lichtheim (), Frood (), Kubisch (; summary article in English: ), and Landgráfová (). Collections of translations of a wide range of texts, including biographies, allow them to be compared to other genres and styles of monument, e.g. Lichtheim (; ; ), Parkinson (), Simpson (), and Strudwick (). The best introduction to Egyptian biography in the Graeco Roman period, thus closest to material that is the focus of this volume, is Baines (). A highly accessible edited volume treating Egyptian self presentation in language and art, encompassing a range of media and genres, and organised chronologically (but excluding Graeco Roman material) is Bassir ().
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Biographical Material in Epigraphic Sources ......................................................................................................................
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I—permanently incised texts on stone or bronze—are a characteristic feature of Greek and Roman Antiquity. The production of inscriptions began with the development of the Greek alphabets in the Archaic period and steadily increased until production peaked in the second century . Although the number of texts gradually decreased from then on, inscriptions remained an important phenomenon also throughout Late Antiquity and the Byzantine period. Recording texts on durable materials is not simply a by-product of a broader culture of writing. Inscriptions do not offer a random or representative sample of a given corpus of texts which existed in a specific period. Their production is expensive and thus presupposes a conscious decision in favour of epigraphic documentation, singling out specific kinds of texts. Inscriptions are therefore anything but ‘objective’ documents. Instead, they offer a selection of texts guided by strong and particular interests. Thus, the epigraphic tradition is fundamentally shaped by intentionality. In order to denote the production of inscriptions as a cultural practice in this sense, scholars today use the term ‘epigraphic habit’. This concept has strongly contributed to refining awareness of diachronic changes and regional peculiarities in ancient epigraphic culture. In all periods of ancient epigraphy, however, by far the most common genres of inscriptions are those directly related to individual people: funerary inscriptions provide the most substantial single corpus, followed by religious dedications and honorific inscriptions. In their simplest forms, these kinds of texts are almost entirely reduced to a name, the crucial element used to identify a person. For free-born individuals, this usually includes the father’s name (or patronymic). These core elements could be supplemented with further details which might range from rather bland data, such as place of origin, social status, profession, or age, to information about offices held or even brief characterizations. However, to talk of biography seems only justified when a text offers a holistic view of a person’s life and includes the entirety of their journey from birth to death, i.e. a ‘cradle-tograve narrative’, or at least covers extensive parts of their life up to an advanced age. Moreover, this formal criterion alone is not sufficient, since it would apply also to the simplest funerary inscriptions that give hardly more than the name and age of the deceased.
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To be called biographical, an inscription should contain more substantial information on the various stages of a person’s life that serves to characterize them in greater detail and proposes a moral judgement of their lives. Such elements mirror the moral aims of literary biographies, designed to provide their readers with ethical instruction for their own lives by confronting them with either exemplary or negative characters. The scope and density of the descriptions are significant here. Unlike literary texts, inscriptions as artefacts were generally conceived to communicate condensed information on a restricted space. For this purpose, a special language with a fixed repertoire of standardized formulae was developed, and especially Latin epigraphy also makes heavy use of abbreviations. Very long texts, which on the grounds of their exceptional importance were inscribed irrespective of their length and the effort required, account for only an infinitely small percentage of the extant epigraphic material. The specific materiality of inscriptions, which distinguishes them from literary texts, limited the space available, but also opened additional channels of communication. The inscriptions took effect as parts of objects or architecture and were accordingly components of a visual unit. Their layout, the size of the letters, and their position, usually in a very visible place, all influenced how this object was perceived and could serve to visually emphasize the person as the focus of the text, for instance, by presenting the name in larger letters or in a prominent position. The sheer size and quality of a monument, the size and material of a statue, the furnishings of a tomb, etc. all immediately communicate intelligible messages about a person’s wealth, ambition, and success and underscore or complement the biographical details given in the associated inscription. The combination of image and text is particularly informative in the case of honorific and funerary monuments. In honorific monuments, the statue of the honorand forms an indivisible unit with the inscribed base, while funerary monuments often feature a relief showing the deceased alongside the inscription. The formalized visual language of these images clearly communicated to any observer that this was a respectable citizen, a model priestess, a brave soldier, etc., even before the inscription was read. Both as texts and as components of monuments, inscriptions thus were shaped by highly standardized forms which constrained their ability to depict individual personality. Epigraphic monuments do not present individuals but inscribe people into prefigured categories with which the recipients were well acquainted; as a result, they often provide only stereotypical biographical information. On the other hand, this sort of categorization was significant also in ancient literary biographies. And wherever inscriptions do show formulae that depart from the amply documented usual standard, this provides a good measure of the degree of individuality present in the portrayal of biographical detail. Another fundamental difference between literary texts and inscriptions has to be borne in mind: literary biographies often fulfil their moral and entertainment purpose by including negative elements in the portrayal of their heroes. In contrast, inscriptions, and particularly honorific and funerary texts, were intended to cement positive images in the public memory. They are therefore even more selective and one-sided than literary biographies. On occasion, autobiographical elements come into play in this process, for instance, when funerary monuments and their inscriptions were erected during a person’s lifetime or when prominent individuals directly or indirectly instigated the public honours they received and influenced the selection of meritorious deeds praised in the texts.
Overall, while the personal data so frequently included in inscriptions are linked to the person’s biography, the texts in essence remain assemblages of isolated biographical elements which were not integrated into a coherent narrative. Therefore, inscriptions at first sight may appear to have little relevance to the history of ancient biography, and accordingly, books on (auto-)biography in Antiquity seldom refer to inscriptions. F. Leo did not mention inscriptions in his still fundamental history of Graeco-Roman biography, and the same is true for more recent works on the subject.1 But G. Misch (: .–) in his monumental history of autobiography devotes several pages at least to Roman inscriptions. And more recent research also considers inscribed monuments as important media of (self-)representation in wider political and social discourses, and has paid increasingly more attention to the relationship between inscriptions and biographical forms (K. Rosen ; Vössing ).
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.................................................................................................................................. Ever since the Archaic period, the Greek elites had made use of inscribed monuments to permanently anchor individual exploits in collective memory. Rather than to communicate biographical information, such texts were inscribed to commemorate distinct occasions, e.g. victories in sporting competitions or military conflict or dedications of buildings or precious objects. Only funerary inscriptions were always interested in—at least briefly— informing readers about the life of the deceased, his or her status or profession, deeds, or achievements, and sometimes even attempted brief characterizations. In the mid-sixth century , an Athenian funerary epigram rendered in dialogue form recorded the death of Tettichus, who had died in war at a young age (IG I3 bis). At the end of the fifth century , an inscription from Geronthrai in Laconia preserved the memory of Eualces, who had fallen in the Battle of Mantinea in (IG V, ). The grave stele from Athens for Dexileus recorded the years of his birth and his death which occurred on the battlefield at Corinth in , an event which was well known to his contemporaries: ‘he died at Korinth as one of the five cavalrymen’ (IG II/III2 ). The text is combined with a magnificent relief representing Dexileus as a cavalryman in idealized pose riding over a fallen enemy. In the early fourth century , a funerary inscription from Phaleron near Athens lauded the righteousness (δικαιοσύνη) of Euphanes (SEG , ). It is characteristic that apart from the Dexileus inscriptions, all these examples are epigrams. The poetic form was more flexible than the rather rigid formulae of epigraphic prose and allowed more individual detail to be included in the text. Furthermore, a funerary epigram as such was a distinction which signalled a person of outstanding qualities. In the fourth century , literary interest in biography and autobiography markedly increased, and a parallel expansion of biographical information can be observed in funeral inscriptions (Momigliano : –). In the early Hellenistic period, beginning in the late
Leo (), Dihle (; ), and Sonnabend (). Brief remarks in Momigliano (: , ) and Hägg (a: ). 1
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fourth century , Greek poleis started to publish honorific decrees for their citizens which contained increasingly detailed accounts of the life and deeds of the honorands.2 But even then, the majority of these decrees focused on a specific isolated accomplishment or briefly recapitulated the citizen’s earlier successes on the occasion of his most recent exploit which had provoked the honours for him. Extensive decrees covering the whole political career of a citizen remain exceptional. In the early Hellenistic period, more extensive biographical portrayals also focus on political successes, which often makes them little more than strings of isolated episodes. Only after the mid-second century did some cities in Asia Minor begin publishing extensive honorific decrees that claimed to canvas the honorand’s entire life, from his childhood to his death. By contrast, honorific decrees addressing foreigners remained—with only some exceptions—quite short and standardized during the whole Hellenistic period.3 Even Hellenistic kings were in general honoured only with quite short inscriptions. A notable exception is the long autobiographical inscription set up by Antiochus I of Commagene (IGLS ). The practice of permanently putting up honorific decrees for fellow citizens seems to have developed in parallel in a number of different Greek cities. It was Athens, however, which set the trend in the early Hellenistic period by being the first to publish extensive career decrees. In the context of the political unrest and the long-standing conflicts with the Macedonian rulers, the council and people of Athens repeatedly published honorific decrees for outstanding citizens that included detailed descriptions of their achievements. In the third century , the democratic faction in Athens was particularly pronounced in its use of honorific decrees for Athenian citizens as vehicles to reaffirm and circulate democratic values and ideals. Just like literary biographies, the extensive narratives primarily served to illustrate exemplary behaviour. By selecting episodes from the lives of outstanding figures, the city attempted to provide all citizens with models for their personal life choices and reaffirm its communal norms and ideals. The decrees therefore presented ideal biographies of staunch, patriotic democrats, invoked the traditional values of democracy, freedom, and autonomy and lauded active citizens for their efforts in the service of the city. The constant clashes with the Macedonian kings who on several occasions forced oligarchic regimes on the Athenians seem to have been perceived as a particular threat to the traditional order that necessitated the reaffirmation of democratic ideals. Decades after their deaths, honorific decrees styled the well-known politicians Lycurgus and Demosthenes as ideal democrats and staunch opponents of the Macedonian rulers.4 During the years of freedom and independence after , Philippides of Cephale and Callias of Sphettus were praised both for their accomplishments and efforts as democratic citizens while they were still alive.5 During the same period, the council and people also published an honorific decree that portrayed the politician Demochares as an ideal democrat shortly after his death (Plu. Moralia D–F):
K. Rosen () and Errington (). See, however, e.g. IG XII ,, (Samos) for an expanded narrative on the life of a foreign benefactor (K. Rosen : ). 3 For exceptions, see e.g. IG XII ,, ; IG XII ,, . 4 IG II/III2 ; . Plu. Moralia A E (Lycurgus); F C (Demosthenes). 5 Philippides: IG II/III3 ,, ; Callias: IG II/III3 ,, . Shear (). 2
He went into exile for the democracy, and he had never any share in an oligarchic regime nor held an office while the democracy was dissolved. He was the only Athenian politician of his generation who never planned a revolution in his fatherland except for a democracy. By his political measures, he made the decisions (of the popular assembly), the laws, the courts and the estates safe for all Athenians. By word and deed, he never did anything against the democracy.
There are also a few third-century examples of honorific decrees for pro-Macedonian citizens, such as Philippides of Paeania (IG II/III3 ,, ) or Phaedrus of Sphettus (IG II/III3 ,, ), which also contain extensive biographical sketches. These decrees were passed during periods of Macedonian control and served to contrast and counter the biographies of ideal democrats. The early Hellenistic decrees passed by Athenian civic bodies in honour of fellow citizens were always highly political documents and served the polis as vehicles that propagated its own version of the past, its intentional history (Gauthier : –; Kralli –; Luraghi ; Forster : –). The biographical descriptions contained in the decrees largely consisted of exemplary episodes and served to illustrate general notions of civic morality and virtue. The accomplishments recorded were accordingly chosen with care and probably at least in part adapted to the core themes of the narrative. The biographical perspective was therefore secondary and subjected to the ideological statements being made by these political manifestos. Moreover, the decrees were not exclusively intended for publication on stone. Draft proposals were read aloud by the citizen proposing the motion during the sessions of the council and assembly called upon to pass them (Rhodes and Lewis : –; Bielfeldt : –; Samons : –; Forster : , –). The structure and style of the narratives were accordingly adapted to the needs of the audience in the assembly. The Athenian decrees in honour of citizens in the early Hellenistic period were therefore never biographies in the literary sense. Since their portrayal generally sacrificed individuality in favour of the intentions of the polis, autobiographical elements seem to play only a minor part in the decrees, especially since the outstanding citizens themselves were probably able to influence the narratives only in a very limited fashion.6 In view of the sophisticated ideological messages of the decrees, it is hard to believe that the proposers more or less took over autobiographical texts supplied by the honorands or their families. But, in general, the moral purposes and ideological tendencies of the epigraphically published honorific decrees mirror the educational thrust of both biography and historiography. Athens was not alone in honouring its own citizens in the early Hellenistic period. Similar honorific decrees containing extensive descriptions of the honorand’s life were occasionally published also in various other cities. These decrees provided a summary of the individual’s deeds that was organized by categories and gave an account of successes achieved in inter-state politics and civic offices. Usually, a single, exceptional deed induced the cities to pass and subsequently publish the honorific decree which then rehearsed earlier achievements. A grain crisis on Samos provides the climax and occasion for the decree in honour of Bulagoras, which is neatly organized in categories and serves to style
Errington (: ), in contrast, sees the honorific decrees as autobiographies but underrates the influence of proposers, council, and assembly on their content. 6
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him an ideal citizen (IG XII ,, ). Polycritus of Erythrai (I.Erythrai Klazomenai ) and Protogenes of Olbia (IOSPE I2 ) both performed most of their meritorious deeds in the context of military conflicts. Although these decrees naturally added to the individual prestige of the recipients by amplifying their record, they also served an important purpose for the community by memorializing the successful negotiation of existential crises by the cities. As a rule, however, the honorific decrees of the early Hellenistic period never grew into biographies of literary dimensions, which is not to say that their language and rhetorical style were not sophisticated. The main difference is that the decrees never progressed beyond stringing exemplary episodes together. One should note, however, that organizing accounts of accomplishments thematically is a structural concept also found in literary biographies of the Hellenistic period. The first comprehensive accounts of outstanding citizens’ lives and accomplishments in honorific decrees are found around in a number of cities of Asia Minor. These decrees begin their narratives with the honorand’s childhood and youth and proceed to paint his entire life—sometimes even beyond his death, when they treat his public burial by the citizen community. On the occasion of Menas’ second gymnasiarchy, the polis of Sestus recapitulated the previous merits of this outstanding citizen (I.Sestos ). The narrative, which is once more organized by categories, uses ring composition to highlight that he showed the same virtues and character traits throughout his life. His exceptional qualities thus function as core motifs that permeate the entire document: Menas’ career from birth to death realizes a polis ideal of an exemplary and virtuous life in constant service of the community. Similarly, the city of Colophon opened its honorific decrees for Polemaeus and Menippus with detailed accounts of the youth and training of the two politicians (Robert and Robert ; Lehmann ; SEG , –). These exceptional citizens had travelled to international centres of education, such as Athens and Rhodes, at a young age and prepared themselves for their future lives as politicians in their home city by being trained in philosophy and rhetoric. The authors of the decrees seem to have considered their intellectual training in rhetoric and political affairs the foundation of their later successes as envoys or in civic offices. Both narratives end by looking to the future and expressing the hope that the two outstanding citizens would not cease to apply themselves on behalf of the polis. These rather conventional formulae allow the narratives to cover the lives of their subjects in their entirety: the polis ideal held that good citizens should devote their entire lives to serving the polis and toil for the promotion of the common good from their youth to their death (Wörrle ; Forster : –). In decrees of the late Hellenistic period, which were exhibited on the inside walls of the northern stoa of the agora, the city of Priene similarly attempted to give a comprehensive picture of the honorands’ lives. The decrees in honour of Moschion and Herodes (I.Priene –; I.Priene B-M –), for instance, provide detailed accounts of the deeds these virtuous citizens accomplished from their early childhood onwards. The narratives were organized by type of accomplishment, a structure found also in the honorific decrees for Crates (I.Priene ; I.Priene B-M ) and Heraclitus (I.Priene + ; I.Priene B-M ). By contrast with early Hellenistic decrees, these texts did not limit the scope of their descriptions to the political sphere, such as embassies or magistracies, but included euergetic gestures, such as donations and banquets, for the benefit of the whole community. Thus, public duties and private initiatives of rich, aristocratic citizens increasingly merged. By
prospectively decreeing posthumous honours for active citizens during their lifetime, such as crowns and public burial, the city of Priene also took care to provide for the time after their death. The premise of such public distinction was that the honorands would continue to show the same benevolent attitude in the future. Only by displaying a lifetime of active service that ended only with his death, could a citizen ultimately show himself worthy of the posthumous honours he received. From the perspective of the polis, a full appreciation of a person’s accomplishments in life was possible only in retrospect, an attitude that probably mirrors popular philosophy (cf. Hdt. .–). Thus, by employing the device of prospective posthumous honours, the honorific decrees of Priene were able to encompass the entire lives of their protagonists while they were still alive. In engraving these resolutions on stone in the civic centre of the polis, Priene put ideal biographies of virtuous citizens on permanent public display. This is explicitly reflected upon in the decree for Athenopolis, which engages with the underlying moral concepts on a theoretical level without diving into the details of the honorand’s life (I.Priene ; I.Priene B-M ): A truly good and honourable man dedicated his entire life to serving the polis and maintained this exemplary attitude until his death. Good citizens were not simply active politicians and model democrats, but let their concern for the community be felt in all areas of their public activities and even their private life. They contributed—in their role as caring fathers of the household—to the community’s well-being by sponsoring public activities from their private funds (Wörrle ; Gehrke ). By the end of the Hellenistic period, the resulting appropriation of public life by rich and powerful citizens made politics in the Greek cities to become increasingly dominated by a limited number of leading families. Aristotelian philosophy held that good character traits were made apparent only by a person’s actions, and virtue was reinforced only by its constant display in practice.7 The late Hellenistic honorific decrees seem to have adopted this concept since their main body frequently refers back to the general ideas presented in the introduction, either by directly repeating keywords or by making more subtle references. This internal cross-referencing highlighted the notion that a person’s gifts were fully developed only in their practical application and that the whole life of an exemplary individual should display a flawless unity. In their educational aims and moralizing tendencies and as comprehensive, fairly detailed portraits of their subjects’ lives, the late Hellenistic decrees come close to ancient conceptions of literary biography. But the fact remains, that the core interest of these texts was not in the biographical account. The extensive descriptions of the honorands’ lives were primarily intended to exemplify a conception of the ideal citizen, and the accounts were certainly adapted to serve this purpose. Naturally the moral aim precluded the inclusion of any negative aspects or setbacks in the protagonists’ careers. Furthermore, even the most extensive decrees were originally conceived as speeches held in the assembly. The language and structure of these narratives were accordingly adapted to the needs and expectations of those listening to the oral presentation of the written drafts. As eulogies on outstanding figures of public life, the detailed honorific decrees cities published for their own citizens in late Hellenistic Asia Minor were comparable to the texts written by Isocrates in the mid-fourth century about the Cypriot monarch Evagoras and by Xenophon around the same time about the Spartan king Agesilaus: in essence, these 7
Cf. e.g. Arist. EE b, a; EN a b, a b, a ; MM a b.
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were biographical encomia (see Chapter and Chapter respectively in this volume). But pace Errington (: ), they are not sufficient to fill the gap in literary attestations of political biography between Isocrates and Xenophon, on the one hand, and Plutarch, on the other. Rather, they can be seen as one current within the general development of contemporary literature, in which biography, historiography, and rhetoric influenced not only each other, but also the shape of civic decrees. In their language, style, and organization these narratives often drew upon literary models and seem to have copied elements from contemporary literary biographical accounts. In part, therefore, late Hellenistic honorific decrees were at least related to the genre of literary biography. As eulogies strongly rooted in rhetorical practice, they can best be described as biographical encomia or—in line with Aristotle’s terminology—as biographical praise or epainos.8 The beginning of the principate marks a change in the epigraphic habits of the eastern provinces. The publication of long honorific decrees on stone becomes a rare phenomenon though it is clear that such decrees continued to be passed and that the discourse on the lives and achievements of leading politicians was still an important issue in the popular assemblies. But instead of full decree texts, only very abridged versions—the so-called honorific inscriptions—were now usually inscribed on the pedestals of the statues awarded to the honorands.9 These shorter texts, which became a dominant genre both of Greek and of Latin inscriptions during the Imperial period, allowed less space for general reflections about civic values. They focused instead on the honorand and gave a short list of his or her most important achievements. This development may reflect the decreasing political weight of popular assemblies as against the growing influence of individual notables.
R
.................................................................................................................................. As in Hellenistic Greece, the use of inscriptions in Roman public discourse was embedded in more general political and social practices. The nobility, the ruling elite of the Roman Republic, essentially defined itself on the basis of the prestige it accumulated exclusively by serving the res publica. The members of the most prominent families were locked in constant competition for the highest offices, especially the consulate, and for military glory. In their public self-representation, the families were keenly intent on promoting the memory of prominent relatives for the purpose of generating political capital. This distinctively Roman interest in familial prestige was prone to foster the development of biographical perspectives and narrative forms (Scholz ). Thus, the speeches that leading politicians delivered to the people (contiones) were full of anecdotes about the exemplary behaviour of their own ancestors or of other outstanding individuals. The funerals of prominent family members were used to reaffirm and display the family’s prestige in elaborate public performances. The public eulogy a relative held in honour of the deceased—the so-called laudatio funebris—was a particularly important element On this distinction, see Arist. Rh. b , EE b and EN b . Whether an honorific decree fits into the one or the other category has to be analysed case by case. 9 Schuler () discusses some examples of honorific monuments in the Greek East during the Imperial period. 8
(Misch : .–; Suerbaum ; Blasi ; Hägg a: –). Another firstrank occasion of public self-representation were the triumphal processions awarded to victorious generals. Within the general struggle for honour and public recognition, inscriptions were used early on to immortalize key themes of such ephemeral performative acts and to anchor individual accomplishments perpetually in collective memory. T. Hägg rightly remarks that ‘the concentration on acts in the evaluation and description of a person’ was a ‘deep-rooted element of Roman mentality. The cursus honorum so diligently recorded in Roman inscriptions of various categories is one well-known manifestation, a kind of minibiography in stone’ (Hägg a: , referring to Eck ). There are several types of such inscriptions which were different in function and context but akin to each other in many aspects of their form and contents. The latter is particularly true for the two largest single groups, funeral and honorific inscriptions, but also for the so-called elogia and dedications related to military victories. An early form of biographical retrospective discourse is provided by the eulogies in Saturnine metre which were inscribed upon the sarcophagi of several members of the family of the Cornelii Scipiones. The oldest of these texts is for Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, consul in :10 ‘Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, begotten of his father Gnaeus, a brave and sapient man, whose handsome form was fully a match for his courage, who was consul, censor, aedile among you, captured Taurasia, Cisauna, Samnium, reduced all of Lucania and took hostages from there’ (trans. Courtney : ). The first element to follow the subject’s name in this text is the name of his father, Gnaeus. This underlines the importance of the family lineage and establishes a biographical arc by referring to the subject’s birth. Its counterpoint, death, was made visually manifest to the observer by the sarcophagus bearing the inscription. The following lines touch on qualities of body, mind, and character, all of which are tailored to serving the res publica: bravery, cleverness, and physical and intellectual perfection. These virtues aided Barbatus in accomplishing the most important successes of a life in politics. Although the list is very brief, it clearly intimates a long career: besides the aedileship, he held the highest magistracies of consulate and censorate, and further won a series of military victories. It is worth noting the phrase quei fuit apud vos, which directly addresses the intended audience, the Roman citizens, and recalls the face-to-face situation of a laudatio funebris. The narrow focus on political virtues, offices, and military glory is also characteristic of all later eulogies. Despite its brevity, the text clearly gives the impression that it is communicating something really important and worth remembering about Barbatus’ life. But though this format unfolds its own rhetorical effect, it remains a string of key words that may serve as an abstract of a biography, but not as a fully developed biographical narrative. Funeral inscriptions in prose were usually even shorter. The epitaph of Ser(vius) Sulpicius Ser(vi) f(ilius) Galba co(n)s(ul) (second century ) is a typically radical reduction of a biography to essential elements: name, father’s name, and the most prestigious office.11 At Herculaneum, the inscription on a statue base reads Ap(pio) Claudio G(ai) f(ilio) Pulchro | co(n)s(uli), imp(eratori) | Herculanenses post mort(em) (CIL X ; ILS ). The
10 11
Kruschwitz (: ). Cf. Courtney (: ) and Faßbender (). ILS ; ILLRP . On the date, see AE (: ).
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posthumous monument, though looking back on the whole life of the honorand, condensed his career into its pinnacle. In both cases, the monumental terseness of the inscriptions heightens the effect: The honorands were so famous that there was no need to describe their lives. A few essential details were enough to evoke what was considered to be well known to everybody. These basic elements of representation—names and principal achievements—could be expanded freely. This seems to have happened most frequently in the case of texts which were commissioned by the protagonists themselves or by close relatives, i.e. in a more or less autobiographical context of self-representation. A case in point is the funeral inscription of Lucius Munatius Plancus, consul in , a prominent senator of the Caesarian and triumviral era, which was set up at Formiae (CIL X ; ILS ). The importance of lineage is stressed by referring to his grandfather and great-grandfather, and after the enumeration of the highest offices, the title of imperator, and an important priesthood, the syntax continues in the paratactic narrative mode of a eulogy: ‘He celebrated a triumph over the Raeti, he built the temple of Saturnus from the booty, he distributed farmland in Italy at Beneventum, in Gaul he organized colonies at Lugudunum and Raurica.’ A corresponding dedicatory inscription at Rome, which followed the usual format of public building inscriptions, was much more laconic: L(ucius) Plancus L(uci) f(ilius) co(n)s(ul) imp(erator) iter(um), de manib(iis) (ILLRP ; ILS ; cf. AE : ). The custom of dedicating buildings, usually temples, or precious objects from booty (ex manubiis) allowed victorious generals to set up lasting memorials of their triumphs in the urban landscape. In some cases, the dedicatory inscriptions were expanded to give a succinct record of the res gestae. In , Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus dedicated an obviously large plaque with a painted map of Sardinia in the temple of Mater Matuta. The outline of the island was filled with pictures of the various battles, larger versions of which may have been carried around in the triumphal procession, and accompanied by an inscription which recounted the main successes of the campaign in a terse paratactic style. The text is cited by Livy (..–), and the fact that he expatiates on the tabula dedicated by Gracchus indicates that the object was unusual at the time. In order to attract public attention, the nobility deployed great inventiveness.12 Monuments which served to commemorate glorious deeds in war were also set up in the area of operations close to important battle sites or in conspicuous landmark positions. In , Hannibal had dedicated an altar to Hera at Lacinium in Calabria with a long bilingual report of his campaign in Italy: cum ingenti rerum ab se gestarum titulo, Punicis Graecisque litteris insculpto (Livy ..). The inscription was seen and used as a source by Polybius (..; ..). Roman generals, too, erected victory monuments (tropaea) of increasingly large dimensions. Pompey celebrated his victory over Sertorius in / by placing a tropaeum on the summit of the pass through the Pyrenees. It was inscribed with a catalogue of settlements conquered by him (Pliny H.N. .). The model was taken up by the so-called Tropaea Augusti dedicated to Augustus at La Turbie in / which featured a list of the Alpine tribes defeated by Drusus and Tiberius in (CIL V ). 12
The genre and characteristic style of reports on military res gestae are much older. The elogium of C. Duilius (CIL I2 ; InscrIt XIII , ; ILLRP ; ILS ) gives a report of his famous naval victory which he won against the Carthaginians as consul in the year . For a later example, cf. the dedication of Pompey cited by Pliny H.N. ..
But while amounting to sizeable reports, such texts were focused on specific sets of events and tended to disregard the earlier life of the protagonist. In general, the Augustan period was a turning point in the development of Roman epigraphic practice. In his very conscious strategy of public self-representation Augustus used inscriptions in unprecedented numbers and of unprecedented size and aesthetic quality. The tradition of inscribed eulogies was taken up by Augustus in the design of his new forum and helped present his principate as the summit of republican history. The two colonnades of the forum housed statues of important members of the gens Iulia and of outstanding generals of the republic. Their bases were inscribed with brief accounts of their accomplishments. In particular, the texts for the mythical ancestors of the Iulii recall the brevity of the Republican inscriptions cited above, as is nicely exemplified by Aeneas:13 ‘Aeneas, son of Venus, king of the Latins. He reigned three years.’ The impact of the new Forum Augustum was significant. Several cities in Italy proceeded to erect honorific monuments bearing identical or similar inscriptions. Marius received a particularly extensive account which mirrored the unusual length of his career.14 While the extent of the inscription is remarkable, the formulae and themes are familiar: after a list of the offices held by Marius, the narrative turns to his campaigns and triumphs. Less conventional are direct references to the political troubles of the period which are turned into praise for Marius: ‘He saved the republic from civil war, but was later forced into exile at the age of only to fight his way back and to be elected consul for the seventh time.’ However, despite some narrative complexity, the text fully remains within the conventions of the genre which did not usually allow for general characterization or the mention of abstract virtues. The most important report on res gestae was of course authored by Augustus himself. The Res Gestae Divi Augusti (RG) was inscribed after the death of the princeps on two bronze pillars erected in front of his mausoleum in Rome. On local initiative, it was also inscribed in several cities of the province of Galatia, especially on the walls of the temple of Roma and Augustus at Ancyra (Ankara) where almost the complete text survives both in Latin and in Greek (hence Monumentum Ancyranum).15 The report, which was written by the princeps at the age of , covers his whole political life from his first moves as a young man of years. It clearly builds on the style and themes of epigraphic accounts of res gestae but expands them to a new dimension of length and thematical variety. Even without actually reading it, the inscription conveyed a clear message: the longest catalogue of deeds ever inscribed at Rome signalled the most important politician of Roman history. Faithful to its genre, the narrative focuses on Augustus as a public figure, his military campaigns and political measures, the powers and honours awarded to him, the games organized and the buildings dedicated by him, and his manifold other deeds as benefactor. However, in
InscrIt XIII , ; a longer variant with more biographical detail was found in Pompeii (InscrIt XIII , ; cf. for Romulus). 14 The text has survived in a copy from Arretium (InscrIt XIII , ; ILS ); the end is not preserved. At Rome, only two small fragments have been found, which show, however, that there existed at least two copies of the elogium (CIL VI ,, ; ). 15 Scheid (); Cooley (); I.Ancyra . Outside Galatia, the text may have been published at Sardis in the province of Asia: Thonemann (). The RG is a regular subject of research in ancient autobiographies. See already the overly glorifying discussion by Misch (: . ). Potential Hellenistic models are discussed by Bearzot (: ). 13
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contrast to the usual epigraphic practice, Augustus speaks in the first person, which stresses the autobiographical character of the narrative. Nonetheless, the highly selective and ideological text retains a pseudo-objective colour because there is hardly any expression of emotion or a direct claim to outstanding virtues. It is an interesting question whether the RG is to be considered a literary text which was inscribed only for exceptional reasons, or if Augustus conceived it from the start with a view to its later permanent publication. In any case, he had already produced a literary autobiography as a separate piece, and the RG closely corresponds to the style of its epigraphic cognates.16 The difference in style becomes clear by comparison with another exceptional inscription of the Augustan period. The so-called laudatio Turiae was delivered by a widower, presumably a senator, in honour of his deceased wife (Flach ; CIL VI ,, ). Originally spanning around lines, this inscription was very long, but unfortunately survives only in parts. It was engraved on two marble slabs that were most likely attached to the woman’s tomb. Throughout, the speaker addresses his wife in the second person, emphasizing the couple’s close bond of intimacy. From the safer vantage point of the Augustan principate, he looks back to the turbulent times of the triumvirate, which had presented the couple with the most dangerous crisis they had encountered in forty years of marriage: the husband was on the proscription lists and had to go into hiding, while his wife took decisive actions to fend off the danger and finally succeeded in moving Augustus to restore her husband’s rights. The extant text opens with an account of the dramatic events in which the woman showed her exemplary character and exceptional strength. Since the beginning of the speech is lost, we do not know, whether the widower described the origins and youth of his wife. It goes without saying that such a remarkable woman also possessed the conventional domestic virtues, which the speaker lists only briefly in a praeteritio.17 In closing, the speaker laments the magnitude of his loss and emphasizes the importance of the praise (laudes tuae), which serves to immortalize the memory of his wife.18 Besides a dramatic and captivating tale, the speech offers a portrayal of the life of a truly exemplary woman who demonstrated her complete loyalty to her husband in times of existential danger by acting in exceptionally brave ways (col. II l. : virtus) and proved herself a heroine. The laudatio Turiae thus comes close to literary biographies, and in fact was conceived as a performative text—a speech—that was inscribed on stone only due to the idiosyncratic decision of the husband.19 This explains the personal and emotional character of the text which is atypical among epigraphic monuments. Still, the engraving of the text added to its significance. The speaker’s remark on the immortality of his wife’s glory implicitly indicates the motive behind the permanent, monumental presentation of the speech. The unspoken cross-references between the monument and the content of the laudatio served to enhance the text’s effect.
16 On the relation between the RG and earlier inscriptions on res gestae, see Ridley (: ; : ) and Cooley (: ). 17 Col. I l. ; cf. Flach (: ). 18 Col. II l. ; cf. l. ; ibid.: . 19 It is not, however, unique: a parallel, roughly contemporaneous text is the so called laudatio Murdiae of a son for his deceased mother which was likewise found in Rome (CIL VI ; ILS ).
The principate afforded the Roman Empire a high degree of societal and economic stability. The intensified use of inscriptions by Augustus provided a further stimulus for the substantial growth in epigraphic production, especially in the western provinces where the epigraphic habit had previously been weak or non-existent. The first to follow the lead were the elites at all levels of society: senatorial, equestrian, and municipal. Inscriptions on tombs and on the pedestals of statues tended to become longer and to give more detailed reports of careers. An early example is the funeral inscription which Quintus Aemilius Secundus put on the tomb of his son at Berytus (?). On this occasion, Secundus, who had served as an equestrian officer in the Augustan period, recounts his own career in an autobiographical ego document.20 He pointedly inserts a narrative sentence into a more conventional list of posts in order to commemorate two outstanding achievements (CIL III ; ILS l. –): ‘by command of (the governor Publius Sulpicius) Quirinius I conducted a census of the city of Apameia, of . citizens; also I was sent by Quirinius against the Ituraeans and conquered a fortress of them in the Lebanon mountains’. He rounds out this self-portrait by adding further details of his career before and after his military service, particularly a list of distinguished municipal magistracies (l. –). An even more elaborate example of a narrative of res gestae is the monumental epitaph of Quintus Veranius, a distinguished senator under Claudius and Nero. The long report on his achievements ends with his last assignment, the governorship in the province of Britannia, and the laconic clausula in qua decessit, ‘where he died’ (CIL VI ,, ). This inscription was commissioned by the family after the death of Veranius and consequently uses the third person. But despite their differences of perspective and details, both texts display a similar concern to sketch a holistic picture of the respective career and are clearly comparable with the epigraphic eulogies of the Republican and Augustan period. And just like these models, they are not interested in the personality and character of their protagonists. A particularly important development of the Imperial period is the proliferation of the epigraphic habit throughout society: non-elite sections of the population who had for a long time not participated in the primarily aristocratic epigraphic discourse now become increasingly visible in the epigraphic evidence. Farmers, craftsmen, merchants, and ordinary soldiers, freedmen and slaves, men and sometimes women, who did not possess much in the way of social prestige, but had economic means at their disposal, now expressed their specific self-confidence in epigraphic monuments tailored to their purposes. Funerary inscriptions were obviously the medium they most frequently used.21 Still, among thousands of relevant texts, the percentage of those in which the basic biographical data such as name, age, social status, and profession were augmented by more detail remains low. Not infrequently, reliefs complemented the text and images showed the dedicants or the deceased as respectable citizens, as soldiers with their insignia, or in typical scenes of daily economic life. The combination of image and text certainly created a more complete and lively picture of the life of the person concerned. Nonetheless, both media were primarily governed by typological conventions which pigeonholed persons into predefined
20
On this term, see e.g. Kuhlmann (), who discusses various types of papyrological documents. A useful selection with commentary and further bibliography is provided by Kolb and Fugmann (). 21
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social groups rather than presenting them as complex individual personalities (Alföldy ; ). As in all periods of Antiquity, epigrams were a means to leave behind some of the constraints of prose inscriptions and use a more diversified language and a wider range of themes.22 An epigram on stone signalled that those who had commissioned it were well-todo and proud of their education. In terms of content, the poetic freedom of expression made it easier to dwell on individual virtues and character traits. Because of its exceptional length, the funerary epigram of the ‘harvester of Mactar’, put up probably in the third century in the province of Africa proconsularis, modern Tunisia, is a notable example.23 The poem presents itself as an autobiographical ego document and may well have been commissioned together with the monumental tomb by the harvester while he was still alive. It is a fascinating document of the pride of a social climber who was born into a poor, insignificant family and managed to reach the ordo decurionum, the highest rank of municipal society. The narrative opens with his origins and youth. The following section about the hard labour the harvester performed on the fields for more than twenty years is particularly extensive and full of detail that lends it narrative spirit. Giving so much space to the manual labour so despised by the upper classes is a statement in itself that serves to bring out the core message of the epigram: the speaker’s pride in having gained prosperity, social respect, and the highest civic offices by being hard-working. His (actual or envisaged) death after a long, happy, and righteous life rounds out the biography of an exemplary human being, whom the reader is invited to emulate. It qualifies as a biography because it covers the whole span from birth to old age and ends with praise for an exemplary and beatific life.
C
.................................................................................................................................. This brief overview has shown that only few categories of inscriptions may qualify as biographies. Even within these groups only small numbers of texts can be compared to literary (auto-)biographies in terms of length, style, and complexity—in the first place the long honorific decrees of Greek cities in the Hellenistic period. Longer funeral and honorific inscriptions, epigrams, and the Roman elogia also were considered. Unique texts like the RG and the laudatio Turiae are important, but not representative of the bulk of epigraphic texts. In a more general perspective, however, we may go beyond the standards of literary biography and consider inscriptions as an important medium of social positioning. Against this background, the spread of the epigraphic habit to a wide range of non-elite groups in the Imperial period (first–third century ) was a momentous development. By producing inscriptions, large numbers of ordinary people acquired a hitherto unavailable means of presenting themselves in public and construing at least biographical miniatures of their own
22
M.G. Schmidt () provides an introduction and includes some bibliography on Greek epigrams. For a selection of texts, see Courtney (). 23 CIL VIII ; ILS . Cf. MacMullen (: ), Courtney (: ), and Ruprechts berger and Lukits (: ).
lives.24 The choice of suitable formulae from the established epigraphic repertoire will have prompted some of them to reflect upon their lives and to engage with popular morals. And even if the result was only a short text with a few biographical data, its permanent display of stone will have been an important contribution to the self-esteem and social standing of the protagonists or their families. In this wider sense, inscriptions did make an important contribution to biographical thinking in ancient society.
F R More information on the general background of Greek and Latin epigraphy, the various categories of texts, formal conventions, etc. is available in the handbooks by McLean (), Cooley (), and Bruun and Edmondson (). The long honorific decrees of the Hellenistic period have recently attracted much attention. Their narrative structure is discussed by Luraghi () and Chaniotis (a; b; ), their relation to contemporary rhetoric by Judge (), and their background of contemporary philosophy and education by B.D. Gray (). For a general analysis of the phenome non, see Forster (). Ma () analyses the relation of honours, monuments, and identity in the Hellenistic cities in a wider perspective. In a fundamental study on the Imperial period, Alföldy () explores conventional values as mirrored in inscriptions and stresses the narrow limits of individual representation. The volume edited by Vössing () contains four important and ground breaking contributions on the relationship between epigraphy and biography by Alföldy (), Eck (), Errington (), and Speidel ().
24
A case study is attempted in Schuler ().
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The Role of the Visual Arts in Sophistic Self-Representation ......................................................................................................................
M of this volume is concerned with verbal biographies, composed within literary works. Yet in the ancient world a person’s reputation was constructed and handed down as much through material and visual means as by literary descriptions. These also had the power to reach a very wide audience, depending on the circumstances of erection and display. In this chapter I will use the imperial Greek sophists as a case study through which to investigate the types of biographies which could be written through material objects, and the dynamic uses to which prominent figures could put the visual arts in their efforts at selfrepresentation. The chapter will have three aims. First of all, it will look at the portrait statues which were erected to successful figures, and which helped to secure a particular image of them for posterity. Then it will look at the ways particular individuals used other forms of physical objects to promote an image of themselves which would survive the passage of time, through the dedication of buildings and monuments in acts of civic euergetism. Finally, it will look at the ways that a person’s response to the visual world could help to construct them as a member of the educated classes, the pepaideumenoi.
S I A
.................................................................................................................................. The sophists were keenly aware of the importance of appearance (Gleason ; Whitmarsh : –). In the course of their extempore oratorical displays, sophists could use visual devices to great effect, using them to support and punctuate their oral displays. Philostratus tells us about the skēnē (theatrical devices) employed by the famous sophist Polemo, which included acts such as jumping up from his chair, and stamping the ground with his foot (Philostr. VS ). Elsewhere, Philostratus comments on the beautiful appearance of the sophist Alexander the ‘Clay-Plato’, who is said to possess a curly beard, large eyes, a wellshaped nose, and white teeth (VS ). When the sophist appeared in Athens to give a speech, his fine appearance is said to have won over his audience before he even started
speaking (VS ). Yet this beauty could also evoke a different response, as when the emperor Antoninus Pius is said to have rebuked him as someone ‘who is always arranging his hair, polishing his teeth, trimming his nails and smelling of perfume’ (VS ). Philostratus’ description of Alexander the Clay-Plato thus reveals the difficult line a successful orator had to tread—to appear well-turned out and urbane, without sliding into the perils of excessive self-ornamentation. That sophists had a reputation for stunning audiences with their appearances is also shown in the satirical portrait drawn by Lucian in the Teacher of Rhetoric (), where the budding orator is advised to wear colourful or translucent clothing and fancy shoes when performing, and to carry a book, as well as being taught how to speak and carry himself. As Maud Gleason () has demonstrated, the body and physical appearance played a crucial role in constructions of self-identity in the Roman period, as shown in the wealth of texts prescribing the correct forms of deportment for orators, as well as in the negative judgements asserted in texts such as Polemo’s Physiognomics (Swain a). This science purported to be able to read character flaws from a subject’s physical appearance, identifying, for example, fleshy cheeks as a sign of drunkenness and laziness (Polem. Phgn. Leiden B, trans. Hoyland : ). In this competitive, visually astute world, it was crucial that an ambitious sophist was able to control his self-image. In the course of performance, orators needed to strike the right balance, winning over audiences with their flair, while avoiding unconscious mannerisms which might betray a secret inner flaw. In practice, of course, the same mannerisms could attract praise or hostility, depending on the sympathies of the viewer. In his defence against an accusation of winning his wife through witchcraft, the Latin sophist Apuleius (Harrison ) suggests that his accusers have wrongly attributed to him a carefully tended appearance, whereas in fact his constant study has made him pale and unattractive (Apol. .). As Zanker (: –) suggests, it is likely that Apuleius deliberately appeared in court with uncombed hair, as a means to reject the accusation of devilish handsomeness with which his accusers had charged him. Yun Lee Too () has also shown that Apuleius was keenly aware of the potentially petrifying effect of portrait statuary, with its power to fix a particular image of the honorand which he might prefer, in other cases, to avoid (cf. Slater ). All this concern about appearance, and the need to constantly monitor and defend one’s self-image makes portrait statuary a potentially explosive area. During a performance, selfimage could be fluid, but the picture given in a portrait fixed a particular image of the subject in the public imagination. It was crucial, then, to get that image right, and ensure that it conveyed the right sort of impression of the man concerned. As Elsner notes, portraiture is an encomiastic medium, in contrast to the polemic use of appearance which we find in physiognomic texts (Elsner b: ). Yet the flexibility with which physiognomic traits could be read as negative signs in the wider world raised the stakes of public portraiture, making it essential to ensure that the correct sort of image was fixed in stone or bronze. While a public honorific state was one of the key signs of success sought by an ambitious orator, as indeed, by any civic notable, it also contained the worrying potential to petrify the image of a sophist who elsewhere could adopt a different habitus and persona to fit the requirements of the situation. An illustrative example of the power of a portrait statue is the lost bronze statue of the Gallic philosopher-sophist Favorinus which was erected at Corinth and later removed by the city, after the sophist’s dispute with the emperor Hadrian.1 Favorinus’ tour de force in response to 1
Compare Philostr. VS for a similar action at Athens.
the Corinthians’ actions, preserved among Dio Chrysostom’s works as Oration , has often been discussed.2 It is interesting here to speculate about what the statue might have looked like and how it contributed to Favorinus’ self-image. Favorinus was born a eunuch, without testicles; according to Philostratus, he had a high voice and never grew a beard (VS ). Polemo gives a more detailed description, full of invective, in the Physiognomy: ‘He had puffed-up eyes, his cheeks were slack, his mouth was broad, his neck was long and thin, his ankles were thick, with much flesh on the legs’ (Leiden A, trans. Hoyland : ). As Elsner notes (b: ), the portrait statue set up by the Corinthians must have offered a more flattering version of this philosopher-sophist. Honorific statues combined a conventional body-type with a portrait head. Favorinus’ head would have been beardless, as were a number of other second-century examples from the Greek East. While Polemo refers to his puffed-up eyes and sagging cheeks as signs of Favorinus’ negative character traits, such features could be idealized and used instead to refer to the experience and wisdom of the man possessing them. R.R.R. Smith () shows that a number of second-century portraits from cities of the Greek East represented their subjects as clean-shaven. Many show mature men, with lined brows or sagging cheeks. While some are shown with very short hair, or bald, others wear their hair in longer locks, as in a portrait from the bouleutērion at Aphrodisias (ibid.: pl. XIII.), or one from Ephesus in the British Museum, dated by Smith to the midsecond century, which shows a clean-shaven man with a heavily lined face, complete with bags under his eyes (ibid.: pl. III.). A head, apparently from Tralles, in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts shows an elaborately coiffured hairstyle matched with a clean-shaven face, and may encapsulate a flavour of the elegant appearance of Favorinus who is attacked by Polemo for anointing his abundant hair (Phgn. Leiden A; R.R.R. Smith : pl. XIV.). As for the dress of the statue, Elsner (b: ) speculates that it could have shown Favorinus wearing either the toga or the himation with bare chest, but favours the tunic and himation dress often adopted in honorific statue types (R.R.R. Smith : –). A Greek form of dress seems most likely when we consider the references to his statue which Favorinus makes in his speech. Here he tells us that the statue was set up on the occasion of his second visit to the city of Corinth. When the city was unable to persuade him to stay, they decided instead to set up an image of him in the library to encourage the city’s youth to follow his example (Ps.-D.Chr. .).3 Later, Favorinus defends his right to a statue on the grounds of his mastery of Greek culture: ‘If someone, not a Leucanian but a Roman, and not of the masses but an equestrian, has striven to acquire not only the speech but also the thought and the lifestyle and the appearance of the Greeks . . . ought he not be set up as a bronze statue amongst you?’ (Ps.-D.Chr. .; all translations are my own unless otherwise stated). Of the elements which Favorinus mentions here, one is particularly appropriate for a statue: schēma (appearance), which can also be used in ecphrastic writings to refer to the appearance of a statue. It seems highly likely that this statue which celebrates the sophist’s Hellenism, and was set up in the library as a paradigm to encourage learning, would have embodied those ideas in its physical form. Research on honorific portrait statuary in this period has shown that there was a range of different options for clothing, hairstyle and beard, each of which carried different associations and meanings (R.R.R. Smith ; R.R.R. Smith et al. ). Drawing on standard
2 3
For example, Gleason (: ), König (), and L.M. White (). L.M. White (: ) discusses the possible location of the statue.
visual types, and in combination with a dedicatory inscription listing the circumstances of its erection, the overall monument could be tailored to present a very precise image of the individual, suited to its context of dedication and display. Zanker’s earlier work on the intellectual ‘beard’ in second-century portraiture (Zanker : –) has been modified by R.R.R. Smith (: –) and Borg (a), who reject the idea of a specific ‘philosopher’ image in favour of a more general reference to intellectual pursuits and Greek education (paideia). Rather than seeking to identify a specific portrait form for the sophists, Borg (ibid.: , ) argues that the lack of a specific type is itself an important sign that the polymathy of the sophists found expression in a range of different characteristics, and that the sophists themselves sought the more general image of the educated man—the pepaideumenos. We could also add that this allowed sophists some of the same flexibility they could exploit in oratorical performance, to present themselves in a series of different roles depending on their needs. So, what evidence do we have for portrait statues of sophists? In her study of the epigraphic evidence for sophists, Puech (: –) lists sophists or orators honoured by statues set up by the state. Puech includes both figures known elsewhere as sophists but not necessarily named as such in the inscription, and otherwise unknown figures who are, however, labelled as sophists or rhetors in the inscriptions (cf. Schmitz : –). In around half of the inscriptions, the person’s oratorical skills are specifically mentioned, while in other cases they are honoured for other actions and skills, such as their euergetism or political activities (Puech : –). This underlines the difficulty of separating out the sophists as a separate category of society. The social importance of the sophists was long debated, but most would now agree that many of these figures were important members of the aristocracy, and often played significant roles as politicians and benefactors as well as pursuing intellectual careers.4 Thus, a figure who is named by Philostratus as a sophist, Damianus of Ephesus, appears in the epigraphical record as an important civic official and euergete, whose many benefactions to his home city won him a series of portrait honours (Philostr. VS ; Puech : –). Philostratus (VS ) also lists his benefactions. The sophists embodied cultural ideals which were shared more broadly by the rest of the civic elite, even if they sometimes took the display of paideia to its extremes. While some individuals within the elite might choose to pursue one particular role to the exclusion of the others (politics at the local or imperial level, athletics, intellectual life, euergetism), others could combine a number of these roles in highly successful careers, as we will see in the case of Herodes Atticus. This makes it impossible and probably undesirable to set clear demarcations between honours for an individual as civic notable, politician, or sophist. Often these roles must have intertwined. Both professional sophists and non-sophists could use their oratorical skills to win benefactions for their home towns, and both might be awarded a portrait statue as a result. The sophist Polemo won a number of privileges for his adopted city of Smyrna from the emperor Hadrian (Philostr. VS , ; CIG ; Puech : –, no. ), while the two leading men of the Vedii Antonini family at Ephesus (non-sophists)
4 On the question of whether the sophists were important politically as sophists, or rather as representatives of the elite more broadly, see especially Bowersock (), Bowie (), Brunt (), and Schmitz ().
. . Bust, possibly of Polemo. Athens National Museum inv. . Source: Photo: D-DAI-ATH-NM . All rights reserved.
both served on embassies to the senate and emperor in Rome, as well as fulfilling civic and priestly roles at Ephesus (S. Dillon : ). An inscription which described their career (Inschriften von Ephesos no. ) comes from an honorific statue base for the younger Vedius. While there is no secure epigraphic evidence, it seems highly likely that the various honours which Smyrna bestowed on Polemo would also have included an honorific statue.5 When we look for securely attested surviving statues of sophists, the evidence is scanty, except in the case of Herodes Atticus. One possible candidate is a statue bust found at the site of the Olympieum at Athens, which has been persuasively identified as a portrait of Polemo, though the evidence is circumstantial (Hekler : ). According to Philostratus (VS ), Emperor Hadrian asked Polemo to give the opening oration at the dedication of the completed Olympieum in . Philostratus describes Polemo as fixing his gaze on his thoughts and giving a divinely inspired speech at the base of the temple. The bust which survives (Athens, National Museum inv. , Fig. .) is a close match for Philostratus’ description. The slightly turned head and uplifted eyes convey the concentration and divine Philostr. VS describes the honours granted to Polemo in Smyrna, while records a statue in a temple there, though without information on who dedicated it. 5
. . Bust of Herodes Atticus. Athens National Museum inv. . Source: Photo: Gösta Hellner, D-DAI-ATH-/. All rights reserved.
inspiration which were the prelude to Polemo’s speech, while the depiction of a mature man, with a lined brow, correlates with Polemo’s age (early forties) at the time. The bust wears a himation without a tunic, usually seen as a particularly intellectual form of dress, in contrast to the himation with tunic which often appears on honorific statuary (Zanker : ; R.R.R. Smith : ). This presents the subject as an intellectual, while the naturally arranged hair and beard suggest a care for personal appearance, without the undue ornamentation which could lead to accusations of effeminacy. A similar personal style was adopted by the sophist, politician, and eminent Athenian, Herodes Atticus, who boasts an unusually high number of extant portraits for a private individual.6 A portrait type known through a series of replicas is securely attested as Herodes through the inscription on a herm portrait found at Corinth. A tomb near Marathon yielded a bust of Herodes (Louvre MA ) along with images of the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. A similar bust comes from the area of Herodes Atticus’ villa at Kephissia (Athens, National Museum inv. , Fig. .). Both show him wearing a tunic and with a himation closely wrapped around him. His short-cut hair and full beard 6
See G.M.A. Richter (: . ), Tobin (: ), and R.R.R. Smith (: ).
are similar to the style of the portrait identified as Polemo, though here Herodes looks downwards, conveying the idea of thought and restraint. The type draws from the iconography of orator-politicians of the fourth century , such as Demosthenes, Lysias, and Aeschines, setting Herodes into a long tradition of the politically active intellectual (R.R.R. Smith : ). Elsewhere, statues of Herodes were set up in buildings or monuments sponsored by him or his wife Regilla. The Nymphaeum at Olympia dedicated by Regilla was adorned with portrait statues of Herodes and Regilla’s families as well as the ruling imperial household (see Fig. .). Unfortunately many of the portrait heads are missing and it is uncertain which statues should be identified with which individuals. Bol (: ) suggests that Herodes Atticus may have been shown wearing a toga, though R.R.R. Smith (: ) concludes that this statue might instead have represented Herodes’ father, indicating the family’s long-standing Roman citizenship, whereas Herodes himself may have worn the tunic and himation. Another headless statue of a man wearing only the himation which was found in the western parodos of Herodes Atticus’ Odeum at Athens probably also represents him, as donor of the building. Here the himation without tunic, and the box of book rolls at his feet, make a clear reference to Herodes’ intellectual attributes (Galli : , pl. .). We can compare the portrait type of Herodes Atticus to that of a near contemporary, one of the Vedii Antonini of Ephesus, as well as with the later portrait of Dometeinos of Aphrodisias. Sheila Dillon has identified a portrait type shown in at least three replicas as being that of a civic notable of second-century Ephesus, and suggests that it represented one of the two Vedii Antonini whose benefactions are celebrated in the city’s epigraphy (S. Dillon ). The younger of these built the gymnasium in which one of the statues was found; both the building and its decoration belong in the Antonine period. The statue (Izmir Archaeological Museum inv. , Fig. .), shows the subject wearing a tunic and closely wrapped himation, in the so-called arm-sling type which could be associated with the idea of the modest orator (R.R.R. Smith : ). The thoughtful expression shows the man’s seriousness. His hair and beard are artfully arranged. He wears a distinctive top-knot in his hair, described by R.R.R. Smith (: ) as ‘some kind of personal aristocratic marker’, as well as carefully-arranged lank strands of hair which fall onto his forehead, probably in emulation of portraits of Aristotle (S. Dillon : , n. ). Overall the effect is of modesty and seriousness, but with a higher emphasis on elaborate coiffuring than is evident on the statues of Herodes and Polemo. Interestingly, a bust of the same portrait type, wearing the himation alone, has recently been found at Herodes Atticus’ villa at Eva in Arcadia, suggesting that the two men must have known one another (Spyropoulos : –, no. ). The portrait statue of L. Antonius Claudius Dometeinos Diogenes was set up on a tall base outside the bouleutērion at Aphrodisias in the early third century , either in the latter part of his life or posthumously (R.R.R. Smith : –; R.R.R. Smith et al. : , –, no. , Fig. .). The inscription honours him as a law-giver and father and grandfather of senators, though elsewhere he is named as gymnasiarch, provincial high priest of Asia and stephanophoros for life, all important civic and priestly positions. The statue shows him in himation and tunic, in the so-called arm-sling type, and with book rolls by his feet, signalling both his civic duties and his erudition. His portrait head is lavishly styled with long luxuriant hair, twisted into corkscrew curls,
. . Statue of one of the Vedii Antonini, Izmir Archaeological Museum, inv. . Source: Photo: Austrian Archaeological Institute A-W-OAI-N II .
closely resembling the court fashions associated with the Antonine imperial house, especially the portraiture of Marcus Aurelius. The coiffure is topped by an imposing crown showing Dometeinos’ role as an imperial priest. Overall this is a complex and imposing statue, showing Dometeinos as a man of refinement and education, as well as the possessor of priestly power. In part, the differences between these four portrait types can be explained by chronology, with the tendency for hair and beards to become longer over the course of the second century . Yet it is also telling that it is the portraits of sophists which seem in many ways to try to avoid deliberate artfulness in the arrangement of hair and beard. In a culture which could see undue self-grooming as a sign of effeminacy, or use it to throw against Apuleius the accusation of magical practices, it was perhaps sensible in one’s portrait image to favour a more restrained look which hearkened back to the intellectual image of the past. For others among the elite, however, a sophisticated degree of self-grooming could be appropriate, indicating that they were au fait with contemporary fashions; these successful civic notables could perhaps afford a slightly more extravagant portrait image, trusting in the security of their civic position.
. . Statue of Dometeinos, Aphrodisias Museum inv. , . Source: Photo: NYU-Aphrodisias Excavations, R. Wilkins.
C E C L P I
.................................................................................................................................. Portrait images could be set up by cities, as a form of public honour, or by the individual themself or their family and friends. They could also be included as part of public monuments sponsored by an individual or members of their family, as we have seen in the case of the Nymphaeum at Olympia, and the statue from the Odeum of Herodes Atticus at Athens.7 The dedication of such a monument was an act of euergesia, benefaction, by which a rich civic notable could seek to repay his debts to his city, win their goodwill, and ensure a lasting memorial for himself and his family. Recent studies of euergetism have shown that it played a critical role in maintaining social cohesion in the cities of the Roman 7
Ma () gives a detailed discussion of the social meaning of honorific statues in the Hellenistic period with important insights also for later practice.
Empire, allowing the extreme wealth of a few to be used for the wider benefits of the many, and diffusing some of the tensions which might otherwise have arisen (Zuiderhoek ). Euergetism could take a variety of forms, and might include acts such as instituting a festival, distributions of money, or grants towards particular civic expenses, but building projects were particularly popular, making up per cent of the attested acts of euergetism in Roman Asia Minor (ibid.: –, Fig. .). Buildings could act as enduring monuments to the generosity, prestige, and patriotism of the donor, whose name was left imprinted across the city in the dedicatory inscriptions, as well as allowing for the display of portrait statues of the donor and their wider family.8 Collectively, these buildings also helped to define the character of civic life. The most popular constructions in Asia Minor were temples, supporting the religious life of the community, followed by structures which supported civic life and leisure, such as stoas, bath-gymnasia and theatres (ibid.: Figs. ., .). Through their collective benefactions, the wealthy civic elite helped to construct a particular type of Greek civic lifestyle, which allowed for the continued expression of Greek civic culture beneath the auspices of Roman power. Amongst these wealthy benefactors appear a number of sophists, as is clear from the epigraphic evidence and from Philostratus’ biographies (Bowersock : –). Both sophists and non-sophists could use their benefactions to create a particular sort of selfimage, representing their interests and cultural leanings through the choices that they made. This can be seen in Herodes Atticus’ donations in mainland Greece, which are attested to by both literary and archaeological evidence (Philostr. VS –, Paus. .., ..-, .., ..; Galli ). In his hometown of Athens, Herodes donated the Panathenaic stadium, for use in the four-yearly Panathenaic festival, and also an odeum, constructed in the memory of his wife Regilla, both of which remain. He funded another odeum in Corinth, statues of Poseidon and Amphitrite in the temple at the Isthmus, and a stadium at Delphi, in addition to a number of smaller projects. His construction of an aqueduct at Olympia led to Lucian’s reference to him in the On the Death of Peregrinus () as ‘a benefactor to Greece who had brought water to Olympia and put a stop to the thirst of those at the festival’. This aqueduct led to a monumental nymphaeum which was dedicated by his wife, Regilla, and contained an impressive array of portrait statues, linking Herodes’ and Regilla’s families with the imperial household (Bol ; Fig. .). Herodes’ benefactions can be seen as specifically designed not only to exalt himself and his family, but also to stress his keen appreciation and support of all the key elements of Greek culture. It is significant that in addition to Athens, his hometown, Herodes’ benefactions are concentrated in the important panhellenic meeting places of Olympia, the Isthmus at Corinth, and Delphi. This allowed him to reach as wide an audience as possible, as well as to signal his loyalty to the traditional centres of Greek culture. The types of building he sponsored are also important. In addition to civic amenities, such as the aqueduct and nymphaeum, the fact that Herodes chose to construct two stadiums, at Athens and Delphi, and two odeums, at Athens and Corinth, shows his support of intellectual and athletic culture, both key identifiers of Greek identity in this period.
8
See, however, Ng () for reservations, arguing that, in practice, festivals were more likely to provide lasting memorials.
. . Reconstruction of the Nymphaeum at Olympia. Source: Photo: D-DAI-Ath--.
Non-sophists could do likewise, as we see with the Vedii at Ephesus. The younger P. Vedius Antoninus was responsible for building a bouleuterion and a gymnasium in the city, promoting both intellectual and athletic activity in a similar manner to Herodes Atticus (Inschriften von Ephesos , ). One difference, however, lies in the geographical spread of their benefactions. While Vedius set up buildings for the benefit of his own home city, Herodes chose to spread his benefactions across a much wider area. Herodes is indeed a complex figure, with many strands to his identity. While Philostratus presents him as the lynchpin of his biography of the sophists, Herodes also had a successful political career, acting as eponymous archon at Athens, before rising through the ranks of the Roman political system to become consul in (Tobin : –). He married into an Italian family, and had a villa along the Via Appia in addition to a number of villas in Greece. Studies of the finds from his private villas suggest that these were lavishly decorated, and that Herodes used art as a crucial part of his self-representation. Excavations of his villa at Eva in Arcadia have revealed extensive sculptural finds, including works from the classical
period, as well as portraits of contemporary figures, including the emperors (Spyropoulos ). In addition, a number of portraits of Herodes’ foster sons have been found, particular of the boy Polydeucion, whom Herodes seems to have heroized after his death, perhaps in a deliberate emulation of Hadrian’s cultic honours for Antinous (Tobin : –). Elsewhere, too, we can see Herodes imitating the emperor Hadrian, as in the inscription on the ‘Gate of Eternal Harmony’ in his villa at Marathon, celebrating his marriage to Regilla, which echoes that on the Gate of Hadrian in Athens (ibid.: –). Herodes can be seen using portraiture and monuments in both public and private contexts to present a variety of images of himself: as a dedicated supporter of his home city, and of panhellenic culture; as a man of learning and restraint, and as a bereaved father, whose grief at the loss of his foster-sons is excused and augmented by the imperial parallel of Hadrian. Literary testimonies show that Herodes provoked fierce opposition in some quarters, attacked by his peers for his extravagant grief at the deaths of his family members, accused by her brother of murdering his wife, and begrudged by the Athenians for his actions restricting the donations promised to them in his father’s will (Philostr. VS –, –). Through his public and private use of art Herodes can be seen trying to assert his own chosen self-image, as a devoted husband and father and a patriotic preserver of Greek culture.
L P: L A S-R
.................................................................................................................................. So far we have looked at the ways that portrait statues and civic monuments could help to construct a particular image of sophists, and other elite citizens, in the public eye. Now I want to turn to my final example of the use of the visual arts in acts of self-representation: the ways that the very act of looking could help to construct one’s self-image as a member of the educated elite. This is made particularly clear in an oration written by the Syrian orator and satirist, Lucian, around –. On the Hall purports to be the introduction to a longer speech and sets out to give an encomium of the room in which the speech is to take place. As it proceeds, however, we find that the speech is actually a meditation about the powers of visual beauty, the ways in which the educated man ought to respond, and the difficulties of getting it right. The orator starts by describing the beauty of the room: it is great in size, beautiful, shining with light, gleaming with gold and blooming with paintings—who, he asks, would not want to respond to such beauty by composing speeches particularly if, as for Lucian, that were his profession? Would he instead ‘after looking around carefully, and wondering only, go away, leaving it mute and voiceless’? (). That would be an act of utter rusticity (ἀγροικία), revealing ignorance of beauty (ἀπειροκαλία), and lack of education (ἀμουσία) (). Indeed, we are told, ‘there is not the same law regarding things seen (τα θεάματα) for laymen (ἰδιώταις) and the educated (πεπαιδευμένοις ἀνδράσιν)’. While the layman will look around in silence, unable to say anything worthy of the sight, the pepaideumenos, later glossed as someone with education (μετὰ παιδείας), will be impelled to ‘make an exchange
for the sight with words’ (). Lucian here seems clear, the right way for a member of the educated classes to respond to art is with words; to fail to do so would be to reveal oneself to be instead an idiōtēs, one without the necessary paideia to get it right. As the speech proceeds, we find that the situation is actually a little more complicated than this, since a second speaker raises the worrying prospect that sight is more powerful than sound, and the orator’s audience are distracted from his words by the beauty which surrounds him (Dom. –). The stakes are thus raised: while the pepaideumenos must respond appropriately to visual beauty, to show that he really is a member of the educated elite, this is no easy task. The piece as a whole is a meditation on the long-standing topoi of the comparison of words and images, of the power of art to entice and entrap its viewers, and of the strategies which words can use to explain and constrain the visual. To win back his audience, and reveal that he really is an educated viewer of images, the first speaker chooses to give a description of the paintings hung on the walls around them, which, he tells us, ‘require educated viewers’ (πεπαιδευμένων θεατῶν δεόμενον, ). In this speech, the skills of describing beauty and interpreting images are shown to be the hallmark of an educated man, skills which a successful orator like Lucian must demonstrate, but which he can also pass on to his audience to turn them, too, into educated spectators. Indeed, the idea of ecphrasis as education as well as display, can be found in the later Imagines of the Elder Philostratus, dating to the early third century . In the proem to his work Philostratus presents it both as a display of rhetorical skills and as an educational exercise. He tells us that he was staying in a villa on the Bay of Naples and was being regularly importuned by the local youths, asking him to give μελέτας (sophistic exercises). Not wanting to do this in public, Philostratus decided instead to make an exposition (ἐπίδειξιν) on the subject of the paintings in the villa itself, which his host’s son had already asked him to explain (ἑρμηνεύειν) (proem –). The resulting descriptions are presented as educational exercises, teaching the young boy how to respond properly to and interpret the images, as well as being displays of Philostratus’ own rhetorical skill and ingenuity (R. Webb b). Whether or not real buildings or paintings lie behind these texts is irrelevant.9 Instead, what both texts tell us is that being able to respond to visual stimuli appropriately was a key marker of the educated man. That response could encompass a number of forms, from encomiastic descriptions to erudite interpretations of the underlying meanings of a particular image. As well as showing their own skills as visual exegetes, both Lucian and Philostratus also expect detailed visual knowledge from their audiences. Philostratus’ Imagines often play with allusions to other forms of the visual arts, drawing on his viewer’s knowledge of sculptural forms, for example, as in his descriptions of Narcissus and Hyacinth (Im. ... ..; see Abbondanza ). Similarly, in his Portraits, Lucian draws a vivid portrait of the emperor Lucius Verus’ mistress, Pantheia, by combining particular elements from a series of famous statues made by the likes of Pheidias, Praxiteles, and Alcamenes, coloured by the hands of the great painters (Im. –). The effect of the speech depends on his audience appreciating the references, and using them to create their own mental image from Lucian’s description.
9
Lehmann Hartleben () attempts to reconstruct the original villa described by Philostratus. See critique by Bryson ().
Of course, there are a lot more complexities and nuances in Lucian and Philostratus’ works than I have discussed here, yet what both do show is the critical role which visual arts played in the self-representation of oneself as an educated man, both for professional sophists and orators, and for their pupils, the many members of the wealthy elite who could use education to define their status, and to communicate with others across the empire. This was a visually literate world, in which one’s appearance was as critical as one’s words or deeds in creating an appropriate desired self-image among the wider public. The choice of costume in a portrait statue could be as relevant as the deployment of atticizing vocabulary in a speech; when Favorinus talks of his Greek schēma in the Corinthian oration, he may be referring simultaneously to both his appearance and his speech (Ps.-D.Chr..; see Whitmarsh a: ). The decision to dedicate a gymnasium, stadium, or odeum in an act of public euergetism shows a commitment to preserving the traditional aspects of Greek culture and education which the sophists also embodied in their rhetorical style, language, and themes. Yet the visual arts also brought their own perils. Just as a slip of language might reveal one as an imposter in the competitive world of sophistic oratory, failure to respond appropriately to images could be seen as a sign of a lack of education. As both Lucian and Philostratus show, images were seductive, inviting their viewers into a mute, sensual absorption which could only be resisted through the power of words (Newby ; ).
C
.................................................................................................................................. This chapter has concentrated on the use of the visual arts in the self-representation of sophists, yet the strategies discussed here were also shared by the wider society. It is certainly in the intensely rhetorical texts of Lucian and Philostratus that we find most clearly expressed the necessity to present oneself as pepaideumenos through a proper response to images; while the difficulty of getting one’s physical image to tell the right story is well expressed in Polemo’s Physiognomy. Yet these texts are didactic, as well as being rhetorical set-pieces; Philostratus’ audience includes the sophist’s students, learning by example how they too can reveal themselves to be educated men. As Schmitz () suggests, the sophists can be seen as representing the epitome of the cultural paideia that the ruling elite was expected as a whole to manifest. Paideia was a criterion for being a member of the ruling classes, but not all members of the elite choose to become sophists, and indeed some sophists came from more lowly backgrounds. The sons of wealthy elite families had a variety of roles they could choose to pursue, in athletics, politics, or civic euergetism, as well as rhetoric. As we have seen, a figure who combined a number of these is Herodes Atticus, who not only held important political posts both in his hometown of Athens and later in Rome, but was also a leading sophist and an important benefactor. Such a man shows the redundancy of attempting to extract out the ‘sophistic’ elements of his self-representation. According to Philostratus (VS ), Herodes left behind a number of letters, essays, and diaries, on which Philostratus drew to write his biography. Yet, he also left a material record of his life which is just as informative. His portrait statues, villas, and benefactions help to construct a
self-image which was consistent with his role as politician, sophist, and member of the elite. Portraiture and civic euergetism provided wealthy figures with a variety of choices from which they could select the particular costumes, hairstyles, and building programmes which would best represent their interests and self-image, and collectively create a physical record of themselves to hand down to posterity. To what extent can we conceptualize these sorts of representation and selfrepresentation as biography? From the perspective of the historian, physical monuments along with the texts inscribed upon them often allow us to write the life-histories of individuals who would otherwise remain unknown, omitted from the literary tradition. Yet the analogy also goes deeper. Monuments often work within the same sorts of categories and agenda which we also see in literary biographies. As we saw with Favorinus’ statue, statues and their inscriptions could present individuals as exempla of particular sorts of values, designed to have a didactic function for their wider audience (cf. M.B. Roller ). The imagery chosen for portrait statues also situates these individuals within particular categories—as scholar, philosopher, or powerful civic notable. Like the Egyptian biographies studied by Frood (Chapter in this volume), statues and monuments work within the conventions of a particular type. They produce individualized monuments which can either present the community’s perception of a figure, or their own desired self-perception, sometimes co-existing in tension with one another (cf. Ma ). Each monument is a single player in a wider narrative of an individual’s virtues and achievements; collectively, these portraits and buildings create both authorized, and unauthorized, biographies.
F R Research on the Second Sophistic has been prolific in recent decades. For a useful overview, see Whitmarsh (), and for key introductions, see Bowersock (), Bowie (), G. Anderson (), Swain (), Schmitz (), Goldhill (a), and Whitmarsh (a). For a discussion of the epigraphic evidence, see Puech (). For a prosopography combining literary and epigraphic material, see Janiszewski et al. (). On Polemo’s Physiognomics and its cultural context, see Swain (a), esp. Elsner (b) exploring possible links with art, as well as the earlier works of Barton () and Gleason (). On Philostratus (author of both the Lives of the Sophists, and the Imagines), see G. Anderson (), Bowie and Elsner (), and Eshleman (Chapter in this volume). For a discussion of sophistic self representation in funerary monuments, see Rife (). On portrait statuary, R.R.R. Smith () is the seminal article, developed further in R.R.R. Smith et al. (). Recent work has focused especially on female statuary: S. Dillon (: esp. ) and Trimble (). For more on the social and spatial contexts of statuary, see Stewart (), Fejfer (), and Ma (). On portraits of intellectuals, see G.M.A. Richter (), Zanker (), and Borg (a); see also S. Dillon () on the Vedii Antonini. For the study of euergetism, Veyne () is still a crucial starting place, supplemented by the works of van Bremen (; on female donors), Zuiderhoek (), and Longfellow (). On athletic dedications, see Newby (: ). For a discussion of the merits of festivals and monuments for conveying memory, see Ng (). On Herodes Atticus, see Graindor (), Ameling (), Tobin (), Galli (), and Gleason (); also Pomeroy () on Regilla. On the Nymphaeum at Olympia, see Bol (); on Herodes’ portraiture, see Bol (); on Polydeukion, see Gazda (). For an interim account of the findings from the villa at Eva, see Spyropoulos ().
For studies of the viewing of art in this period, see especially Elsner (; a). On ecphrasis, see R. Webb (; ) and Goldhill (). On Lucian in general, see Bompaire (), Jones (), Swain (b), and Anderson (Chapter in this volume). On On the Hall, see Maffei (: xxxviii xliii), Goldhill (b: ), Newby (), E. Thomas (: ), and Simon (); on Portraits, see Maffei (). On Philostratus’ Imagines, see Lehmann Hartleben (), Blanchard (), Conan (), Beall (), Bryson (), R. Webb (b), Newby (), Baumann (), and Squire (b).
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Portraits, Statues, and Triumphal Arches in Imperial Rome ......................................................................................................................
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R’ growing military and political ascendance throughout the Mediterranean during the third and second centuries coincided with significant artistic developments in the realm of portraiture and historical documentation in the visual arts. By the later Imperial period, Rome’s statues were considered an alternative population to the city’s approximately one million living inhabitants.1 The visual landscape of the city was densely packed with statues in gold, silver, bronze, and marble, vast numbers of which were portraits honouring the men and women of Rome for their lifetime biographical achievements. In addition, the statuary population included images which surmounted the numerous triumphal arches positioned throughout Rome. Portraits formed the artistic analogue of written biographies, encomia, and panegyrics, as did the historical and allegorical narrative reliefs that often adorned triumphal arches. Even Plutarch acknowledges the shared practices between biographical writing and the creation of portraits (Alex ., Cim. .; Geiger : –).
D R L: T R R P
.................................................................................................................................. The origins of a distinctly Roman portraiture are complex. Although historical sources attest to images of specific individuals already in the Regal period, including representations of statues of Romulus, Titus Tatius, and Attus Navius, the rise of purportedly realistic representations should probably be situated in the third century and is conceptually entwined with the imagines (wax masks) used in elite funerals (Pliny, H.N. .-; on Attus Navius: see Papini : –). Both Polybius and Diodorus Siculus describe the use of imagines in the mid-second century (Plb. ..; D.S. .., apud Phot. Bibl. b). 1
Cassiod. Var. ..
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There is growing scholarly consensus that the imagines were life masks moulded when aristocratic males had attained one of the curule magistracies (H. Flower : –; C.B. Rose : –; Pollini : –). The moulding of these masks appears to have been made possible by technical innovations in the late fourth century attributed to Lysippus’s brother Lysistratus, whom Pliny credits as the first sculptor to take life moulds of the human face in order to produce realistic (as opposed to beautiful) likenesses (H.N. ..). Stored in and around the atria of Roman houses, these masks became visible documents of the accrued political capital and achievements of individuals and families. Pliny links the imagines with painted portraits displayed with genealogical diagrams in elite homes and discusses the wax masks, painted portraits, and family trees in conjunction with the written records and codices detailing the political and magisterial accomplishments of individual family members. These written sources were displayed in the small record rooms (tabulina) located off the atrium (H.N. ..–). Thus, images of specific individuals, together with written accounts of their public exploits lay at the very heart of the elite house, the atrium. As artistic documentation of individual physiognomies, the imagines foreground the issues of mimesis that inflect Roman Republican portraiture. Because they may have been taken more than once during an elite male’s career, the imagines themselves probably reflected a range of ages. Surviving marble portraits which are commonly called ‘veristic’ after the Latin word for true, purport to be realistic renditions of specific, mature, male facial features. The marble veristic portraits, primarily dating from the last quarter of the second century into the first century , undoubtedly reflect an older tradition of bronze portraits. Stamped seals from Kedesh which are clearly meant to reference Roman veristic images, as well as marble portraits from Delos from the later second century, suggest that the Roman penchant for specific and individualized likenesses was well established by the second century (C.B. Rose : –; Pollini : –). The extant portraits also reflect a range of ages, from middle-aged to elderly. The ‘Terme Ruler’, almost certainly a representation of a Roman general from the first quarter of the second century , reflects the more youthful dynamic end of the scale, while works like the pseudo-Albinus or the veiled portrait in the Galleria Chiaramonti of the Vatican reflect the more intensely aged (Fig. .).2 Despite their very specific physiognomies, these veristic Republican images share many formal features which reflect a collective, as well as an individualized, identity.
P S: T T
.................................................................................................................................. In Roman portrait statues, individual likeness was confined to the head and facial features, while the bodies were used as props or costumes to convey additional biographical or allegorical information about the sitter (Fabricius ; Fejfer : ). By the Imperial period, male statues comprised a relatively small number of recognizable somatic tropes which ‘Terme Ruler’ (Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, inv. , h. .) to top of head: Papini (; : ), Gasparri and Paris (: , no. ). Pseudo Albinus type: Papini (: ). Chiaramonti portrait (Musei Vaticani, Galleria Chiaramonti, inv. ): Liverani (: , ), La Rocca, Parisi Presicce, and Lo Monaco (: , no. .). 2
. . Republican male, Rome, Musei Vaticani, Galleria Chiaramonti ., inv. . Source: Photo author’s own.
included togate images, cuirassed images, equestrian images (including portraits in chariots), theomorphic images, and ideal, heroic types. Within these types, however, adjustments of pose, costume, and attribute could inflect the statues with additional biographical details. According to Pliny, portrait statues wearing the toga were of long-standing tradition (H.N. .). The toga not only underscored notions of romanitas and collective Roman identity, but could also communicate biographical details such as magistracies or offices held, oratorical achievements, or, for emperors, their position as pontifex maximus as in the well-known statue of Augustus from the Via Labicana which presents the emperor veiled (capite velato).3 Although the emperor’s right hand and forearm are missing, he would have originally held the sacrificial bowl (patera) for pouring libations at ritual ceremonies over which he presided as pontifex maximus. Augustus himself did not assume the role of pontifex maximus until the position became vacant at the death of M. Aemilius Lepidus late in or early in , biographical information which can help date the statue to circa – , the year of the emperor’s death. Polychromy further refined the messages encoded in the togate bodies by indicating the purple stripe of the toga praetexta or the
Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, inv. , h. . m. See Gasparri and Paris (: , no. ). 3
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purple embroidered with gold of the toga picta and the tunica palmata (Edmondson : ; Koortbojian : ). Togate statues which left the head uncovered, presented the sitter in civic rather than religious guises. Standing portraits could celebrate offices held by the honorand, with specific biographical details enumerated in accompanying inscriptions on the statues’ bases. Rhetorical gestures, such as extended arms and the gripping of the border of the toga animated the statues into speaking likenesses of orators. A surprising number of portraits of Nero created under Claudius employ poses and gestures that present the young heir as an orator.4 These portraits of Nero appear to be the first to use the orating type for a representation of a boy or adolescent, and they may be linked to the important speeches he is recorded to have made to the senate in on behalf of the cities of Bologna (in Latin), Troy (in Latin), Apamea (in Greek), and the island of Rhodes (in Greek) (Tac. Ann. ..). The biographical narratives of seated togate figures were further embellished by the type of stool or chair that was included, most importantly, the sella curulis (Schäfer ; Koortbojian : ). The use of the sella curulis was limited to only those who had achieved the highest magistracies or priesthoods (including the consulship, praetorships, curule aedileships, dictatorships, flamines dialis, and, by the Imperial period, emperors, their heirs, as well as the proconsuls, and the praefectus urbi). In the seated statues, the arms of the sellae could also be decorated with portraits, presumably of illustrious ancestors, as, for instance, in an Antonine example in the Palazzo Falconieri in Rome.5 These relief portraits, which could include women, are always facing profile busts which convey additional biographical information about the sitter. The seated posture of these statues also confers increased status on the honorand as viewers presumably remained standing in the seated presence of the portrait. While the togate statues broadcast civic and religious accomplishments, cuirassed images communicated military achievements. The basic format of these standing statues was fairly standard, depicting the individual with armour and paludamentum. Variety consisted in the position of the arms, attributes, and decorative schemes on the cuirass. While footgear was most often the military boots, armoured statues could also feature the senatorial or patrician shoes (Goette : , Figs. a–c; Edmondson : –, Fig. .). The range of cuirass decoration included gorgoneia, victories, griffins, the wolf and twins, palladia, Oceanus, Tellus, Helios, Nereids, and sea centaurs, all of which add allegorical and cosmological associations (Stemmer : –). The Prima Porta statue of Augustus includes a rare historical dimension in its cuirass imagery with its central scene alluding to the return of the Parthian standards in , an event that Augustus highlights in the autobiographical record of his accomplishments (RG .). On the cuirass, a Roman soldier, accompanied by a dog, receives an eagle-topped legionary standard from a Parthian and the scene is set within a constellation of circling figures that include the sky god Caelus at the top, figures of Helios, Eos (the dawn), and Selene (the moon), below him, Tellus with two infants, Apollo and Diana, and flanking figures of captured female foreigners, likely personifying the recently re-pacified provinces of Spain and Gaul (Squire a).
See Goette (: ). For the relief portraits on curule chairs, see Schäfer (: ). On the Palazzo Falconieri statue, ibid.: , , pls. . 4 5
The imagery of a Neronian cuirass from the cycle of Julio-Claudian portraits at Caere has also been more personalized.6 This statue was originally combined with a portrait of Nero and the upper section of the breastplate includes a representation of the sun god in the four-horsed chariot. The god’s facial features have clearly been massaged to reflect Nero’s later portrait types with fuller physiognomy and carefully arranged coiffures. The depiction of the sun god on the cuirass may reflect emerging trends in theomorphic imagery in Neronian Rome and Nero’s plans for the Colossus. They are combined with representations of Arimaspi kneeling before griffins, mythological creatures closely allied to Apollo, to whom they offer bowls. The Arimaspi were a legendary one-eyed people thought to live to the north of the Black Sea. The use of Arimaspi on Roman cuirasses is fairly rare, and here their combination with the Neroized Helios/Apollo alludes to Nero’s own military and diplomatic accomplishments in Armenia. Both the Prima Porta statue of Augustus and the Caere statue of Nero reflect the kind of biographical adjustments that could be made to cuirass decoration. Equestrian statues comprise a second category of statues with primarily military connotations. Cicero notes that they are the highest type of statuary honour and Cassiodorus’ account of the statuary population in Rome includes ‘greges abundantissimi equorum’ (Var. ..). Pliny acknowledges that the origins of equestrian statues are Greek, but he also differentiates the Greek precedents as representations of victors in sacred panhellenic contests (H.N. ..). He also considers portraits with chariots as part of the equestrian repertoire, including those with the quadriga commemorating men who had celebrated a triumph. The list of known equestrian statues in Rome from literary, epigraphic, and surviving monumental remains is impressive, and comprises material from the beginning of the Republic through the fourth century with the equestrian statue of Constantius II erected in the Roman Forum in – to celebrate the emperor’s victory over the usurper Magnentius and that of Arcadius at the end of the fourth century in the Forum of Caesar (CIL VI.; Bergemann : –, no. E, pl. f, and Beil. ). The majority of these statues, in bronze and marble, would have depicted the honorand armoured or with tunic and paludamentum, the travelling costume of the Roman general, as in the Marcus Aurelius statue in the Palazzo dei Conservatori.7 In the Capitoline statue, Marcus wears the calcei patricii. The distinctive saddle of the emperor’s horse appears to be Sarmatian in origins and it contributes to the statue’s celebration of Marcus’s military conquests, while the gesture of outstretched right hand underscores the emperor’s virtue of clemency. Caesar was honoured with both cuirassed and equestrian images in his Forum (Pliny H.N. .). According to Statius, Caesar’s equestrian image had been reconfigured from a pre-existing statue of Alexander on horseback created by Lysippus, presumably that from the Granicus monument imported to Rome by Q. Metullus Macedonicus in (Silv. .–). Lysippus’s composition seems to be reflected in a bronze statuette from Herculaneum which depicts Alexander on a rearing horse wearing a breastplate and chlamys and raising his right arm to spear a fallen enemy.8 Rome, Musei Vaticani, Museo Gregoriano Profano, inv. . Cadario (: , Fig. b). Without inventory number. Fittschen and Zanker (: , no. , pls. ). 8 Naples, Museo Nazionale Archeologico, inv. . Le collezioni del Museo Nazionale di Napoli .. La scultura greco romana, le culture antiche della collezione Farnese e collezioni monetali, le oreficerie, la collezione glittica (Rome ) , no. . 6 7
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The refashioned equestrian Alexander/Caesar statue appeared in the Forum in front of the temple of Venus Genetrix with a second equine image of Caesar’s extraordinary horse who refused to let anyone but Caesar ride him, whose hooves resembled human hands and who foretold the rule of the world for its master according the haruspices (Suet. Caes. ; Pliny H.N. ..). Pliny’s description of the statue of Caesar’s horse occurs within a discussion of famous horses in Book , together with an account of Alexander’s stallion Bucephalus, who also famously refused to let anyone but Alexander ride him when he was wearing the royal saddle. The complex nexus of portrait images, armoured, equestrian, and equine, in the Forum consciously link very specific biographical details in the lives of Caesar and Alexander. The equestrian imagery at the Forum of Caesar was further augmented at the end of the fourth century when a statue of Arcadius was dedicated there by the praefectus urbi, Nicomachus Flavianus (CIL VI.; Ruck ). The portrait of Arcadius appears to have echoed the rearing pose of Lysippus’s Alexander/ Caesar, underscoring the enduring power of the image. In the Republican period, equestrian portraits could be togate rather than armoured, as in the case of Quintus Marcus Tremulus set up in front of the temple of Castor and Pollux in the Forum Romanum in (Pliny H.N. ..; Papini : –). Pliny links the statue with Tremulus’s noteworthy accomplishments of twice defeating the Samnites and of liberating the people of Rome from a war tax by taking the town of Anagni. In rare cases, equestrian statues could employ nudity, rather than armour or toga, as attested by a statue in London formerly in the Farnese and Bufalo collections.9 The statue was discovered in Rome in the sixteenth century. It was originally carved in the early second century, likely under Trajan or Hadrian, and has been restored with a JulioClaudian portrait head. The nudity of the London statue links it to another category of portrait statuary that employed heroic or divine body types to make heightened rhetorical claims about the honorand. Emperors were routinely represented as Jupiter, in both seated and standing types. The standing type is derived from earlier representations of Zeus/Jupiter and has a bare upper torso and drapery around the hips. A sceptre is usually held in the left hand and the thunderbolt in the right. A standing statue of Claudius from Lanuvium, just south of Rome, exemplifies the standing Jupiter type.10 The eagle of Jupiter perches at the emperor’s right leg. The seated Jupiter type employed by emperors is derived from the cult image of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus. A portrait of Augustus in the Torlonia Collection, likely created under Tiberius, shows the emperor seated, with bare upper torso; he holds a sceptre in his upraised left hand and would have held a thunderbolt in his right (restored incorrectly with a globe) (Visconti –: , no. , pl. ; Maderna : –, no. JT; Boschung : , no. ; Hallett : , no. B). A statue of Nerva reworked from Domitian repeats the standing Jupiter type and confirms that the visual elision of Jupiter and Roman emperors as rulers of the inhabited world remained an important artistic trope throughout the first century .11
9 10 11
British Museum, , .. Bergemann (: , pls. ). Rome, Musei Vaticani, Sala Rotonda, inv. , h. Spinola (: , no. , Fig. a). Ny Carslberg Glyptotek , inv. , h. m. Johansen (: , no. ).
Imperial portrait statues could also employ nude, heroic formats and many seem to adapt the so-called Diomedes type, often attributed to Cresilas, c. . In this type, the emperor is shown with the right, weight-bearing leg straight and the left leg slightly bent; a cloak is draped over the left shoulder and can be wrapped over the left forearm. There can be a sword belt across the chest and the head can be turned towards the right. There are at least thirty-nine surviving Roman versions and variants of this type. In Rome it was used for portraits of M. Agrippa, Nero (reconfigured to Domitian), Trajan, Lucius Verus, Elagabalus (subsequently reconfigured as Severus Alexander), Severus Alexander, and Trebonianus Gallus.12 An unusual portrait of Hadrian from Ceprano which closely quotes the ‘Ares Borghese’ type may be a highly specific heroic invocation with particular resonance for Hadrian (Fig. .).13 The emperor is depicted nude, wearing a crested helmet, sword belt across the chest and holding a shield with his left arm and a sword in his right hand. This compositional type (the ‘Ares Borghese’) exists in at least twenty-five surviving examples and is traditionally associated with the god of war. There are difficulties, however, in maintaining this association, including the youthful and beardless aspect of the divinity. A. Avagliano () has recently suggested that the type actually represents Theseus. In any case, the type is also adapted as early as the first century , perhaps within the orbit of Pasiteles, into a Mars and Venus group which incorporates the Venus of Capua compositional type. The new eclectic pairing is adopted for portraits, primarily in the second century (Kousser ). If the origins of the Ares Borghese type as Theseus are correct, its use in the Ceprano Hadrian may be intended to recall the emperor’s close associations with Athens, the granting of the title of Olympius to the emperor, and to create a kind of Greek parallel to Romulus as the founder of the city as Hadrian established the Romaia. The two are famously paired in the inscriptions on the gate of Hadrian’s library in Athens: ‘This is the city of Theseus/This is the city of Hadrian.’ The Ares Borghese type is also used for Lucius Verus in a fragmentary portrait from Ephesus.14 Given the adaptation of the type into the Mars and Venus pairs already in the first century , Mars may also have been a primary reference in the Ceprano statue, especially given its close proximity to Rome. A statue of Antoninus Pius in the Palazzo Altemps employs a variation on the heroic nude Diomedes theme.15 Like many other heroic nude representations of emperors, the image sounds a military note through the armour next to Antoninus’s right leg. In the
M. Agrippa (Venice, Museo Archeologico, inv. , h. . m.): Traversari (: , no. , Fig. a ); Maderna (: , no. D ). Trajan (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, inv. ): Maderna (: no. D , pl. ); Johansen (: , no. ). Lucius Verus (Naples, Museo Nazionale Archeologico, h. . m.): Maderna (: , no. D , pl. .); Gasparri (: ). Elagabalus/Severus Alexander (Naples, Museo Nazionale Archeologico, inv. , h. . m.): Maderna (: , no. D); Gasparri (: , no. ). Severus Alexander (Rome, Museo Torlonia, no. , h. . m.): Maderna (: , no. D ). Trebonianus Gallus (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. , h. . m.): Maderna (: , no. UD., pl. .); Marlowe (: , Fig. ); La Rocca, Parisi Presicce, and Lo Monaco (: , no. .). 13 Museo Capitolino, Salone , inv. ; h. . m. Fittschen and Zanker (: , no. , pl. ); Avagliano (: , no. .). 14 London, British Museum, , .. Fittschen (: , no. ). 15 Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Altemps, inv. , h. . m. De Angelis D’Ossat (: ); Hallett (: , , no. B, pl. ). 12
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. . Hadrian, from Ceprano, Rome, Museo Capitolino, Salone , inv. . Source: Photo author’s own.
sixteenth century the statue was in the Soderini gardens at the Mausoleum of Augustus, and it is likely to have originally been displayed nearby in the Campus Martius. The exuberant gesture of address made by the extended right arm is a result of restorations to the statue carried out by Ippolito Buzio in the seventeenth century. The extensive posthumous statuary honours for L. Volusius Saturninus proposed by Nero and enacted by the senate reveal the range of biographical celebration inherent in the various portrait formats for men. These honours are recorded in inscriptions from Lucus Feroniae and the Roman Forum. Saturninus died at the age of , and the senate decreed nine statues in his honour to be erected in prominent locations throughout the city (Panciera ). One of the statues was bronze, and it was one of three that depicted Saturninus in triumphal garb wearing the toga picta. It was placed in the Forum of Augustus. Augustus himself had decreed that bronze statues of those who had been awarded a triumph, or triumphal insignia were to be placed in his Forum (D.C. .). Saturninus’s other two triumphal statues were displayed at the temple of Divus Augustus. Three statues showed him wearing the consular toga praetexta and they were placed at the temple of Divus Iulius in the Forum Romanum, and on the Palatine by the ‘Tripylon’ (probably the arch of Octavius, erected by Augustus on the Palatine) and in the area of the temple of Apollo Palatinus. Suetonius notes that having portraits, presumably of private
persons, erected on the Palatine was a very rare honour (Otho .). A statue of Saturninus as augur was erected at the Regia in the Roman forum. Saturninus’s inscription is the only attested mention of statua consularis or statua auguralis. The augural statue likely portrayed Saturninus capite velato and holding the lituus, much like Augustus on the Vicomagistri altar in Florence.16 An equestrian statue was displayed near the rostra in the Forum Romanum, and a seated statue with sella curulis was set up in the Portico of the Cornelii Lentuli near the theatre of Pompey in the Campus Martius. The seated portrait may have celebrated Saturninus as praefectus urbi, an office which had become a signal honour by the first century and which Saturninus may have held for as long as years. Its placement in the otherwise unattested Porticus Lentulorum may have been the result of Saturninus’s marriage to Cornelia, the daughter of L. Cornelius Lentulus, adding further biographical detail to the image (Eck : ). Saturninus’s nine statues celebrate an extraordinarily successful political career which had flourished under all five of Rome’s Julio-Claudian emperors.
P P W’ B
.................................................................................................................................. Portraits of women are also attested for the Regal and Republican periods, although in far fewer numbers than their male counterparts, and with slightly more ambiguous identifications. Like the corresponding male images, these likenesses are often linked to important biographical details. For example, there are four public statues associated with legendary women of the Regal and Republican periods. A bronze statue is alleged to have been erected for Gaia Caecilia, wife of Tarquinius Priscus, in the temple of Semo Sancus on the Quirinal (Plu. Quaest. Rom. .). Pliny purports to quote from records decreeing a statue to the Vestal Virgin Gaia Taracia (or Fufetia) to honour her donation of the Campus Tiberinus to the Roman people (H.N. .). An equestrian statue was erected for Cloelia to honour her heroic exploits during the Romans’ conflict with Lars Porsenna during the reign of Tarquinius Priscus. The statue was located at the top of the Via Sacra, near the Velia and apparently still visible in the fourth century , according to Servius in his commentary on the Aeneid (.). Around , a statue was set up in honour of Claudia Quinta in the temple of the Magna Mater on the Palatine, for her miraculous intervention in dislodging the ship transporting the sacred stone of the goddess up the Tiber (Val. Max. .., Tac. Ann. .., Liv. ..–, Ov. Fast. .–). This statue was renowned as it survived two fires at the temple in and and would have had special resonance in the JulioClaudian period for its familial associations and its proximity to the residences of both Livia and Augustus (Val. Max..., Tac. Ann. .). A seated statue of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi and daughter of Scipio Africanus, was also erected in the Portico of Metellus and viewed by Pliny in the Portico of Octavia, which replaced that of Metellus (H.N. .). Although none of these five statues are without interpretive problems, and the evidence for Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, inv. .. Mansuelli (: , no. , Fig. a d); Romualdi (: ). 16
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the statue of Gaia Taracia (Fufetia) is admittedly archival rather than a descriptive account, they suggest the early possibilities of female portraits within the visual landscape of Rome and it is interesting that they encompass equestrian and seated formats. A range of later authors such as Valerius Maximus, Pliny, Tacitus, and Servius all accept the historical plausibility of these early public honorific statuary for women. The statue of Cornelia, whose base survives, presents historical problems, and may have been a bronze statue of a Greek goddess or Hellenistic queen in the guise of a goddess originally displayed in the Portico of Metellus and then transformed into a portrait of Cornelia when the Portico was rebuilt by Octavia.17 The base currently contains two inscriptions, one at the upper part of the base beneath the moulding reading ‘OPVS TISICRATIS’, often dated to the second century , which identifies the sculpture as the work of Tisicrates, and a larger inscription reading ‘CORNELIA AFRICANI F/MATER GRACCHORUM’, datable by its letter forms to the Augustan period. Ruck (: –) has shown that the squarer dimensions of the Cornelia base fit better with seated representations of Demeter (such as the Demeter of Cnidus), or Cybele or Hera, rather than Aphrodite (as usually suggested), whose bases are longer and narrower. The reconfiguration of the portrait as Cornelia for the new Portico of Octavia may have been intended to foster biographical links between Octavia and Cornelia as mothers deprived of their sons, and widows (Woodhull : –). It also appears to have established precedents for later seated statues of women. Cornelia’s public portrait at the Portico of Octavia inevitably links it to the public portraits of Octavia herself and her sister-in-law Livia that Octavian granted in (D.C. ..; Flory ; Hemelrijk ). The erection of these statues in Rome coincided with the granting of freedom from financial guardianship to both women, as well as sacrosanctitas. These representations were undoubtedly standing draped portraits which portrayed them wearing the nodus coiffure. This carefully arranged and braided coiffure forcefully underscored the romanitas of Augustus’s wife and sister, as it is exclusively Roman and has no parallels or precedents in the coiffures of Hellenistic Greek women or queens. Flory (: –) has suggested that one possible place for their display would have been at the temple of Venus Genetrix, where they would have been placed in both apposition and opposition to the gilded statue of Cleopatra which Caesar had put in the cella of the temple. If so, the display of Octavia’s portrait there would have had pointed biographical and historical implications in terms of her recent repudiation by M. Antonius and her return to Rome. The granting of public statues, freedom from tutela, and sacrosanctitas underscores the vital political relevance of both women in the years immediately before Actium as Octavian and Antonius struggled for control of the Mediterranean. Beginning with Livia, portraits of imperial women began to be mass-produced. Displayed in Rome, and disseminated throughout the empire, these images primarily employed draped standing formats, and occasionally draped seated compositions as well. The draped body types could also allude to established divine types. In general, female portraits employ more theomorphic references than those of their male counterparts (Fabricius ; Fejfer : ). Unlike their private contemporaries, nude body types were not used for female members of the imperial house. Livia’s role as mother of Rome’s second 17
Musei Capitolini, Galleria Lapidaria, inv. . CIL VI.; Ruck (); Hemelrijk ().
. . Faustina Maior, Rome, Museo Capitolino, Vestibolo, inv. . Source: Photo: author’s own.
emperor, Tiberius, and ancestress of all the succeeding Julio-Claudian emperors is celebrated through her alignment with mother goddesses, such as Demeter, Ceres, and Magna Mater, such as, for instance, in a statue in Holkham Hall which presents the empress as Ceres.18 Julia Domna also employs the iconography of Ceres in a statue from Ostia.19 Many other divinities are referenced by imperial women, and they can also employ the small and large Herculaneum woman type which derives from representations of Demeter and Kore. Empresses can also be represented as Concordia, as evidenced by an over-life-sized statue of Faustina Maior in the Museo Capitolino (Fig. .).20 This statue was discovered at the baths of the residential complex excavated in at the Villa Negroni in Rome. The empress incarnates notions of Concordia and guarantees harmony throughout the empire. As the maternal aunt of Marcus Aurelius, Faustina also provided the familial link between H. . m. Bartman (: , n. , , , ns. , , , , , no. , Figs. ); Alexandridis (: , no. , pl. .). 19 Ostia, Museo, inv. , h. . m. Calza (: , no. , pls. ); Alexandridis (: , no. , pl. ., ). 20 Rome, Museo Capitolino, Atrio , inv. , h. . m. Fittschen and Zanker (: , no. ); Barbera and Paris (: ); Bergmann and Watson (: ); Alexandridis (: , no. , pl. .); Fejfer (: , fig. ). 18
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Marcus and Antoninus Pius. As the mother of Marcus’s wife, Faustina Minor, she is also the grandmother of future imperial heirs. At the Termini complex, the statue of Faustina Concordia was displayed together with images of Apollo and Diana in smaller scale, giving the ensemble cosmological implications and recalling the appearance of eternal harmony (Concordia Aeterna) of Antonine coins and medallions (Barbera and Paris : –; Bergmann and Watson : ). Two surviving portraits of Helena, the mother of Constantine, in Rome and Florence which depict her as a seated divinity have been reconfigured from pre-existing portraits of Faustina the Younger.21 These portraits depict the empress in a compositional type (‘Olympias-Aphrodite-Agrippina’) often associated with Venus, but recently re-identified as Hygeia, the Roman Salus, goddess of health, and possibly associated with a statue seen by Pausanias on the Acropolis.22 The type was frequently used for highly honorific portraits of women, such as, for instance, the Farnese Agrippina or a statue restored with a modern head in the Uffizi.23 Lacking specific attributes, like the Molossian hound or snake associated with Hygeia/Salus, or the slipping drapery of Venus, these statues may have held a more generalized divine meaning. Despite Helena’s Christianity, her role as mother of the emperor and ancestress of an emerging dynasty made her elision with traditional deities compelling.24 Helena’s association with Salus underscores that she has guaranteed the health and safety of the empire by being the mother of Rome’s emperor, Constantine. If the Capitoline and Uffizi statues also access the seated Venus statuary types as well, they reinforce her role of ancestress, as Venus is the divine progenetrix of the Roman people. In any case, these two statues, with their divine associations, accrue additional meaning through Helena’s own biography as the mother of Constantine. The reworking of these Antonine portraits also constitutes a strongly retrospective aspect of Constantine’s artistic programme which seeks to align him with the revered emperors of the imperial past. In their original iterations as Faustina the Elder, both statues may have been displayed together with highly specific biographical connotations for the empress. Paolucci (–: ) has convincingly posited that the statues were discovered in the sixteenth century in the vigna of Ascanio Malagrozzi on the Caelian. If so, the location is suggestive as Malagrozzi’s vigna were very near the ancient Castra Peregrina which could indicate that the images celebrated Faustina as Mater Castrorum, an evocative new title that had been created for her. Their Caelian location would also have had further biographical references through topographical links to the ancestral house of Marcus Aurelius also nearby on the Caelian (Liverani ).
Rome, Museo Capitolino, Stanza degli Imperatori , inv. , h. . m. Fittschen and Zanker (: , no. , pls. ); La Rocca, Parisi Presicce, and Lo Monaco (: , no. .); Paolucci ( ). Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, inv. ., h. . m. Mansuelli (: , no. , Figs. a, b, c); Paolucci ( ). 22 Paus. ... Despinis (: ). For Aphrodite, see Delivorrias (). 23 Naples, Museo Nazionale Archeologico, inv. , h . m.; l. . m. Gasparri (: , no. ). Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, inv. ., h. . m. Mansuelli (: , no. , Figs. a b); Despinis (: ). 24 Helena is referred to as mater, genetrix, procreatrix, and avia in inscriptions. Hekster (: ). 21
V B T A
.................................................................................................................................. Portrait statues and honorific arches share clear conceptual links. Indeed, Pliny notes in his discussion of portraits that the purpose of placing portrait statues on columns was in order to elevate them above other mortals, but he also notes that this was the same for the ‘new invention’ of honorific arches (H.N. .). Pliny assigns the arches a primary function as statue bases for portraits. The attic inscriptions of the arches effectively identify the honorand(s) of the arch as well as the portrait statues which surmounted them. The earliest attested honorific arches in Rome date to the second century (P.J.E. Davies : –, –). The first of these arches (usually referred to as fornices) are manubial dedications made by Lucius Stertinius in at the temples of Mater Matuta and Fortuna in the Forum Boarium and the Circus Maximus (Liv. ..–; De Maria : –, nos. –). Livy records that the three arches were topped with gilded bronze statues. Shortly after the erection of the fornices of Stertinius, P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus dedicated an arch on the Capitoline which included seven gilded statues, two equestrian images, and two marble basins (Liv. ..; De Maria : , no. ). The precise character of the statues is unspecified, as is also the case with those of Stertinius, but it is possible that they were portraits associated with the gens Cornelia. The first Republican triumphal arch was set up in the Roman Forum in by Q. Fabius Maximus to celebrate his victories over the Allobrogi. This arch is also the first which seems to be located over the Via Sacra and thus along the triumphal processional route. The fornix was restored or rebuilt in , by Maximus’s grandson, also Q. Fabius Maximus, and at that time it was furnished with portraits of Q. Fabius Maximus Allobrogicus, the original dedicator, and L. Aemilius Paullus and. P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus. Beginning with Augustus, imperial biographies were inscribed onto the urban landscape of Rome through honorific arches. Four arches alone can be associated with Augustus, including one celebrating his victory over S. Pompeius at the Battle of Naulochus in , the Actian and Parthian arches in the Forum Romanum commemorating the victory over M. Antonius and Cleopatra at Actium and the return of the Parthian standards, and an arch put up in honour of his father Octavius on the Palatine.25 Like the Fornix Fabianus, the Actian arch was located over the branch of the Via Sacra to the south of the temple of Divus Julius and it seems to have been replaced by the Parthian arch. Both the Actian and Parthian arches supported portraits of Augustus in the triumphal quadriga. The Parthian arch had additional historical documentation and decoration with the inscribed lists of Roman consuls and generals who had been awarded a triumph. While the Naulochus, Actian, and Parthian arches acted as straightforward celebrations of the emperor’s military and diplomatic accomplishments, the arch of Octavius has more enigmatic biographical
The Naulochus arch (precise location unknown): D.C. ..; De Maria (: , no. ). Actian arch: D.C. ..; De Maria (: , no. ). Parthian arch: D.C. ..; De Maria (: , no. ). Palatine arch of Octavius: Pliny, H.N. .; De Maria (: , no. ); Kleiner (). 25
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implications. As Kleiner () has pointed out, the arch is ostensibly dedicated to his biological father, C. Octavius, but it is not surmounted with a portrait of Octavius, but rather of Apollo, Augustus’s alleged divine parent. After the Augustan examples, arches were erected to Nero Drusus on the Via Appia, Tiberius, and Germanicus in the Forum Romanum, Germanicus and Drusus Minor in the Forum Augustum, and another arch to Germanicus near the Circus Flaminius, which was remarkable for its extensive display of portrait statuary honouring Germanicus and his family.26 This arch supported twelve images of Germanicus, his father Drusus, his mother Antonia Minor, his wife Agrippina Maior, his brother Claudius, his sister Livilla, his sons Nero Caesar, Drusus Caesar and Caligula, and his daughters Agrippina Minor, Drusilla and Julia Livilla, representing three generations of the extended family. An arch was also erected to Claudius in to celebrate his victories in Britain (De Maria : –, no. ). The arch was constructed in conjunction with a portrait group located nearby that honoured Claudius, Germanicus, Antonia Minor, Agrippina Minor, Nero, Britannicus, and Drusus the Elder (C.B. Rose : –, no. ). In , the senate voted an arch to Nero for his diplomatic and military victories in Parthia (Kleiner ; De Maria : –, no. ). Like its Julio-Claudian predecessors, this arch, situated on the Capitoline, also acted as an elaborate base for a triumphal statue of Nero in the quadriga. The arch featured additional sculptural decoration including figures of victory and Mars. Marble fragments now in the Centrale Montemartini may also be associated with the arch and include female figures likely representing breezes, which may have had geopolitical implications, as well as cornice coffers with military equipment (La Rocca ). Based on numismatic depictions of the arch, it is the first to have had freestanding columns on pedestals as part of the façade decoration and it set important precedents for subsequent triumphal monuments in the capital. The arch was undoubtedly dismantled, destroyed, or rededicated as a result of the memory sanctions enacted against Nero after his suicide on June , so its biographical and triumphal acta were effectively rescinded. The arch of Titus is the first of the imperial arches to survive largely intact in terms of its sculptural programme (De Maria : –, no. ). Constructed between and , during the principate of his brother Domitian, the arch is carefully situated along the Via Sacra to frame a view of the temple of Divine Vespasian and Titus across the valley of the Forum in order to carefully exalt the new deity. Like the earlier imperial arches, the arch supported a bronze statuary group of Titus in the quadriga. Reliefs in the interior bay of the arch visually document Titus’s triumph of , awarded for his victories in Judaea. The north-eastern panel depicts Titus in the triumphal quadriga, reduplicating the statuary group surmounting the arch, while the south-western shows the procession of spoils from the Temple at Jerusalem, including the golden menorah and the table of the shew bread. Details of the scene, including the menorah, were highlighted with gilding. Historical details in the reliefs have been altered to communicate Titus’s new divine status. In the Nero Drusus: De Maria (: , no. ). Tiberius and Germanicus in the Forum: ibid.: , no. . Germanicus and Drusus Minor in the Forum Augustum: ibid.: . Germanicus near the Circus Flaminius: ibid.: , no. ; C.B. Rose (: , no. ). There was also an additional arch to Drusus Minor (De Maria : , no. ), and one to Tiberius near the theatre of Pompey (ibid.: , no. ). 26
quadriga scene, Titus rides alone in the chariot, although historical accounts of the procession indicate that Titus rode behind Vespasian, with Domitian following beside on horseback (J. BJ .). In the triumphal relief, Titus also appears with divinities including the goddess Victory who flies behind him, extending a triumphal crown over his head. Titus’s deifications are also represented in the barrel vault of the central bay, where Titus, wearing the toga, ascends to heaven on the back of an eagle. The arch and its decoration are also highly experiential. As viewers entering towards the Forum walk through the arch, they walk along the triumphal route and thus recreate the depicted procession on either side of the interior bay. The relief with the spoils from Jerusalem self-consciously acknowledges this recreative component of the historical event, as it too is about to pass through a single bayed arch shown at an oblique angle. Like its two surviving successors, the arches of Septimius Severus and Constantine, the arch of Titus is also located at a transitional spot in the triumphal route as it takes a sharp degree turn to begin its descent down into the valley of the Forum. Approximately percent of surviving historical reliefs date to the second century, despite the fact that the arches and monuments to which they originally belonged are largely no longer extant (Tortorella : ). Arches to Trajan, Lucius Verus, and Marcus Aurelius are all attested in the regionary catalogues or later medieval sources.27 The two panel reliefs from the Arco di Portogallo confirm a monument to Hadrian, likely an arch and they are important for their biographical and historical accounts (De Maria : –, no. ; Torelli ; Woodhull : –). One of the reliefs depicts Hadrian, in the company of the personifications of the Roman senate and people, making an address to assembled Roman citizens, including a young boy wearing a toga. While its precise historical details have proved impossible to decipher, it clearly comprises a highly specialized account of Hadrian’s principate and may perhaps be associated with the institution of state-sponsored welfare for poorer citizens. The second scene depicts the apotheosis of Hadrian’s wife, Sabina, who is shown ascending to heaven on the back of a winged female divinity or personification. Hadrian, seated below her, attests to her newly divine status. This apotheosis relief underscores the enduring dynastic significance of imperial women throughout the second century . As the grand-niece of Hadrian’s predecessor Trajan, Sabina strengthens the family connections between the two emperors through her mother, Matidia, and grandmother, Marciana, sister of Trajan. The reliefs from the Arco di Portogallo are imbued with biographical and dynastic significance specific to Hadrian. Indeed, imperial female biographies are particularly important to the monumental landscape of second-century Rome and the adoptive and Antonine emperors, as evidenced by the temples erected to Matidia in the Campus Martius and later to Faustina Maior in the Forum Romanum and the pronounced prominence of second-century imperial women in portraiture (Boatwright : ). Hadrian himself delivered the eulogy of his mother-in-law Matidia and he enumerated her familial ties; she behaved like a daughter to Trajan, she was his niece by blood, and the best mother-in-law to Hadrian (CIL XIV.; Hekster : –).
Arch of Trajan regio , De Maria (: , no. ). Arch of Verus regio , ibid.: , no. . Arch of M. Aurelius, ibid.: , no. . 27
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.................................................................................................................................. The arch of Septimius Severus extols the emperor’s victories in Parthia through its reliefs and the statuary group on the attic of the arch (De Maria : –, no. ; Lusnia : –). The triple-bayed arch has four reliefs over the lateral side bays which relate details of Severus’s Parthian campaigns between and in apparently documentary-like detail, a technique borrowed from the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. The reliefs depict the Battle of Nisibis, the battle with the Parthian king Volagaeses V, the Siege of Edessa, the Battle of Seleucia, and the assault and capture of the Parthian capital, Ctesiphon. As in the earlier arches, Septimius himself appeared in the triumphal quadriga in the bronze statuary group on the top of the monument, flanked by his two heirs, Caracalla and Geta, on horseback. In addition to providing evidence for the statuary group, coins also indicate that there was a bronze railing on top of the cornice, confirmed by holes at the cornice level for attaching the railing. This effectively created a gallery that was accessible via the arch’s internal staircase (Beckmann : –). Both the arch of Titus and the arch of Constantine also have internal staircases which suggests that they too may have had galleries. The purpose of the galleries is not entirely clear, but they could have provided elevated viewing spaces or space for musicians or others involved in the various processions that typically would have passed through the arches (ibid.: , –). The biographical and dynastic information provided in the attic inscriptions of the arch of Septimius Severus was amended after the murder of Geta at the end of as a result of the rigorous memory sanctions enforced by Caracalla against his brother. The inscriptions originally had cast bronze letters over those inscribed into the marble. Geta’s names and titles in the seventh line of the inscriptions have been removed and replaced with new titles for Severus and Caracalla. The lines originally read P. SEPTIMIO. GETAE. NOBILISSIMO. CAESARI and was altered to read OPTIMIS. FORTISSIMISQVE. PRINCIBVS. A second inscription appears to have been added to the gallery level. Ventura Villanueva () has proposed that the holes in the face of the arch at this level were for the attachment of bronze letters for an inscription that encircled the arch and honoured Divus Septimius on the long sides of the arch, Divus Carcalla on the north-east, and Diva Julia Domna on the south-west. The inscription would have read ET DIVO SEVERO PIO ET DIVO ANTON MAGNO ET DIVO SEVERO PIO ET DIVA JULIA PIA. The inscriptional emendations and additions to the arch effectively efface Geta from the triumphal record and insert Julia Domna who was not initially present, underscoring her dynastic significance during the reigns of her greatnephews Elagabalus and Severus Alexander. The complicated biographical and dynastic record in a second Severan honorific monument contemporary with the Forum arch, the arch of the Argentarii, has also been substantially altered (De Maria : –, no. ; Diebner ; H. Flower ; Lusnia : –). This trabeated arch functioned as a monumental gateway along vicus Jugarius and was put up by the Argentarii in honour of the Severan dynasty. The names of Geta, as well as Caracalla’s father-in-law, the Praetorian Prefect Plautianus, and Caracalla’s wife Plautilla, the daughter of Plautianus, have all been erased from the attic inscription and replaced with new names and titles for the surviving family members,
Caracalla and Julia Domna (CIL VI.). The erasures occurred in two or three phases. Plautianus’s names were eliminated in , after his execution on charges of treason, Plautilla’s in (the date of her exile) or early in (the date of her death), and Geta at the end of . The relief portraits of Geta, Plautianus, and Plautilla have also all been entirely effaced. The interior bay has two large rectangular reliefs, one originally depicting Septimius Severus, Julia Domna, and Geta, the other Caracalla, Plautilla, and Plautianus. The removal of Plautilla and Plautianus has left a gaping empty space in nearly two-thirds of the Caracalla relief, while Julia Domna’s drapery has been somewhat awkwardly extended to cover the empty area occasioned by Geta’s erasure. Small, bust-size portraits of Geta have also been effaced from the legionary standards that decorate the pilasters of the monument, again creating noticeable blank areas. The stark emendations that the arch of the Argentarii has been subjected to have entirely rewritten the Severans’ family history, eliminating a treasonous father-in-law and powerful Praetorian Prefect, an imperial wife, and co-emperor from the visual record. Later in the third century, the Hadrianic reliefs from the Arco di Portogallo appear to have been reconfigured, perhaps during the principate of Gallienus. La Rocca (: –) has suggested that the apotheosis scene may have been reconceived to celebrate the deification of Gallienus’s mother Mariniana. Gallienus’s reuse of the Hadrianic reliefs linked his biographical achievements with those of Hadrian and created a parallel apotheosis of Sabina/Mariniana and a paradigm of imperial consecratio (Torelli : –). The apotheosis relief also underscores the continued importance of imperial women for dynastic and imperial stability in the third century, witnessed as well by the inclusion of Gallienus’s wife, Salonina in the dedicatory inscription of the Porta Esquilina (CIL VI.; De Maria : –, no. ). Gallienus’s appropriated biography in the Arco di Portogallo reliefs initiates new directions in monumental commemorations which would continue with the reused Julio-Claudian reliefs on the Tetrarchic Arcus Novus and culminate in the arch of Constantine. The reused Julio-Claudian material on the Arcus Novus and its placement along the Via Lata near the Britannic arch of Claudius were intended to celebrate the Tetrarchs’ defeat of Caurausius and the reconquest of Britain by close comparison with the early imperial British victories of Claudius through a process that Kinney () has termed ‘renovatio memoriae’. The majority of the reliefs decorating the arch of Constantine have been expropriated from earlier monuments celebrating Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius (De Maria : –, no. ; Capodiferro ; Marlowe ; Faust ; Hughes ; Dumser : –). In the reused reliefs, the earlier emperors’ facial features have all been recarved to represent Constantine. The borrowed biographies of the earlier emperors function in three different modes on the arch. Constantine subsumes Trajan’s epic roles in the two military scenes from the Great Trajanic frieze redeployed in the arch’s central bay (Leander Touati ; : –). In one panel, the triumphant Trajan/Constantine appears on horseback, trampling foes and Roman soldiers present the severed heads of the foreign foe to the emperor. In the second excerpted scene, Trajan/Constantine stands with the goddess Roma and is crowned by Victory while more cavalry battle foreigners to the emperor’s left. These two panels carefully formulate a traditional imperial victory over foreigners, thus deflecting and defusing Constantine’s actual victory in a civil conflict with a rival Roman emperor. The panels are paired with inscriptions that acclaim Constantine as liberator of the city of Rome and instigator of peace. The eight Hadrianic tondi, which
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represent scenes of hunting and sacrifice, function on a more allegorical level designed to celebrate the emperor’s virtus and pietas. The eight panels of Marcus Aurelius are encomiastic and carefully detail specific imperial actions and interactions with Roman citizens, soldiers, and foreigners in scenes of profectio, adventus, lustratio, adlocutio, and largitio as well as additional imperial virtues like clementia (Angelicoussis ). Together, the reused reliefs are intended to encompass an ideal imperial biography. The reused elements occur in concert with a narrative frieze that visually documents the historical details of Constantine’s entry into Italy, the Siege of Verona, the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the entry into Rome, an adlocutio delivered by Constantine in the Forum Romanum, and the emperor’s distribution of money to the Roman people. The arch’s inscription makes the ostensible claim that the senate and people of Rome are its authors and it is dedicated to Constantine. The monument creates an ideal biography for the emperor based on imperial paradigms and historical events. The Aurelian panels have actually been carefully edited as they appear to have originally formed a series of twelve scenes, eight of which were chosen for reuse on the arch. In addition to the eight reused panels, there are three more in the Palazzo dei Conservatori and fragments of another in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (, inv. , h. . m. Johansen : , no. ). The three surviving panels in the Palazzo dei Conservatori have effectively been edited out of the Constantinian series, and they include the two most intensely triumphal images, of Marcus in the quadriga during the processus triumphalis, and the culminating sacrifice in front of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus, as well as the most explicit scene of clemency to foreigners (Viscogliosi ; Tortorella : –). The expurgation of the Conservatori reliefs renders the rest of the series less triumphalist and again deflects attention away from Constantine’s victory in a civil war. As with the earlier arches, the arch of Constantine was surmounted by a gilded bronze statuary group which depicted the emperor in the triumphal chariot. The entire ensemble was carefully aligned with the Colossus of Nero and as viewers approached the arch from the south, the two gilded bronze images of Constantine and the Colossus, representing the sun god, would have visually interacted with one another as the Colossus appeared behind Constantine’s portrait as a spectacular backdrop (Marlowe ). The Colossus was a powerful symbol of Roman aeternitas and its topographical juxtaposition with Constantine’s triumphal monument gave the biographical elements on the arch an ageless and eternal aspect. Following Constantine, the city continued to be embellished with triumphal arches, including arches to Valens and Valentinian near the Pons Agrippae and to Gratian, Valentinian II, and Theodosius near the Pons Aelius (de Maria : –, no. , , no. ; Lega ; Coarelli ). The arch of Valens and Valentinian, dated to c.–, was decorated with gilded bronze statues, double life-sized, which included a standing togate portrait with calcei patricii and a winged figure of Victory.
C
.................................................................................................................................. Rich and varied biographical details recounting the achievements of men and women were indelibly inscribed onto Rome’s monumental landscape through honorific portraits and
triumphal arches which acted as artistic and tangible manifestations of biographical achievements. Accompanied by inscriptions, these sculptural and architectural monuments also activated and perpetuated a communal memory of Rome’s past. Like written biographies, they also served as powerful exempla for present generations and predicted and proscribed role models for the future. Like no other city, the urban fabric of ancient Rome was substantially defined by the biographical monuments that celebrated its inhabitants.
F R Pollini (), C B. Rose (), and Papini () discuss the origins of Roman realistic portraiture and the new technology involving life masks introduced by Lysistratus at the end of the fourth century. Fejfer () surveys the various formats and body types available for Roman portraits of both men and women. Koortbojian () and Squire (a) provide further assessment of statuary body types. De Maria () remains the fundamental survey of the triumphal and honorific arches in the city of Rome, with additional information also available in individual entries in the Lexicon topographi cum urbis Romae.
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RECEPTION .............................................................................................................
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I
.................................................................................................................................. T chapter deals with direct and indirect influences of classical and late antique biographical forms and contents on Byzantine biographical writing. Moreover, a broad outline of the development of biographical writing in Byzantium in general will be attempted. Encouraged by both the overall lay-out of this Handbook and Tomas Hägg’s approach to biographical writing (Hägg a; Hägg and Rousseau ), I apply the concept of biography in a broad sense (inclusively rather than exclusively). Of course, this chapter cannot offer a systematic treatment: given the vast material scattered over many centuries as well as the considerable lack of previous analysis, it gives a general overview in combination with a selection of texts (motivated by their richness in biographical information and literary accomplishment) to be discussed in more detail.
A B B
.................................................................................................................................. The majority of ancient biographical literature has come down to us via Byzantine manuscripts. These texts left traces in various forms (e.g. allusions, quotations, comments) in Byzantine literature. It is, however, difficult to assess their impact on Byzantine biographical writing. The Cyropaedia, for one, has been suggested as a possible model for the History of Basil, and certainly was one for John Zonaras’ History. Isocrates’ Evagoras and Xenophon’s Agesilaus (on which see Chapter and Chapter respectively in this volume) were well established school texts, it seems. Menander Rhetor whose advice was much appreciated, recommended the former as a model for the basilikos logos. Ancient encomia probably influenced Byzantine life-writing much more indirectly, through early Christian texts which were imbued by the written and unwritten rules of ancient rhetoric (e.g. the encomia of Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory of Nyssa). Direct influence is possible, but there is not much hard evidence for it. The same is true for Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. Again, it is Menander Rhetor who recommends their reading. According to N.G. Wilson (: ) no other classical author,
apart from those occupying a central place in the school curriculum, was so frequently transcribed during the middle Byzantine period. Photius read a substantial collection of excerpts. Referring explicitly to the Parallel Lives, Nicephorus Basilaces (twelfth century) exploits information given by Plutarch for the composition of a progymnasma (cf. Xenophontos ). Maximus Planudes took care of an edition of Plutarch’s Complete Works (Hunger : .) which was used by Theodore Metochites and Nicephorus Gregoras.1 The History of Basil, especially the contrasting of Basil and Michael III, is supposed to reflect Plutarch’s Lives, while Michael Psellus’ Chronographia seems to have been influenced by Plutarch, both in the technique of character drawing and on a purely linguistic level.2 Moreover, the Parallel Lives were used as a source of edifying and inspiring material about heroes of the past (N.G. Wilson : –). All in all, however, it seems that Plutarch was more influential as the author of the Moralia than the author of the Lives (Tartaglia ). In contrast to that, the Tale of Alexander not only was constantly reworked (like the Life of Aesop), but seems to have influenced the biographical arrangement of other heroic stories as well.
H: B, E, Hˉ
.................................................................................................................................. Biography as a separate and clearly defined genre did not exist in Byzantine literature. Yet, there are several genres, such as hagiograpical Lives and encomia, which are either by definition biographical to varying degrees or potentially biographical (e.g. historiography). The most influential genre is the Life or bios. It developed as a format for the description and propagation of sainthood at a time when Christians had ceased being persecuted and a life led in strict accordance with the Word of God, and not only the martyr’s death, became a token of sainthood. Whereas the martyrium (or passio) extols the death of a martyr for Christ, the bios celebrates the ‘life and conduct’ (bios kai politeia, the most common title of a Byzantine vita) as proof of the hero’s sainthood. Following the model of the Life of Antony (on which see Chapter in this volume) and other famous Lives of the early Byzantine/ late antique period (especially the monastic Lives composed by Cyril of Scythopolis, on whom Chapter touches in passing), the narrative structure of Lives is usually linear, presenting the hero’s life from infancy to death. In contrast to the bios, the encomium, an inherited though christianized ancient format, exploits the saint’s biography in order to praise him, not necessarily presenting it in a linear way. Most encomia explicitly adhere to the rules laid down by Menander Rhetor, treating their subject in regard to a set of certain fixed topics.
Gaul (: ); for further attestations see the index in N.G. Wilson (). On the manuscript tradition, see also Stefec (). 2 I am indebted to Roderich Reinsch for this information; see also the index fontium in his recent edition of the text (Reinsch : ) and Lauritzen (). 1
The Byzantines themselves, when explicitly contrasting the two genres, regarded richness of biographical information and rather straightforward linguistic form as the bios’ major characteristics. However, from the very beginning, the two genres had also much in common; after all, both pursued the presentation of a life and its praise. It is a characteristic development of Byzantine biographical writing that a process of intermingling of bios and encomium can be observed, which culminates occasionally in the so-called ‘bios intertwined with encomium’ (βίος συμπεπλεγμένος ἐγκωμίῳ or βίος σὺν ἐγκωμίῳ, Hinterberger ). Apart from this telling title, it is indicative for the generic fusion that some bioi, too, appeal to the ‘laws of the encomium’ or obviously are influenced by model encomia, especially the Byzantine encomium par excellence, Gregory of Nazianzus’ Epitaphios of Basil of Caesarea. The hypomnēma is a more ‘historical’ form of hagiography, focusing on the collection of available ‘historical’ data and therefore also closer to biography in a modern sense. Though all in all rather marginal, it is one of the major textual forms represented in the influential tenth-century Metaphrastic mēnologion, where it is reserved for biblical figures, mostly apostles (Schiffer ). Elsewhere, historically significant church leaders are treated, such as in John Zonaras’ hypomnēmata (twelfth century) on the patriarchs of Alexandria and Jerusalem, Cyril and Sophronius (Kaltsogianni : –, –). Both texts focus on the hero’s education and his resulting literary output as well as on his political significance in major ecclesiastical conflicts, and his concomitant role at important church councils. The hypomnēma, therefore, seems to answer a need for biographical information (in a history-like format) concerning persons of eminent importance for the history of Christendom.3
Hagiography Through the Centuries After the so-called Dark Ages (–) characterized by the relative scarcity of literary production, biographical writing powerfully sets in with the Life of Stephen the Younger by Stephen the Deacon (written in ; Auzépy ).4 This text combines the monastic Life with the passio, which describes the brutal execution of the icon-worshipping hero under the iconoclast emperor Constantine V. For the following half-century and beyond, biographical writing is primarily concerned with the praise of champions of icon veneration and their staunch resistance against imperial suppression. Theodore of Stoudios (d. ), patriarch Methodius (–), and their contemporary Ignatius the Deacon are the most important authors to be mentioned here.5 Both Methodius’ and Ignatius’ biographies mark the impressive recovery of classicizing Byzantine literature after centuries of decay. Rightly, their texts have been characterized as writings in super high style (Ševčenko : ). Due to the almost complete absence of miracles and because of the former career of both patriarchs in the imperial administration, the Lives of Tarasius and Nicephorus, composed 3
On the close connection of these hypomnēmata to Zonaras’ historiographical work, see Kaltsogianni (: ). 4 Concerning the content of this section, cf. particularly Efthymiadis (a). 5 Both Theodore and Methodius were in turn themselves honoured with biographies, cf. Krausmüller (a).
by Ignatius, have been categorized as ‘semi-secular biography’ (Alexander : ; ed. Efthymiadis and de Boor : –). The same is true for the Life of Philaretus (d. ), which was composed during the second iconoclast period / by the saint’s nephew Nicetas of Amnia (Kazhdan, Sherry, and Angelidi : –; ed. Rydén ). Philaretus was a wealthy landowner in Paphlagonia who spent all his fortune on generous gifts to the poor and needy. Eventually, his generosity was rewarded with the marriage of one of his granddaughters to Emperor Constantine VI. Philaretus was head of a big family, his only virtues were compassion/charity and unshakeable confidence in God, like Job (with whose story the Life draws close parallels). His Life has a fairy tale character, including an imperial bride show. Besides an epitaphios logos on his parents (Antonopoulou : oratio ), one of the earliest secular biographical writings, emperor Leo VI the Wise (–) composed several homilies on saints, the literary genre of homily not being clearly distinguished from the encomium. The most productive biographer of the tenth century was Nicetas David Paphlagon (see Paschalides ). His work consists primarily of forty-eight encomia on saints of the remote past which were collected in a so-called ‘special panegyricum’. Nicetas’ most famous biography, however, presents a hero from the very recent past: the Vita Ignatii (Smithies and Duffy ) treats patriarch Ignatius’ (– and –) valiant resistance against government interference in church affairs. Ignatius is presented as a victim of iconoclast persecution as well as of political strife. Being the son of Emperor Michael I, he was castrated when his father was forced to resign (). As patriarch, he himself was dethroned and forced into exile before he was reappointed patriarch. His biography, therefore, is presented also as a martyrium (or athlēsis, ‘struggle, competition’ as it is called in the title). Ignatius’ primary virtues are zēlos and parrhēsia (‘zeal’ and ‘boldness’) which he displays when confronted with imperial representatives, especially his chief adversary Caesar Bardas. The Life contrasts Ignatius with his rival patriarch Photius, but perhaps even more with Bardas. Two developments of major significance, already anticipated by Nicetas Paphlagon, reached their peak during the second half of the tenth century. As early as the seventh century, older hagiographical texts had begun to undergo primarily stylistic elaboration (Høgel ). These new versions of older texts, so-called metaphraseis, reflecting the increasing importance of hagiography, developed into a new subgenre, and culminated in a strong metaphrastic movement during the tenth century.6 The second important development is the collection of hagiographical writings destined for liturgical use and arranged according to the ecclesiastical calendar (starting on September). The most influential of these so-called mēnologia was compiled by Symeon Magister (usually called the Metaphrast) and consists mainly of metaphraseis. This Metaphrastic mēnologion contains primarily passiones and bioi, but also hypomnēmata and only a few encomia. Though uncompleted, the Metaphrastic mēnologion rapidly became the most important collection of hagiographical texts in the Byzantine Empire which deeply influenced the hagiographical and biographical literature of the following centuries. This collection, whose success was also due to imperial support, pursued the regulation of the uncontrolled spread of saints as
6
See, for example, Hägg (a: ) on rewriting Pythagorean Lives.
well as of the content of their biographies. This kind of ‘canonization’ through registration is an important reason for the noticeable decline of saints’ biographies in the following centuries. In the following century, less-renowned authors (if known at all) were active, who, however, composed important texts of considerable length, characterized by an obvious attempt at historical record and precision. After the final solution of the controversy about icon veneration, the biographical interest had turned to the spread of monastic foundations in the entire empire and those supporting it. The biographies of Luke of Steiris (Sophianos ), Nicon Metanoeite (Sullivan ), Athanasius of Athos (Noret ), and Lazarus of Galesion (see Greenfield ) are the most splendid examples. Firmly established already in the sixth century by Cyril of Scythopolis’ monastic Lives (Schwartz ), the usual biography of a monk comprises the following stages (cf. Hinterberger : ): from an early age, the hero has a strong leaning towards the monastic life and, still in his teens, leaves his family (with or without their consent). He is introduced into the ascetical life by an abbot or an experienced ascetic and gradually ascends the ladder of ascetical virtues. On his way to spiritual perfection, the monk has to overcome numerous obstacles (his own passions, hostility of others, attacks by demons, fame, cf. also Pratsch : –). For his efforts the monk is rewarded with God’s grace, often expressed by visions or miracles performed already during his lifetime. Having obtained ascetical excellence he spends a considerable length of time in isolation, practising hēsychia (‘tranquillity’). Having become famous as an accomplished monk, he attracts followers and founds one or more monasteries. After his death he performs miracles. As one of the outstanding monastic biographies, the Life of Athanasius of Athos (d. c.), in its core, also follows the conventional pattern presented above, but at the same time exhibits numerous specific features. Athanasius’ relationship with Emperor Nicephorus Phocas (–) is one major topic. Athanasius and Nicephorus are presented as inspired by the same desire for hēsychia (‘tranquillity’) which they seek to achieve together. When Nicephorus, ascending the Byzantine throne, betrays his monastic vocation and thus his friendship with Athanasius based on it, Athanasius gives up his former commitment on Mount Athos and attempts to reach the Holy Land. Chased by imperial agents, he finally returns and forgives the emperor for his failing, obtaining generous financial support for his monastery.7 Moreover, the serious conflict between Athanasius’ cenobitic life and the old eremitic lifestyle on Mount Athos, clearly transpires through the idealizing account of the events.8 Furthermore, Athanasius is pictured as an excellently educated man steeped in traditional classical learning. The author of the vita, Athanasius of Panagiou, himself an accomplished classicizing writer as becomes readily clear from the text, intended this biography for an equally learned audience which could appreciate his classicizing style and his hero’s learned conduct as a monk. An almost contemporary text, the Life of Symeon the New Theologian (d. ; Koutsas ), clearly contrasts with the general trend represented by the Life of Athanasius. The plot focuses on events in Constantinople, where Symeon appears as a mystic in search of the immediate experience of God and as a divinely inspired author writing about this 7
Interestingly, the story of this complicated relationship displays novelistic features: Efthymiadis (b: ). 8 See d’Ayala Valva (). Generally, most biographies of monks of the ninth eleventh centuries promote either the anchoretic or the cenobitic way of life; see Flusin ().
experience. Obviously the author of this Life, Nicetas Stethatus, who strongly identifies with his hero, promotes Symeon’s sanctification and his own claim for the contested ‘copyright’ of Symeon’s writings (Hinterberger ). The following centuries are relatively poor in biographies of contemporary saints, while the reworking of old Lives clearly prevails. Neophytus the Recluse (d. ) collected his encomia of older saints venerated in Cyprus (Papatriantaphyllou-Theodoridi and Giankou ). With decidedly higher literary ambitions and from a classically learned background, Constantine Acropolites (d. ) composed about thirty rhetorically polished logoi on almost exclusively old saints, followed by Nicephorus Gregoras (d. /) with about eight encomia and a rather worldly Life of his uncle John (Laurent ). As in the case of the latter text, during the early Palaeologan period, Lives of contemporary saints focus primarily on the ‘orthodox’ struggle against the imperially sanctioned Union with the Church of Rome while the production of the mid-fourteenth century is dominated by Lives of Athonite monks, reflecting the great significance the Hesychast movement and Palamism had gained in this period. In this context, Philotheus Coccinus is the most important biographer whose extensive Life of Gregory Palamas, including documentary material, laid the foundations of Gregory’s official recognition as saint by the Church of Constantinople, a process unknown to earlier centuries (see Macrides ; ed. Tsames ).
Non-Hagiographical Encomia The bios as a biographical genre is reserved for saints and saintly persons. There is no equivalent biographical format for a non-saint. This perhaps has to do with the fact that at the end, sainthood was the Byzantines’ ideal way of life, vigorously propagated not least by literature. This is the reason for saintly traits in the biographies of persons not directly or officially presented as saints (e.g. Michael Psellus’ mother). The saint’s Life’s ubiquitous presence and dominant position in Byzantine literature, rather than self-indulgent vanity and conceit, are also the reason why some autobiographers present themselves somehow in a saintly light (Hinterberger : –). The saint’s Life, as a concept and in its literary format of bios kai politeia, constituted the biographical pattern many a Byzantine would like to identify with. It is this biographical pattern that underlies most encomia too, regardless of whether they are dedicated to a recognized saint or not. All forms of encomium are influenced by ancient/late antique theory and models. Therefore, there are numerous common features, especially its structure and topoi according to Menander Rhetor. In comparison with the classical ancient Greek encomium (e.g. Xenophon’s Agesilaus), the Byzantine variety is almost devoid of specific references: personal or place names are barely mentioned and almost no chronological information is given. In many cases, in order to be intelligible, the encomium presupposes familiarity with the biography of the praised. To the modern reader these texts therefore are often a mystery and historians take pains to squeeze biographical data out of them.9 Yet, especially in the case of the more extensive encomia, compelling life stories are often provided. Main 9 See, for instance, the attempt to reconstruct patriarch Basil Camaterus’ ( ) biography on the basis of Gregory Antiochus’ encomium in Loukaki () and also other patriarchal encomia mentioned below in this section.
forms are the epitaphios logos, in its already mentioned hagiographical version, and its secular counterpart, the basilikos logos, as well as the pure encomium (for a still living person), which was produced in large number only for patriarchs. Some extensive encomia can legitimately claim to be characterized as fully fledged biographies, e.g. the funeral orations by Nicholas Mesarites on his brother John (Heisenberg ), by Michael Psellus on Michael Cerullarius (Polemis : –), or by Manuel Palaeologus on his brother Theodore (Chrysostomides ). Occasionally, some less extensive funeral orations too are rich in biographical data and manage to convey an impressive character portrait even if they do not provide a full biography. George Tornices’ (d. c.) oration on Anna Comnena is a case in point (Darrouzès : –). Characteristically, it is the author’s declared aim to provide a ‘journey/tour’ (periēgesis) through Anna’s character, focusing on her high devotion to learning which he presents in detail. Let us briefly discuss the most important of these texts and authors. Nicholas Mesarites’ epitaphios for his older brother John (d. ), first of all, was presented forty days after John’s death (cf. Sideras : –). The author presents John as a profoundly pious and learned person, driven by both religious and scholarly enthusiasm. We hear that after a thorough education, John became an accomplished scholar and orator. He entered imperial service under Andronicus Comnenus (–), yet shortly thereafter retreated to an ascetic and monastic life in the countryside. When he finally returned to Constantinople, John was appointed to the highly respected post of interpreter of the Psalms. After the Latin conquest of Constantinople in , John appeared repeatedly as the leader of the Orthodox side in the negotiations with the Catholic Church. The narrative parts of the speech are interrupted by long expressions of Nicholas’ grief for his brother. Towards the end of the text, Nicholas incorporated two official disputations between John as representative of the Orthodox Church and the papal legate and the Latin patriarch of Constantinople, which attest to John’s unwavering efforts for the Orthodox cause.10 Great parts of the biography itself are presented in the form of ēthopoiia (‘characterization-through-speech’, a specialty of Nicholas), presenting John speaking to other people. By doing so, Nicholas recalls the rhetorical power of John’s speech and the effect it had on his interlocutors. These dialogues appear also as an apt means of demonstrating John’s courage and resolution in difficult or dangerous situations (e.g. facing the angry emperor or negotiating with the Latins). John’s resolution is also illustrated by his attempted flight to the Holy Land at the tender age of . His prophetic vision, which announced Constantinople’s conquest by the Latins, warrants a comparison with the biblical prophets Daniel and Jeremiah. This is not the only passage in which John’s portrait comes close to that of a saint. Second, Michael Psellus (d. ). His enormous biographical oeuvre comprises epitaphioi, imperial and other panegyrics, historiography, and autobiography. According to Ljubarskij (), Psellus in his depictions of human character distinguished between the monastic and the secular type. In his vision of the human being, characters are multifaceted and changeable, combining both good and evil in them. Psellus dedicated extensive funeral orations to three patriarchs. The longest of these orations is the epitaphios on Michael 10
Cf. also Sideras (: n. , n. ).
Cerullarius. Cerullarius’ biographical data (particularly, leadership of an abortive plot against the emperor and appointment to the patriarchal throne) are interspersed with philosophical and, most characteristically for Psellus, autobiographical digressions. This epitaphios is a special case, as it was presented some years after the patriarch’s rehabilitation. Forced into exile without proper condemnation, Cerullarius had died in shortly before the decisive (staged) court procedure. At the time of the composition of the speech, Cerullarius still was a highly controversial figure, and Psellus’ relationship with him was far from straightforward. All these circumstances, as well as Psellus’ literary artistry, make this text a fascinating read. Besides his numerous funeral speeches, Psellus composed encomia of living persons, as e.g. of his teacher John Mauropus or Emperor Constantine Monomachus (Dennis : –, –). Moreover, Psellus had an extraordinarily strong penchant to write about himself. Most famously, in the Chronographia, he repeatedly indulges in autobiographical digressions (Pietsch ). Yet in his long funeral speeches he is present as well. Psellus’ epitaphios of John Xiphilinus (Polemis : –) constitutes almost a parallel biography of John and Psellus himself. In the funeral speech on his mother, the autobiographical element is so strong that the last editor (Criscuolo ) chose the title ‘autobiography’ for this work in which Psellus presents his successful education and career as his mother’s greatest achievement. Even in the Life of Auxentius (Fisher : –), a fifth-century saint, Psellus obviously identifies in part with the saint, and identifies other characters with his own friends, a fact which was interpreted as an attempt at hagio-autobiography (Kazhdan ). In contrast to the great number of funeral orations, encomia on still living persons are rather rare. One particularly productive subgenre of the encomium is the ‘imperial speech’, the logos basilikos, delivered on certain fixed occasions, before the imperial court. Thus, since the eleventh century, a laudatory speech has been presented to the emperor on Epiphany or Christmas (Magdalino : –; Angelov : , ). Several encomia were dedicated to Emperor Michael Palaeologus (–; Angelov : n. ). All of them contain biographical sketches which exhibit approximately the same biographical data, arranged according to the traditional ‘Menandrian’ model and separating Michael’s deeds into those before and those after his coronation. The liberation of the Byzantine capital, after nearly sixty years of Latin captivity, appears as the culminating point in Michael’s biography. Interestingly, the same content is highlighted in two pseudo-autobiographical texts by Michael (Grégoire –; Dmitrievsky : –). These two texts, composed at the end of his life and constituting the preface to two monastic foundation documents, obviously were not written by Michael himself, but in all probability by a clerk of the imperial chancellery. All five texts (imperial speeches and autobiographical prefaces) present an officially approved version of Michael’s life which aimed at supporting the legitimacy of his regency, by emphasizing his close relationship with John Batatzes, omitting nearly completely the uneasy relationship with John’s son and successor Theodore and concealing Michael’s rebellious acts against the previous emperor or presenting breaks in his career (as the forced flight to the Turks) as provoked by a malicious superhuman power (Hinterberger : –). All biographies present Michael as the God-chosen ruler, almost as an instrument who executed God’s will.
A final form of non-hagiographical encomium is the ecclesiastical counterpart of logoi basilikoi: encomia on patriarchs of Constantinople. This genre flourished in the twelfth century. These encomia were presented on St Lazarus’ Day and frequently were composed and delivered by one of the teachers of the so-called patriarchal school. Like the basilikos logos, the patriarchal encomium too generally is poor in specific biographical data, but continuously refers to and hints at the patriarch’s biography. In this case, though, the references are so vague that the biography frequently remains shadowy. Nevertheless, such texts are often the only biographical information available today. One of the few texts which exhibit a stronger biographical character, is Nicephorus Basilaces’ encomium of Nicholas Muzalon (d. ; Garzya : –). The text emphasizes Muzalon’s high learning, his election to the archbishopric of Cyprus, which he was forced to leave because of internal opposition, and his final ascension to the patriarchal throne.
T B F
.................................................................................................................................. The Byzantine era also produced a number of fictional Lives (Messis ) of either fictitious saints (e.g. Basil the Younger or Andrew the Fool, on whom see Efthymiadis b: –), or historical persons. The Edifying Story of Barlaam and Joasaph, also known as the Barlaam Romance, is an example of both. Although already in early manuscripts it is ascribed to John of Damascus (eighth century), today it is believed to be a late tenth-century composition, translated by the Athonite monk Euthymius Iber (‘the Georgian’) from a Georgian version (Volk ; ). This story is a christianized reworking of a Life of Buddha. From the original Indian setting, ten charming short stories have been preserved, which certainly contributed to the work’s enormous popularity during the Byzantine era (about manuscripts, five of them densely illuminated) and its continued literary success thereafter.11 This Life was occasionally perceived as a model for real life. Thus, when John VI Cantacuzenus (d. ) abdicated, he took monastic vows, assuming the name Joasaph. Another famous example is the anonymous, Byzantine Vita Constantini (not to be confused with Eusebius of Caesarea’s biography of the same name, on which see Chapter in this volume). This story underwent several stages of fictionalization and, though it is couched into the format of bios, has very little to do with traditional hagiography.12 Already from the fifth century onwards, legends about Constantine had started circulating, especially concerning his birth and baptism, and were added to the historical nucleus of Constantine’s biography. In form of a vita, this legendary biography is first attested by manuscripts preserved in mēnologia from the eighth and ninth centuries. The original text of this ‘proto-vita’ developed approximately during the eighth century. It
There are several early modern Greek versions, cf. Kechagioglou (: . ). The origins of the legendary elements were meticulously traced by Kazhdan (); see also Lieu (: ). Interestingly, Eusebius’ Life of Constantine had relatively little impact on the subsequent Byzantine tradition concerning Constantine’s biography, possibly because of Eusebius’ doubtful reputa tion as an adherent to the Arian heresy. 11 12
is the main source of various fully fledged Lives of Constantine written during the following centuries. The most important one, if we consider the great number of extant manuscripts (forty), is the so-called Guidi version, dating to the second half of the ninth century.13 According to this story, Constantine was the illegitimate son of Constantius (called Constans) and the beautiful Helen, with whom Constantius had had sexual intercourse, when on his way to Persia he spent one night in the inn of her father. After he was brought up at his grandfather’s inn, he arrived at Constantius’ court in Britain and was appointed as his father’s successor. Other legendary episodes are Constantine’s capture by Persians, the vision of the cross, the battle at the Milvian bridge, his baptism, and the foundation of Constantinople. In the late Byzantine period, the Guidi version served as the primary source for the composition of new biographies of Constantine which omitted some of its less imperial content (especially his ‘ignoble’ birth and Persian captivity) or even criticized them openly as blatant ‘lies’ (Hinterberger ). Apart from Constantine the Great, John III Batatzes is the only saintly emperor for whom a vita was composed (in the th century), while the empresses Irene and Theodora were honoured with brief hagiographical texts (Schreiner ). Generally, the question of fictionality was seldom raised in respect to biographical writing. John Zonaras however declared that the famous th-century Life of the repentant harlot Mary of Egypt (PG /, –), ascribed to Sophronius of Jerusalem, was obviously fictional (plasma). Byzantium also continued two ancient, popular narrative traditions: those of Aesop and Alexander the Great (on these traditions in Antiquity, see Chapter and Chapter respectively in this volume). Their fictionalized biographies were popular in Byzantium as they were in Syriac and Arabic contexts (Chapter and Chapter respectively in this volume) and underwent further rewriting. All Byzantine manuscripts of the so-called Perriana and Westermanniana versions of the Life of Aesop go back to late antique archetypes. At the end of the thirteenth century, Maximus Planudes, an accomplished philologist and author, composed a classicizing version of the Life of Aesop which is preserved in a substantial number of manuscripts (around thirty) (Karla ). The Alexander Romance already had undergone significant modifications during Late Antiquity and the early Byzantine period. The process of constant accretion, modification, and revision continued during the following centuries (Jouanno ; a). Version ε, dating probably to the end of the seventh or the beginning of the eighth century,14 modifies or adds episodes in a way which enhances the process of ahistorical drift, already noticeable in former versions. Thus, Alexander is even further heroicized. Already as a child, he develops extraordinary abilities, taking part in the Olympic Games at the tender age of . He always wins immediately and totally, and his irresistibility becomes almost a leitmotiv. In the same vein, the monstruous character of his horse Bucephalus is underlined. Another striking feature is the mystification of the episode of Alexander’s death, in which the hero addresses his last words to Bucephalus while he preserves his extraordinary appearance (a stunning smile) beyond death. Despite his heroic traits, Alexander is far from disconnected from the contemporary socio-cultural environment. The text has a strong
13 14
M. Guidi (). On the various versions of the Vita Constantini, see Winkelmann (). On the textual history of the Romance, see Chapter n. in this volume.
Byzantine colouring, and Alexander displays imperial virtues (eternal victory, philanthropy). Furthermore, Alexander appears in a slightly christianized form, converting to monotheism and undertaking an eschatological role when banning the unclean people Gog and Magog behind rocks. Version ε is also moralizing. Olympia’s adultery with Nectanebo is glossed over, and the relationship between Alexander and Philip is presented as less strained. Various versions of the Alexander tale, ancient and Byzantine alike, existed and were read side by side, which led to contamination between versions (as is the case with hagiographical biographies as well). From a formal point of view, the Alexander Romance underwent the most profound modification when at the end of the fourteenth century it was converted into verse (Aerts ; Jouanno b). An anonymous author rewrote the story in fifteen-syllable verse. Finally, a rhymed Tale of Alexander written in fifteen-syllable verse was printed in Venice in and developed into a most successful popular book (Holton ). There are quite a few texts which are not biographies in the narrow sense but nevertheless exhibit a strong biographical element, because their plots are essentially arranged biographically (Moennig ). Perhaps the most famous example is Digenis Akritis, a narrative arranged around the hero’s and his parents’ lives (Jeffreys ). It probably was written at the beginning of the twelfth century and is preserved in various versions, which differ not only in their linguistic make-up, but also in content. The story’s basic plot (common to all versions) covers the hero’s life from cradle to grave. Whereas version E (in decidedly vernacular Greek) consists of loosely connected parts, the biographization of the material can be regarded as the main achievement of version G (in mildly classicizing Greek). The latter’s redactor probably was influenced by the Alexander Romance as a model for heroic biography (Moennig ). Digenis, indeed, is an Alexander type: a valiant and invincible warrior, gifted with cunning and extraordinary physical strength. But, in contrast, Digenis is also a love story. According to a convincing categorization, both the Alexander Romance and Digenis belong to a subgroup of love-romances/novels which cover the couple’s life until the death of one of the lovers (whereas in another group of texts, the narrative stops after the couple’s (re-)union). To the same category belongs the Tale of Achilles (O.L. Smith ) as well as the Tale of Troy, the latter featuring Paris as an anti-hero (Moennig : –; Nørgaard and Smith ). Despite its title Achilleis, this compelling love story has only very little to do with Homer’s hero. Achilles being in love with the daughter of an enemy may reflect some dim reminiscences of the story of Achilles and Priamus’ daughter Polyxena, as it was told in Dictys’ Ephemeris belli troiani and later by such Byzantine writers as John Malalas or John Tzetzes. This biographical arrangement (‘biographization’) of the love romance in the late Byzantine period may be due to the ubiquitous influence of hagiographical biography which made itself felt also in other genres such as historiography (Moennig ).
Biographical Arrangement in Historiography Historiography is another category of texts which often do have a strong biographical character (see Chapter in this volume for ancient examples). Since the tenth century, character sketches of the protagonists of historiography, primarily emperors, gained more
importance and characters gradually became livelier and more complicated. During the eleventh century, conflicting traits in a personality were emphasized and the human being was presented as a mixture of both good and bad character traits, as we have already seen in the case of Michael Psellus’ biographical writings. This ‘realistic’ approach to the presentation of human beings is in stark contrast to idealizing hagiography. Historiographical works are frequently structured in a biographical way, i.e. on the reign and life of the Byzantine emperors: Theophanes Continuatus as well as Genesius’ History of the four emperors before Basil I, Leo the Deacon’s History of Nicephorus Phocas and John Tzimisces (Hunger : .). Marking a profound change in historiographical writing, Michael Psellus’ Chronographia not only is subdivided into chapters according to the reigning emperor, but the author analyses the major characters of his history, providing lively pictures of both their behaviour and appearance. Further developing this approach to history, Nicetas Choniates provides in-depth explorations of Manuel I and Andronicus I, who are presented as ambiguous figures (Hunger : .–; ed. van Dieten ). Without giving such compelling portraits, George Acropolites extols John III Batatzes as an imperial ideal, whereas his son Theodore is presented in an utterly negative light. George Pachymeres structures his detailed history of the early Palaeologan period according to the reigns of Michael VIII and Andronicus II. John Cantacuzenus’ History is a strongly autobiographical text (Schopen –). Interestingly, in his Historiai, Michael Critobulus presents Mehmed Fatih, the conqueror of Constantinople, according to the rules of the basilikos logos (as Moennig suggests; ed. Reinsch ). Other historical works even focus exclusively on the life of one specific emperor, like the so-called Historia Basilii (Ševčenko ) and Anna Comnena’s Alexias (Reinsch and Kambylis ). Both are clearly conceived as primarily historiographical works. It is probably in historiography where the impact of ancient biography is strongest. The History of Basil (reigned –) constitutes the official biography of the founder of the so-called Macedonian dynasty, commissioned by Basil’s grandson Constantine VII. Though an extensive text, in its structure, the History of Basil follows the outline of a basilikos logos. This may also be due to the fact that the author seems to have used Basil’s son Leo’s funeral oration for his parents. Agapitos () persuasively argues that the text was originally conceived as a speculum principis, presenting the ideal model-emperor. The work is clearly divided into four parts: () Basil’s life before his ascension to the throne; () a negative portrait of his predecessor Michael III; () Basil’s deeds as emperor; and () an extensive section on his building activities. At the beginning of the story a royal Armenian ancestry is constructed, in accordance with Basil’s own propaganda. Basil’s accomplishments as emperor are presented in thematic rather than chronological order. After his deeds of peace (administrative reforms) follow the wars, geographically divided into those fought in the East and thereafter those in the West. Even this ‘secular’ biography is full of wondrous events. An eagle announces Basil’s imperial career to his parents, various monks foresee his splendid future, at the end a true miracle is performed by the archbishop of the Rus. Basil appears as the God-sent rescuer of the empire, destined to restore Byzantium’s former glory. It has been argued (see e.g. Jenkins ; Agapitos ) that the History of Basil, especially the contrast of Basil with the anti-hero Michael III, was influenced by Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (especially with the Life of Antony, concerning Michael’s vices, cf. Hunger
: .). Though there are, indeed, a few verbal parallels, the apparatus fontium of the recent critical edition (Ševčenko ) provides only very meagre and vague evidence for such an influence. Alleged parallels with Isocrates’ Evagoras are rather due to the influence of Menander Rhetor’s theoretical rules concerning the basilikos logos (in which the speech on Evagoras is recommended as a model). Xenophon’s Cyropaedia too has been suggested as a possible source of inspiration for the author (Markopoulos ).
Autobiography Autobiography has its specific characteristics (Hinterberger ). It developed in ways quite different from biography, in certain textual environments apt for self-presentation. The oldest Byzantine examples of autobiographical writing appear in the guise of a preface to a monastic rule (typikon) or to a will. According to the author’s role in society, these texts present the career of a founder of a monastic community (e.g. Athanasius of Athos, Christodulus of Patmos, or Neophytus the Recluse) or in case of a secular founder, the career of an imperial official, soldier, or member of the imperial family (e.g. Michael Attaleiates, Gregory Pacurianus, or Theodora Palaeologina), who invested his/her fortune into a monastery where normally he/she would retreat in old age. The special case of an emperor’s biography linked to a foundation document has already been mentioned above (on Michael Palaeologus). Autobiographical wills are less frequent (e.g. by Anna Comnena). Usually, these autobiographical forewords are short and present a brief curriculum vitae. In the case of abbots, the autobiographical text focuses on the building of the monastery and the acquisition of land. The account of these activities and of an ascetic life, fulfilling all the requirements of a saintly life, pursued the aim of supporting the prestige of the foundation and of securing its administrative independence and economic viability. In the preface to his typikon, Neophytus the Recluse (d. c.) tells a story which in its general outline has a lot in common with the Lives of monastic founders (Stefanis : –). Like e.g. Nicon Metanoeite, Neophytus, profoundly moved by human misery, clandestinely abandons his parental home. Again as in the Life of Nicon, Neophytus’ father tracks his son down, but fails to bring him back to live in lay society. After years of apprenticeship in the monastery of St Chrysostome on the Koutsouvendis mountain, Neophytus leaves for the Holy Land in order to find spiritual guidance for a life in hēsychia (tranquillity). Back in Cyprus and following instructions given to him in a vision, he finally retreats to a cave near Paphos around which gradually a monastic community develops, the addressee of the typikon. Satisfying the curiosity of readers and following a (natural) habit to be found in the manuscript tradition of ancient literature as well (e.g. Life of Homer, Life of Euripides), Byzantine biographies sometimes circulated as attachments or introductions to the writings of an author (e.g. Aesop, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Climacus, Symeon Stylites the Younger, Theodore of Stoudios, Athanasius of Athos; cf. Jouanno : ; Krausmüller b: , n. ). Another autobiographical form, the preface to the collected works of a famous author, developed out of this habit. Michael Choniates and Nicephorus Basilaces left such short accounts which concentrate on the author’s education and literary formation (Lampros : .–; Garzya : –). In his introduction to the collection of his letters (and
rhetorical works) George of Cyprus (patriarch Gregory II, –) provides a lively account of his childhood in Cyprus, his flight from his parents’ home to the empire of Nicaea in order to acquire learning, his ultimate failure and despair, and finally the fulfilment of his desire in George Acropolites’ school after the recapture of Constantinople in . There, he acquired the rhetorical formation which made him an acclaimed author (Lameere : –). Lively and circumstantial as this autobiographical preface is, it is also extremely partial (in both senses of the word). George omits any reference to his ecclesiastical career, except one brief allusion to his election to the patriarchal throne as well as to the concomitant duties which distracted him from further literary activities. In his autobiography which originally addresses a small circle of friends and pupils, George/ Gregory appears exclusively as a writer of rhetorical texts who had turned to the ancient masters themselves (instead of Byzantine emulators) in order to refine his style and achieve literary excellence. The most detailed autobiography written by Nicephorus Blemmydes in two instalments around /, combines characteristics of the author’s biography and that of the ascetic plus monastic founder (Munitiz ). In Byzantium, biographies are usually a vehicle for praise. The ancient rhetorical format psogos (invective) may lie behind the contrasting of positive and negative (anti-)heroes as in the History of Basil or the Life of Ignatius. Only few pure invectives have come down to us, e.g. against Bagoas by Nicephorus Basilaces or against Katablattas by John Argyropulus (fourteenth century). In the latter work, which the author intended as a succinct defence against charges of impiety, Argyropulus gives a short autobiographical account of his life in order to prove his own good character (Angold : –). In the case of Theodore Agallianus, the presentation of the author’s own life as a means of defence, this time before a real court, has developed into a substantial autobiography combined with an invective against his accusers (ibid.: ; ed. Patrineles ). Apology is also the motif of Demetrius Cydones famous autobiography, in which he tried to explain to his fellow Byzantines why he was attracted to the Church of Rome (primarily because he was intellectually fascinated by Thomas Aquinas). It should be briefly mentioned that the Liturgy of the Infamous Beardless, a coarse satire, while presenting the anti-hero’s life (parodying the hagiographical format of synaxarion) is biographically arranged (Moennig ; ed. Eideneier ). A curious autobiographical text, which though an official document, could be read as a satire as well, is the Confession of Paul Tagaris (Hunger ). After an adventurous life, at the end of which Tagaris returned to his native Constantinople, he confessed before the synod and the patriarch the numerous sins he had committed (inter alia theft, impersonation of a patriarch, conversion to the Church of Rome). Following the structure of a monastic biography, this text appears as an anti-bios.
Short Biographies, Biographical Sketches, and Collective Biographies The synaxarion is a collection of very short biographical entrances concerning saints, usually containing the name, the most important biographical data immediately connected to their sainthood, with focus on the circumstances of death. Hagiographical calendars in metrical form contain even less biographical data (Paschalides : –; Luzzi ).
The so-called Short History (Historia syntomos), written by Michael Psellus, probably for educational purposes, consists of very short portraits of Roman kings and emperors up to Basil II. Short portraits exhibiting a special interest in the physical appearance and occasionally combined with character drawings (aptly called ‘Somato-(psycho)gramme’ by Hunger : .) constitute one of the charming features in John Malalas’ Chronicle and are still to be found in later chronicles, such as the Chronicle of the Logothete or in historiographical works of Leon the Deacon, George Acropolites, or Nicephorus Gregoras (ibid.: ., , , ). Even Constantine Manasses’ World Chronicle contains short biographies (e.g. of Cyrus or Basil I, cf. Moennig ; ed. Lampsidis ). In his famous Bibliotheca, Photius provides short biographical sketches of some of the authors read by him (Schamp ; ed. Henry –). Short biographical entrances of a similar nature, concerning not only authors (e.g. Gregory of Nazianzus), but also other famous personalities (emperors, generals, etc.) mostly from Antiquity, but in some cases up to the ninth century (such as the author Ignatius the Deacon) can be found in the Suda, an encyclopaedia of higher learning (dating from the tenth century).15
C
.................................................................................................................................. Both the main characteristics of Byzantine biographical writing and the richness of forms and contents have become clear. The influence of the vita/bios on other (even nonbiographical) genres and the concomitant biographization have been noted (cf. Moennig ). Biography has to be interesting, edifying, and entertaining. ‘Adventures’ are an important element, as is the constant movement of the heroes. A recurrent topic is the hero’s flight and his pursuit by other people. It is remarkable that there are so many biographies of people from the provinces who (originally) came to Constantinople for various reasons (especially education and job prospects). Constantinople itself is an important point of reference in many biographies, as is the emperor or the patriarch. Education and learning, too, play a significant role. The specific characteristics of Byzantine biography still remain vague. A lot of further scholarly work needs to be done, before the art of biography can be properly approached. It is the aim of this chapter to give an incentive to investigate Byzantine biographies synchronically and by transgressing traditional generic boundaries.
F R In comparison to the rather cursory treatment of Byzantine biography as a whole (available only in encyclopaedias or lexica, e.g. Karayannopoulos and Weiss ; Tinnefeld ; Kazhdan ; Littlewood ), Byzantine autobiography is relatively well researched (Angold ; ; Hinter berger ). Although a plethora of hagiographical biographies have never been studied from a literary point of view (cf. Høgel ), the recent increase of interest in hagiography has produced a Constantine Manasses’ short Life of Oppian (Colonna ), composed in fifteen syllable verse, is partly based on the respective entry in the Suda. 15
number of enlightening studies on important authors of hagiographical biographies (e.g. Paschalides ; Høgel ; Kaltsogianni ; Paraskevopoulou ) and an especially valuable handbook in two volumes (Efthymiadis a; a). As a special form of biographical writing with particular emphasis on its literary aspects, hagiography is magisterially investigated by Hägg (, though focusing on Late Antiquity). Equally insightful is the exploration of various biographical texts in Kazhdan, Sherry, and Angelidi () and Kazhdan and Angelidi (). Berschin ( ) gives an idea of what an in depth analysis of Byzantine biographical writing in the guise of hagiography, and its overall changing character through the centuries, the various ‘Epochenstile’, could look like. A concise picture of imperial biographies, transcending traditional generic boundaries is provided by Schreiner (). Stimulating ideas on late Byzantine biographical writing are to be found in Moennig (). Enderwitz and Schamoni () cast a fascinating comparative glance into tenth century biography as world literature (juxtaposing Latin and Byzantine biography as well as Arabic, Jewish, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese).
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Did Classical Texts Facilitate Complex Literary Portraits in the Middle Ages? ......................................................................................................................
I spite of a vast and diverse record of life-writing in the western Middle Ages, the medieval contribution to the long history of biography is usually neglected by non-specialists or stereotyped as ‘hagiography’.1 This term is particularly unfortunate as the distinction between saintly and secular Lives is unsustainable in terms of title, status of biographee, language, function, audience, structure, purpose, and other parameters.2 Although much life-writing was certainly composed also with a view to providing material for liturgies of saints (and was accordingly designated vita, passio, or the like), many Lives (e.g. those of Anselm and Charlemagne) became relevant only at a later stage from a sainthood perspective. Moreover, saintly virtues were also emphasized in Lives of abbots, bishops, princes, kings (or in descriptions of them in chronicles), even if the figures concerned never became saints in any technical, ecclesiastical sense; their exemplarity, however, for an institution or a dynasty served as a focused cultural memory in a way that we can only call religious. And, finally, life-writing material would move promiscuously between functions, genres, and languages without any regard for modern categorizations. So while a sharp distinction between secular and sacred biography hinders rather than facilitates our characterization of medieval life-writing and while we should not bracket the entire medieval period as ‘hagiographical’ (some of the emperors and philosophers of classical biography were divine too), there is another reason why medieval biography seems to stand out so clearly between the classical and the Renaissance period of life-writing— another stereotype that is perhaps more difficult to refute. H. Lee (: ). The Middle Ages are ignored in Caine (), and in the trend setting collection by France and St Clair (), one chapter is devoted to pre Renaissance writing, dealing mostly with ancient Christian hagiography. 2 The distinction is emphatically criticized by the greatest authority on western medieval biography, Berschin (: ; ). The categories may be easier to sustain in the Byzantine world. I am indebted to Christian Høgel for discussions on this point. 1
To approach that aspect it is tempting to take our cue from art history (the topic of Part V in this volume): the assertion that the period between Late Antiquity and the Early Renaissance was a portrait-less age.3 Take any modern biography of a medieval historical personality and you will find on the cover, if not a book painting in a somewhat naive style, then a flat, depersonalized contemporary mosaic or, in a few cases, a sculpture without any individual traits. The artistic representations from Greek and Roman Antiquity and from the Renaissance, in contrast, immediately brings us much closer to the great personalities of the past. A somewhat similar case has been made about literary representations: the Middle Ages, we are told, produced only schematized, superficial, black-or-white-portraits-inwriting, not the real likenesses we have become accustomed to since the Renaissance. In this chapter I will offer some indications and provide some references to studies which show that such a view is not correct, while acknowledging that statistically it is not as wrong as the idea that all medieval biography was ‘hagiographical’. An overwhelmingly vast portion of the life-writing that survives from the medieval West—whether in chronicles, fictional narratives, letters, Lives, etc.—sets out to display virtues as a source of admiration and inspiration (and, to a much lesser degree, to display vices to be shunned). Such Lives presented ideals that were held up as a high standard and as an entirely positive focus point for the cultural memory of a group: thus, the members of a cathedral chapter revered and read about a previous bishop who had been decisive for their community; the memory of a saintly monk or a founder abbot was kept alive through writing for contemporary and later brothers; a cleric, a valiant knight, or a king had risked his life for the common good (Thomas Becket, Absalon, Louis IX); the ideals of a new order were incarnated by the founder (Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis of Assisi); the adventures of the patron saint of a nation, town, or a military order were rehearsed by citizens and members on the basis of authoritative writings. This commemorative and mobilizing function of most medieval life-writing dictated the black-and-white, or, rather, pure white, character of such compositions. The absence of the irony, ambiguity, and balanced criticism which strikes us in most of this material—and which we know so well from ancient and post-medieval biography—is mainly to be explained in terms of the communicative situation and a restricted public sphere rather than a one-dimensional mindset, just as the lack of medieval portrait painting should be put down to training and incentive structures within the frameworks and techniques of visual communication rather than to inability or indifference to individual features in general. Most medieval life-writing should be thought of in the same way as commemorative statues in the modern townscape—the kind of monuments that project cultural identity and in the process gloss over any shortcomings or criticisms. The written cultural memory of great and virtuous ancestors was usually meant to serve quite small communities of readers/listeners within dynastic, episcopal, monastic, or urban structures; this would partly explain the contrast to classical Antiquity where the Hellenistic and the Roman Imperial world created a wider public sphere of reading, bringing with it a broader space for ambiguity and irony in the encounter with the many heroic figures of old. And where the public reading sphere did cross regional and dynastic borders, it either
Gombrich (: ). The reference here is to a standard perception in need of qualification, but nevertheless based on clear trends; cf. H. Lee (: ) on seventeenth century biography. 3
served monastic and mendicant organizations with a strong mobilizing agenda of sincerity and Christian virtue (e.g. the Legenda aurea, Italy, c.) or catered for an interregional aristocracy whose common heroes were (semi-)fictional or ancient (Arthur, Roland, Tristan, Alexander, Caesar, etc.) and thus rarely encompassed more contemporary figures within this different and distancing mode of writing. Another factor accounting for the dominance of idealizing, exemplary biography4 needs to be mentioned, though it is only partly distinctive of the Middle Ages and certainly has a bearing on Antiquity as well. The cult of decisive charismatic figures in all human spheres from rulership through religious organizations to intellectual traditions (Copeland )— a fixation that can strike us as odd, naive, or misplaced—was in fact very realistic in a medieval (and partly ancient) context. First of all, the abilities and networks of strong individuals were much more crucial than today for forming and maintaining social structures on all levels. And those frail and vulnerable depersonalized structures that did work naturally had their vitality imputed to a human or divine embodiment—the dynastic pedigree, the patron saint, the founder, the body of members (the corporation), and ultimately, for all of humanity, the all-encompassing body of Christ (Kantorowicz ). In a society of scarce resources, the relative importance of personal charisma rose disproportionately. All social ideals and positive values thus tended to accrue around an embodiment, present, or past and ever-present. Perceiving the social world in this way no doubt favoured a habit of life-writing so full of praise. This pre-modern importance of charismatic leadership is only apparently at odds with the modern cult of individuality and ‘personality’ which emerged after the Renaissance, as described by Caine (: ): ‘All of this lifewriting reflects not only the growing recognition of the importance of the individual, as distinct from the family or community, which emerged during the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries . . . ’. The idea of ‘personality’ with plenty of finer distinctions and the potential of personal self-realization (as emphasized by Goethe, for instance) is essentially a bourgeois, anti-aristocratic development. The individuals of medieval biography were idolized as embodiments of communities, not as personalities in this modern sense. With this very rough sketch of the social framework around medieval biography, we can proceed to look at more internal, literary mechanisms. The one that interests us here above all is the presence and possible effects of ancient Roman biography in western medieval writing. As life-writing in the medieval West is such a vast field without clear contours, the same is true, consequently, of the impact and presence of ancient biographical art within medieval textual culture. In order to give just a few suggestions of how the ancient Roman biographical heritage had an impact on medieval writing I will therefore need to delimit the field of texts and the chronological range quite substantially and focus on just two themes. Basing myself only on a very few examples, I hope that these two themes can be of some interest beyond the chosen texts, namely, were ambiguous portraits facilitated by ancient models? And: did classically inspired Latin contribute to a distinctive conceptualization of man? The three sections proceed from the solid foundations of literary and textual history to an interpretation of two texts within a framework of basic scholarly consensus but with different emphases, and end up on a vast plain of medieval linguistics, anthropology,
‘Exemplary’ is to be preferred to ‘saintly’/‘hagiographical’ as a general description of pre modern biography, as in H. Lee (: ). 4
religious, and philosophical studies, in which I can only hint at one possible impact of ancient literature which might be the object of further study.
P S S M A
.................................................................................................................................. Ancient Christian life-writing in Latin from the fourth to the sixth centuries and its western afterlife is a whole field of study in itself, and I shall here consider only the impact of a core set of pre-Christian Roman biographies.5 These, in turn, did not play any significant role before the revolutionary introduction of pagan authors into the canon of cathedral schools beginning in the eleventh century and burgeoning in the twelfth century—the period which also saw a general European proliferation of book culture (the well-studied case of Einhard and his use of Suetonius in his biography of Charlemagne (c.) remains unique).6 The key Roman classics both became models for Latin works and were appropriated and translated during the rise of the vernacular literatures during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The scene of literary biography in the West then changed dramatically with the emergence of humanism and the spread of Plutarchan Lives, from the s in a Castilian adaptation (giving rise to Italian versions) and from the beginning of the fifteenth century in Latin translations (Pade : .–). Seen from the point of view of the reception of classical biography, one could therefore claim a certain unity for the period of western medieval life-writing from c. to c., with a preponderance of Latin writing in the first half and vernacular in the second (cf. Berschin ). In this period, among all the exciting Roman literary portraiture that we are aware of, it was really only Suetonius and Sallust who were in the frame.7 Suetonius’ voluminous and at times complex depictions of the emperors were read by a few Carolingian intellectuals: one ninth-century copy exists, and, as mentioned, Einhard’s classic biography of Charlemagne employed Suetonius’ per species structure to a considerable degree. This gave posterity a wonderfully readable biography of the Frankish emperor, but by no means a Suetonian ambiguous or critical portrait. Interest in Suetonius resurfaced during the surge of classical reception in the eleventh (four extant copies) and twelfth centuries (twelve copies); almost all of these manuscripts originated in France and England,8 and a few leading twelfth5
Thus, omitting magisterial ancient Christian biographies like Evagrius’ Latin translation (c.) of Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Sulpicius Severus’ Life of Martin (), on the latter of which see Chapter and Chapter in this volume. For autobiographical Christian writing, see Chapter in this volume. 6 Cf. Berschin (). Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne did have an important medieval afterlife itself ( medieval manuscripts), mapped by Tischler (). 7 One could add to this the popular overviews of Roman history, Orosius’ Historiae and especially Eutropius’ Breviarium (mostly in the form of Historia romana, the updated and enlarged versions by Paul the Deacon (c.) and Landolfus Sagax (c.)) whose narratives do include brief descriptions of emperors (Mortensen ). 8 I refer to the attributions in Munk Olsen (: ). S.J. Tibbetts in L.D. Reynolds (: ) gives a slightly different picture, but also with a concentration in France (the Loire valley).
Table 39.1 Known copies of Catilina and Jugurtha between the ninth and the twelfth centuries Century
9 10 11 12 Total
Number of copies Catilina
Jugurtha
2 7 32 84 125
2 7 37 94 140
century historians, writers, and classicists like William of Malmesbury and John of Salisbury display direct or indirect knowledge of the text.9 Suetonius’ material was excerpted and adapted for several vast thirteenth-century compilations, like the French historical collection, Li Fets de Romains, and the encyclopaedic Speculum Historiale by Vincent of Beauvais, from where it entered the grand Castilian Estoria de Espanna promoted by King Alphonso X;10 but it was only with Petrarch in the fourteenth century that the entire collection as such became the focus of historical and literary activity; thereafter, it would be on a victorious march into the Early Modern age—making Suetonius the natural companion of Tacitus and Plutarch, both unknown in the western Middle Ages (Berschin ). Before Italian humanism, in other words, Suetonius remained quite marginal as a model for life-writing. In contrast, Sallust’s depictions of heroes and villains in both Catiline and Jugurtha were influential on an entirely different scale. Let me first quote Munk Olsen’s statistics of known copies from the ninth to the twelfth centuries (Munk Olsen : ) (Table .). Of course, Sallust’s two works are considerably shorter than all of Suetonius and thus took less effort to copy, but the context for understanding this steep rise actually pulls the statistics in the opposite direction: Sallust was a school author, copied into modest volumes whose survival rate must be assumed to be substantially lower than non-scholastic books. From a wide range of sources Munk Olsen has also established that in the eleventh- and twelfth-century classical revival, ten Roman pagan authors were shortlisted as auctores maiores: eight poets plus Cicero and Sallust. This very special status is corroborated by paratexts such as short introductions (accessus), commentaries, glosses, etc. In this way the two works of Sallust seeped into the consciousness of a wide range of high medieval prose writers in France and the Empire (Germany as well as Italy).11 Sallustian phrases and
9
On the use of Suetonius, see Morse () and Haahr (). Biglieri (). I am grateful to Irene Salvo Garcia for discussing this point with me. 11 Going by the locations of copies assigned by Munk Olsen ( ), the copies of Sallust were overwhelmingly produced in the empire (Germany, Italy) and to a lesser extent in France. Very few copies are attested from England, Iberia, and Flanders. 10
adages keep showing up, and some authors even kept him constantly alongside as a Leitautor for their own text.12 Although Sallust’s two works are not biographies in any strict sense, their art of portraiture is most relevant for the questions being asked here. This is due to the character of the narrative. It is my assumption that his popularity with medieval readers can be accounted for by many of the immediate responses a modern reader would give when exposed to the skilfully composed narratives.13 First of all, the main characters are described at the outset in a way that immediately catches the imagination, even for the uninitiated. Catiline (Chapter ) is a reckless figure, but with fascinating corporal, mental, and social resources; Jugurtha—the bastard royal son competing with his legitimate brothers—makes a Hollywood entrance (Chapter ): When Jugurtha first reached manhood, he was strong in body, handsome to look at but above all powerful in his intellectual talents. He did not allow himself to be corrupted by extrava gance or idleness. Rather . . . , he rode horses, threw javelin, competed with his peers in races and, though he surpassed all in glory, he was still loved by all . . . He accomplished the greatest things, but spoke least about himself. (trans. Batstone : )
Throughout both stories Sallust keeps these strong initial images of the protagonists in the mind’s eye of the reader. He links the actions as they unfold with the character description, and through shifting focalization he lets the readers follow the downward path even with some sympathy. As things begin to go awry for Jugurtha, we enter his mind again (Chapter ): At the same time Jugurtha lost his friends: he had killed most of them, the rest fled in fear . . . Since he was unable to wage war without assistants and considered it dangerous to try the trust of new friends after such treachery from old ones, he became inconsistent and confused. No action or plan or any human being was wholly satisfactory . . . (ibid.: )
Both Catiline and Jugurtha are a threat to the Roman order, one from the inside, the other from the outside, as the twelfth-century Dialogue on the Authors by Conrad of Hirsau has it (Accessus ad auctores, Huygens ), but as the main Roman players in these dramas are also treated with ambiguity, if not outright criticism, the tension of viewpoints and a distinctive polyphony keeps up both the suspense and the human interest. The portraits of a series of Roman antagonists/protagonists were another main attraction, for medieval and modern readers alike: not only do we see the iconic figures of the pre-imperial Rome in action—icons very well known by medieval readers from other texts: Marius, Sulla, Caesar, Cicero, and Cato14—each is also dramatically introduced and characterized by Sallust. We get to learn all of their burning lusts for power in different disguises, introduced variously through the narrator’s description, characterization by others, and through their own words. Even Marius, who probably comes across as the most talented and heroic on the 12
For Sallust in the Middle Ages, see Osmond and Ulery () and Schneider (). Cf. the perceptive remarks by Schneider (: ). 14 Lucan’s Pharsalia saw the same sharp rise in interest as Sallust during the twelfth century (no less than extant copies from the twelfth century, Munk Olsen : ) testifying to the fascination of the figures of Caesar, Cato, and Pompey. 13
side of the Roman order, is led to overstate his case of being a new man in a long speech which makes one wonder about this man’s ambition. As for the impact of the charismatic leader, medieval readers were no doubt more kindred in spirit to Sallust than modern historians: it made perfect sense to them that the Roman state survived immense external and internal crises due to the success of Marius and Sulla and the failure of Catiline. The biographical side of Sallust’s works must have been even more striking in the Middle Ages than today, when their focus on a few personalities is a source of irritation. But it was lifewriting of a sort that, for complex reasons, went beyond the medieval standard of praise: the villains were great men (and Jugurtha even begins as a hero), and the heroes of the Roman order are all portrayed with critical distance.
W A P F A M?
.................................................................................................................................. Two brilliant Imperial authors from the second half of the eleventh century can serve here as a brief illustration of how much Sallust began to run in the veins of intellectuals in precisely that period. Lampert of Hersfeld is best known for his very critical portrait of the controversial emperor Henry IV (–) in his famous classicizing Annales (written c./), but he also composed a new celebratory Life of the distant founder of his monastery in Hersfeld, the missionary Lull (d. ). Here he takes up the Sallustian theme of the connection between the style of the historian and the fame of historical figures:15 ‘In fact, if only he [Charlemagne] had acquired Livy or Sallust as his historian, I honestly think that he would equal the glory of Caesar or Augustus or any other prominent Roman emperor both in the arts of war and peace.’16 Lampert’s contemporary Adam of Bremen was the first to exploit fully Sallust’s art of representing charismatic figures with a dubious legacy. His protagonist was the flamboyant archbishop, nobleman, and statesman Adalbert, in charge of the see of Hamburg-Bremen from to , and a dominating voice of government during the last years of Emperor Henry III (d. ) and the minority of Henry IV. During his long rule of the see, Adalbert had at times proven an immense resource for his church (as he was also at the centre of imperial power), and at other times both negligent, madly ambitious, and a disastrous spendthrift. The resulting legacy at the accession of the new archbishop, Liemar, the dedicatee of Adam’s episcopal chronicle, was a crisis in the internal order and resources and the external status of the Hamburg-Bremen see. The entire work can be read as an answer to this crisis, establishing the credentials of the see, its rights and role as missionary to the North (Book ), and facing head-on the troubled cultural memory of Adalbert (Book ). Adam’s striking portrait of Adalbert and its debts to Sallust have long been celebrated (at least in German scholarship) and well analysed.17 Even before the grand entrance of I am following the reading of Berschin (: ). Vita Lulli (ed. Holder Egger : ). 17 See Schmeidler () and Brugnoli (). For historical and literary discussion of the portrait, I refer to Bagge () and Berschin (: ). 15 16
Adalbert, we are warned by Adam that he is facing an impossible task: ‘Although it is difficult to write worthily of this man’s deeds and character, necessity compels us to record them, because we promised to extend the content of this book, O venerable Liemar, up to the day of your pontificate’ (III., trans. Tschan : ); and here is the initial characterization: This remarkable man may for all that be extolled with the praise of every kind in that he was noble, handsome, wise, eloquent, chaste, temperate. All these qualities he comprised in himself and others besides, such as one is wont to attach to the outer man: that he was rich, that he was successful, that he was glorious, that he was influential. All these things were his in abundance. (ibid.: )
The image of such an ideal charismatic figure—beautiful, civilized, powerful, restrained— unfolds further:18 He truly was a man of the noblest stock . . . Keen and well trained of mind, he was skilful in many arts. In things divine and human he was possessed of great prudence and was well known for retaining in memory and setting forth with matchless eloquence what he had acquired by hearing or by study. Then, besides, although handsome of physical form, he was a lover of chastity. His generosity . . .
In this initial portrait we have already been warned that Adalbert had one serious vice, namely, vainglory (. cenodoxia), and in the middle of Book as his character starts to deteriorate, this is fleshed out in a further description (., ibid.: ): ‘Certainly, he was so much given to pomp that he would no longer conduct the ecclesiastical mysteries in accordance with the Latin rite but, warranted by what usage of the Romans or of the Greeks I do not know, he ordained twelve offices to be sung during the three masses at which he assisted.’ A completely degraded Adalbert, in power, wealth, moral and physical state, is finally evoked by Adam at the end of the book (.–), as the archbishop faces his final hour: ‘Toward the end he was so entirely changed from his own self and so impaired of his former virtue that none of his associates, nor he himself, could fully make out what he wished or did not wish’ (., ibid.: ). No single factor can ‘explain’ this thorough, complex, and well-composed biography. Countless communities, secular and ecclesiastical, had had very difficult legacies from problematic leaders to struggle with—but this had not previously led to such ambiguous representation. Lying, pretending, and forgetting were time-honoured practices, and when dealt with, such conflicts were only talked about and not accounted for in writing. It is the careful writing that makes the difference in this case, and Adam was well aware that he was experimenting: ‘And so I beg you, reader, to forgive me if, in putting together under various topics the complex story of so many-sided a man . . . ’ (., ibid.: ). The Latin plays on diversus: ‘ . . . si tam diversi hominis diversam hystoriam diverso themate compaginans . . . ’.
18 The set of civilized ideals developed in German bishoprics in the eleventh century a courtliness before the better known lay French ideals of the next century is brilliantly analysed by S.C. Jaeger (; ).
Not only did Adam apparently share a strong institutional demand to account for Adalbert’s role—in writing—he also chose an implied audience and a narrative technique to do so. Both have had a tendency to be taken for granted and forgotten by the two dominant approaches to this text, on the one hand, a philological scrutiny of phrases and quotations from the classics (especially Sallust), and, on the other, attempts to explain Adam’s attitudes in terms of clerical writing and, obviously, of placing him in the minefield of contemporary ecclesiastical politics. The two factors of implied audience and narrative technique can also be formulated more broadly as two frameworks, or two necessary conditions, for explaining his writing (in addition to the ecclesiastical/political framework): () the widening horizon of writing in the eleventh century; and () Sallust, Latin, and the empire.
The Widening Horizon of Writing in the Eleventh Century The new reception of the classics was not just a fashion added on to an otherwise static system of learning, but took place in an environment where both the output and diversity of writing proliferated in many new ways. Increasing professionalization (including the group of non-noble ‘ministeriales’ in the imperial context), the new importance of legal studies during the Investiture Contest, urbanization, and cathedral schools are some of the headlines. Whether or not we should go so far as to talk of an emerging public sphere (Melve ), it is certain that Adam’s writing coincided with the creation of a new field of argumentative writing exchanged between the empire and the papacy. The implied audience for his—to some degrees argumentatively balanced—account was thus a larger sphere of intellectuals than was usual in the ninth and tenth centuries where the imagined horizon for local writing tended to remain very local.19 Adam played on the writing stage, and his experiment must be seen in the context of other innovations in eleventh-century literature and learning (including fiction, irony, and literary masks).20
Sallust, Latin, and the Empire Adam had many other models and materials to work from, but Sallust provided him with two things—apart from phraseology, proverbs and literary motifs: . A dramatic and varied narrative technique. Adam makes great reading for many of the same reasons that Sallust does. Some of the variation and modulation of narrative elements had medieval and biblical inspiration, but given the fact that Adam quotes Sallust at key points and uses him throughout, it is very probable that he and other historians of the eleventh and twelfth centuries (and beyond) learned some narrative technique also from Sallust, such as a specific way of shifting between the big picture and 19
As far as we can judge from the transmission of Adam’s work, he was not very successful, but the distinction between implied and real audience is fundamental for understanding his text. 20 As evidenced by a new wave of Latin poetry (including the so called Loire poets), legal and rhetorical treatises, new experiments in historiography, see e.g. Green (), Tyler (), Witt (: Chapters and ), Kretschmer (), and Verbaal () for analysis and further references.
anecdotal episodes, between argumentative and narrative modes, between direct and indirect characterization, and between narrator’s comments and evaluations and protagonists’ perspectives—all presented in a compact and compelling style. In the present context, the effective staging of the main character just after authorial reflections is an obvious Sallustian ploy, as is the suspense created by an ambiguous character. . A loyal, but distanced imperial voice. Adam (and other imperial imitators of Sallust) may also have found strength in speaking from a position that had similarities to Sallust’s: an obvious admirer of the Roman Empire and the civilization it brought to others (to be likened to Hamburg-Bremen’ civilizational task of christianizing the North), but at the same time a critic of its present (or recent) leadership who expressed himself with pungent philosophical wisdom. This critical distance of a wise but loyal observer of empire no doubt touched a nerve with eleventh-century imperial intellectuals.21 On balance, I would claim that Sallust had a significant facilitating role in the mode, quality, and confidence of Adam’s (and others’) writing; Sallust informed the mindset in which the idea to treat Adalbert in this way did occur (remember that many other narrative options remained open); but the causa scribendi itself is of course a complex matter beyond the grasp of any scholarly theory. So while no ultimate explanation can be offered, at least narrative and stylistic choices stand in a dialectical relationship with attitudes and values, and on both sides of the equation Sallust exerted a strong pull on the imperial discourse of the period.22
D C I L C D C M?
.................................................................................................................................. The classicizing trend of the eleventh century expanded in both depth and breadth during the twelfth century—in many ways a golden age of medieval Latin historiography. A significant conceptual and ‘anthropological’, if not religious, continuity between preChristian Roman, Christian Roman, and medieval Latin usages makes it impossible to provide any simple answer to the question in this section.23 What can be illustrated here is simply the structuring effect of Latin of the highest twelfth-century register, which included a large imprint from classical authors like Sallust and Cicero, and contrast it to similar vernacular conceptualizations which did not. My textual sample comes from the voluminous Latin chronicle of William of Tyre, written in the Kingdom of Jerusalem between c. and , and the contrasted vernacular text (in French) is the anonymous translation/adaptation of William’s chronicle, the See n. for manuscript evidence of the mainly imperial interest in Sallust. It is probably no coincidence that the period’s greatest master of ambiguous portraits, Michael Psellus (on whom see Chapter in this volume) also developed such a voice with ancient inspiration. 23 A related strong continuity between the three periods (and their Latin usages) is found in the domain of virtue ethics (cf. Sønnesyn ). 21 22
Éracles from c. composed in France (Box .).24 William enjoyed the full education of the French and Italian schools in the mid-twelfth century, including arts (where the classics were studied), theology, and law. When he returned to the East around , he started to ascend the ladder of ecclesiastical office as well as the royal administration, and he became directly involved with King Amaury (–) and was a teacher of his unfortunate successor, the leper king, Baldwin IV (–). William is well aware that history is a dangerous subject, especially when you criticize kings. The prologue of the work is focused on these perils, and he prepares us for his way of describing rulers: ‘We have included in this study . . . many details about the characters, lives, and personal traits of kings, regardless of whether these facts were commendable or open to criticism.’ The ruler portraits by William are quite extraordinary in both detail and breadth, and of special importance are those of the three rulers he personally had known, Baldwin III (whom he at least had seen), his brother Amaury, and Baldwin IV who was still, though barely, alive when William wrote. They must have been quite a challenge for the translator. The beginning of the Baldwin III portrait will easily show that the French translator has abbreviated and simplified William’s original. (First I quote the modern English translation of the Latin, then follows a juxtaposition of the Latin and the Old French versions.) William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, trans. Babcock and Krey (: : –). Fulk, the third Latin king of Jerusalem, was succeeded by Baldwin III, his son by Queen Melisend. As has been mentioned, Baldwin had one brother named Amaury, a little boy seven years old. When Baldwin later died without children, this brother succeeded him in the kingdom, as will be related in the following chapters. Baldwin was years old when he came to the throne, and he reigned twenty years. He was a youth of excellent natural ability and even at that time gave plain evidence of that character which later he fully attained. On reaching manhood, he was easily pre eminent among all others by beauty of feature and form as well by his general bearing. In vivacity of mind and brilliancy of speech he was superior to all the nobles of the realm. He was taller than the average man, but his limbs were so well proportioned to his height that no feature seemed out of harmony with the whole. His features were comely and refined, his complexion florid, a proof of innate strength. In this respect he resembled his mother and was not inferior to his maternal grandfather. His eyes were of medium size, rather prominent and sparkling. He had straight yellowish hair and wore a rather full beard on cheeks and chin. He was of somewhat full habit, although he could not be called fleshy like his brother or spare like his mother. In short, it may be said that his whole appearance was so superior by reason of a certain remarkable dignity which shone forth from him that even strangers could not fail to recognize his innate kingly majesty.
24
There are now two admirable studies of the French text, Issa () and Handyside (), to which I refer for further details and characterization of the relationship between the two texts. My example here on the ‘anthropological’ vocabulary in the Latin original and the French adaptation is not discussed by either of them, but it conforms well to the main trends observed by them.
Box 39.1 Comparison of William of Tyre’s Latin original and the French version William of Tyre, Chronicon :
Éracles, book : (ed. Paris, vol. II: )
I. Defuncto Fulcone succedit filius eius Bal duinus tercius, et qualis corpore fuerit de scribitur.
I. De la maniere Baudoin.
Ne demora guères aprés la mort au roi Foucon, que li baron du roiaume firent cor Defuncto domino Fulcone Ierosolimorum oner leur seigneur son filz, le tierz Baudoin, ex Latinis rege tercio, successit ei dominus qu’il avoit eu de la roine Milessent: Balduinus tercius, ex domina Milissende enfés estoit de treize anz si com je vos dit, regina filius eius, fratrem habens unum quant il fuz coronez. puerulum Amalricum nomine, annorum Més de tel aage estoit il assez sages, aper septem, ut premisimus, qui postmodum cevanz et de bon afere; si que dés lors pot eidem sine liberis defuncto successit in l’en bien cognoistre qu’il seroit preudom et à regno, sicut in sequentibus aperietur. bien entendroit, quant il auroit aage d’ome. Tredecim annorum erat dominus Baldui Einsi avint il: car quant il fu parcreuz ausi nus cum regnare cepit, regnavit autem com li visages li chanja, lessa li cuers toutes annis viginti. Fuit autem adolescens op enfances. Il fu de mout grant biauté et de time indolis, id de se certis promittens in toutes bones cognoissances. Plus bel et diciis, quod postea in virilem evadens mieuz parloit que nus hom que l’en poïst etatem pleno rerum persolvit experimento. trover; Nam vir factus, sicut facie et tota coporis assez estoit granz de cors; bien forniz de habitudine pre ceteris differentius forme membres; legiers estoit, vistes et forz plus preminebat elegantia, ita et mentis vivaci que autres hom. tate et eloquentie flore omnes reliquos regni Au vis avoit couleur fresche et vermeille; principes facile anteibat. de ce ressembloit il sa mere: mès au pere Erat autem corpore procerus, mediocribus retraoit il des euz que il avoit un pou gros maior, ad corporis proceritatem mem sez: nequedent ne li mesavenoit mie. Che brorum habens consonam et quasi propor veus avoit sors, le visage avoit bien vestu de tionaliter respondentem universalem barbe qui estoit une grant avenance à ce dispositionem, ita ut nec in modico a ra tens. Sa mere fu megre et peres cras; cil tint tione totius in eo pars aliqua dissentiret. de l’un et de l’autre, si qu’il fu méiens, ne Fuit sane facie decorus elegantissima, col cras ne megres. ore vivido et innatum designante vigorem, a Regardéure avoit gentil et bele, si que il quibus plane in ea parte matrem referens et sembloit que se uns estranges hom venist, ab avo non degener materno; oculis medie qui onques mès ne l’eust veu, par regarder quantitatis, modice prominentibus, fulgoris son visage le deust il cognoistre à roi. temperati; capillo plano, non flavo penitus, barba mentum genasque grata quadam ple nitudine favorabiliter vestitus; carnositatis media quadam habitudine modificatus, ita ut nec fratris more pinguior nec matris ex emplo dici posset macilentus. Tanta autem, ut in summa dicatur, forme preibat eminentia ut ignaris etiam, eximia quadam in eo refulgente dignitate, certum in se de regia maiestate daret indicium.
The first thing to note in the French version is how verb-dominated it is: almost none of the abstract nouns so important in the Latin description of Baldwin’s character have been retained.25 In the Latin () the proportions of his body are praised as complying with a mathematical/philosophical principle, in the French this is just rendered as ‘with good limbs, light, swift and strong’. In – it is his dignitas that made people realize he was a king, but in the French it is his looks. His attitude towards the church in the Latin is described as reverentia towards institutiones ecclesiasticas, in the French this becomes the more concrete but vague ‘les choses d’eglise’, and the reverentia is turned into a verb-phrase saying that he attended the service every day with great devotion. Similarly his education and intellectual side (ingenii vivacitas) are rendered in verbal phrases: ‘he knew letters’ and ‘he surrounded himself with learned men’. In the portrait of Amaury at the beginning of Book we learn in the Latin that He was far better in counsel than in fluent or ornate speech (verborum affluentia vel ornatu). He was well skilled in the customary law by which the kingdom was governed in fact, he was second no one in this respect. In keenness of intellect and true discernment (mentis acumine et discretionis . . . sinceritate) he surpassed all the nobles of the realm.
In the adaptation this becomes: ‘Mieuz savoit doner un bon conseil qu’il ne contast une parole. Des costumes par que li roiaumes estoit governez savoit plus que nus des autres barons. Les plez qui venoient devant lui savoit si bien finer, par droit et par raison, que tuit s’en mervelloient.’ The abstract ranking of Amaury’s legal abilities in the Latin is turned into the very concrete scenario in the French of his quick handling of cases appearing before him which would impress those present. An even stronger instance of turning abstract characterizations into interpersonal action is the addition made in the subsequent paragraph: ‘He handled with strength and wisdom the frequent crises which arose during his vigorous and unceasing efforts to extend the limits of the kingdom and always maintained a fearless attitude combined with regal firmness (animum regia quadam constantia . . . inperterritum)’. The Éracles renders this: ‘Maintes foiz fu en granz besoinz et gran perilz de son cors, par les guerres qu’il maintenoit por acroistre le pooir de son roiaume sur les anemis Nostre Seigneur; mes touzjorz estoit sages et apensez sanz peor et sans effroi; si que il semonoit ses genz de bien faire par oevre et par parole.’ Apart from underlining the king’s physical danger the translator also gives up on the animus and instead adds a much more visual scene, namely, that his brave conduct spurred on his men by deed and word—something an aristocratic audience would find it easy to engage with. On the whole, the Latin projects a dualistic image of a man—there is the inner man and his mental abilities and dispositions which result in the actions and manners of the outer man—the observed appearance and behaviour (cf. Bagge ). In Latin there is talk of ingenium, habitus, vigor, memoria, affabilitas, reverentia, constantia, urbanitas—all abstract properties of the mind—animus, and mens. The French translation is considerably more one-dimensional. In the Baldwin portrait it starts out by declaring right away that the king was a ‘preudom’—a nobleman in all aspects, the key French predicate of a man of
25
Cf. Rouzies () on similar mechanisms in the French translation of Sallust’s Catiline made in Li Faits des Romains of .
honour, strength, and lineage.26 The closest we get to a dualism is perhaps the rendering of the linking passage in : like his body (cors), so his heart (cuers). But it does make a difference that the inside man is denoted by a body-part too. And it is important to note that neither William nor the translator brings the soul into the equation. They would no doubt agree that man possesses an eternal soul (anima, ame), but that dualism is of a different kind than the one between the mind and the body which is at stake here. So my observation would be that in the complex Latin text, drawing on the language and concepts of more than a thousand years of historical, philosophical, and theological writing, we are presented with a division between intentions (the inner man) and actions, whereas the French presents us almost only with the outer man, in Baldwin’s case a physically strong and beautiful preudom who also happens to do the right things. But how should we account for the gap between the two texts? A linguistically determinist explanation—according to which a specific language invariably brings with it a specific mindset—would both be wrong and not account for much. There are, for instance, twelfthcentury Latin texts which look like the French translation because they were dictated by unlearned authors at a time when Latin was the only way to take down a report in writing (Mortensen ). The whole rhetorical agenda of giving this kind of ‘thick description’ of a ruler comes from William’s strong authorial voice, from within a certain way of writing and thinking in Latin and from a desire to monumentalize the past in the highest register. The translator is trying to keep up as best as he can, but ultimately he adapts almost wholeheartedly to his non-Latinate audience. Had he insisted, he could probably have extended and invented more (this is what eventually happened for all semantic fields in the vernacular in the early modern period) but it seems to have been quite difficult at this still experimental stage of French prose, and obviously irrelevant for the non-Latinate audience who wanted to be entertained by hearing about people like themselves, expressed in the very language they themselves used about each other. The structuring and the ‘abstracting’ effect of Latin on the conceptualization of man are a question not only of language, but also of literary space, of canon, and of education. Sallust had begun both his booklets with reflections on the permanence of the animus and the virtus in contrast to the fickleness of fortune and the irrelevance of bodily pleasures. This insistence on virtue and the dichotomy between the inner and the outer man added strength to intellectual convictions of the historians of the high Middle Ages, and as long as they wrote in Latin, they enjoyed the full range of insights and expression stored in writings beginning in Republican Rome.
C
.................................................................................................................................. Conclusions from this brief chapter can be drawn on three levels of reception: () texts; () narrative elements; and () concepts—with decreasing certainty from () to () as the objects of study are increasingly difficult to circumscribe. Textual scholarship has clearly 26
For a comprehensive analysis of this concept, see Crouch (: Chapter ).
shown that Sallust remained the major non-Christian Roman influence on life-writing from the eleventh to the late fourteenth century (with Suetonius a distant runner-up). Moreover, the intense study of Sallust from the eleventh century on certainly left a strong mark on the art of portraiture in medieval historical writing, though the Sallustian ambiguous portrait and polyphonic technique seems mostly to have impacted on chronicles rather than on stand-alone biographies (where the causa scribendi invariably lay in praise). On the conceptual level, the classical heritage is very difficult to isolate as one factor, but the ‘anthropological’ vocabulary available in Latin in the High Middle Ages was by far the most sophisticated and extensive in the West. It was formed in classical Rome, enriched through Christian learning, philosophy, and literature, and was adjusted and strengthened through the revival of the classical literature beginning in the eleventh century.
F R Berschin () gives excellent coverage of Latin biography of the period in focus here from c. to ; his previous volumes likewise, beginning with Late Antiquity. Nothing similar exists for vernacular writing, divided as scholarship is between individual languages. For the dissemination of Roman texts in the Middle Ages, Munk Olsen’s catalogue ( ) is fundamental. Lampert of Hersfeld’s works were meticulously edited by Holder Egger (). His political views are analysed by Bagge (). There is now an English translation of his Annales by I.S. Robinson (). Adam of Bremen’s reading of Sallust is mapped in the standard edition by Schmeidler (). For modern interpretations of Adam’s work see H.W. Goetz () and Scior (). The historical and literary aspects of the portrait are well covered by Bagge () and Berschin (: ) where references to earlier German literature can be found. The English translation is by Tschan (). Edbury and Rowe () offer the authoritative introduction to William of Tyre, with emphasis on historical rather than literary aspects. The Chronicle received a superb edition by Huygens () improving considerably on the text which was the foundation of the only existing English translation by Babcock and Krey (). The French Éracles is in great need of a new edition, as shown by Handyside (). No modern translation exists.
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Old Models and New Developments ......................................................................................................................
H authors were highly self-conscious in their choice of models. One way to reveal some of the major trends and developments of ancient biography in the Renaissance is to examine the models chosen by Renaissance biographers, and how they alternately subverted and built on those models. This approach not only illuminates the legacy of ancient biography in the Renaissance, but also sheds some light on our own modern suppositions about ancient biography. Some of the models chosen will hardly be a surprise. Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars and the Augustan History provided a model for biography as a history of civic and military leaders. Jerome’s Illustrious Men remained the blueprint for biography as bibliography and as literary history. Yet humanists also found models in Cicero, Varro, and Pliny, all of whom are today rarely thought of as biographers. Moreover, Renaissance authors did not always take up what we might think of as their model’s characteristic features. Plutarch, for instance, was not just a model for comparative biographies, but commonly for individual biographies as well. Diogenes Laertius had at least as much influence on the Lives of artists as on those of philosophers. In this chapter, I will highlight how some of the major authors of Renaissance biography worked and reworked their models to suit new needs. Even in Antiquity, biography was no unitary phenomenon, so it should not surprise us that diverse biographical traditions flourished in the Renaissance as well. This chapter will focus on five sub-types of biography: () collective biographies of historical figures; () collective biographies of literary figures; () individual and comparative biographies; () collective biographies in dialogue form; and () collective biographies with portraits. Each section will begin with the ancient forerunners and the fortuna of their texts in the Renaissance. Each section then takes up the major Renaissance figures who followed those models and how they reworked them. A large volume of biographical writings survives from the Renaissance, so this treatment will
necessarily be selective. The works treated here are illustrative of some major trends and notable developments; they are not comprehensive, even of the sub-types of biography that existed in the Renaissance.
C B H F
.................................................................................................................................. Biography is a genre that, if anything, increased in popularity in the Middle Ages. For biography in the form of collected Lives of famous figures, the greatest influence was Suetonius, whose Lives of the Caesars was known to Isidore and to the Carolingian court.1 For the next few hundred years, the work enjoyed periods of prominence and suffered periods of obscurity. The text was a favourite of Petrarch, who owned three copies, and of Boccaccio, who excerpted the work. The text was immensely popular in the fifteenth century, and we know of copies owned by Coluccio Salutati, Poggio Bracciolini, Niccolò Niccoli, Giovanni Tortelli, and Giannozzo Manetti. Other biographical collections also survived Antiquity. An anonymous work entitled Illustrious Men (De viris illustribus) was popular throughout the Middle Ages; it provided short biographies of Roman political figures from Proca (the Alban king) and Romulus through the late Republic to Mark Antony and Cleopatra.2 One family of manuscripts attributed the work to Pliny (cf. Ep. ..), but the author was more likely a figure from the fourth century (Sage ). This Illustrious Men of Pliny, or pseudo-Pliny, was sometimes transmitted with Aurelius Victor’s biographical Book on the Caesars (Liber de caesaribus) and a short Origin of the Roman Nation (Origo gentis romanae); the three are referred to as the corpus tripartitum. In addition, the imperial biographies that travel under the name Augustan History (Historia Augusta) remained generally known in the Middle Ages.3 One extraordinary manuscript of the Augustan History from the ninth century (Vatican Pal. Lat. ) was later owned by Petrarch, Poggio Bracciolini, and Giannozzo Manetti. Cornelius Nepos was not much better known in the Middle Ages than he had been in Antiquity.4 In twelfth-century France, someone copied a manuscript including his On Foreign Generals, the Cato and Atticus from his On Latin Historians, and a few fragments from Cornelia’s letters. Ambrogio Traversari found that manuscript, which is now lost, and brought it to Italy in the early s.5 At that point copies of his work began to multiply,
L.D. Reynolds (: ) provides an overview of the manuscript tradition of Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and Kaster () provides further detail; on its influence, see Chapter in this volume. 2 L.D. Reynolds (: ) surveys the transmission history. 3 L.D. Reynolds (ibid.: ) surveys the transmission history. 4 L.D. Reynolds (ibid.: ) surveys the transmission history, more detail in Marshall (a; b). 5 The content of Nepos’s Illustrious Men is disputed. It comprised at least sixteen books, among them a book on foreign generals, one on Roman generals, one on Roman historians, one on Greek historians, and perhaps books on poets and kings (Stem : , esp. ). 1
although many editions attributed the On Foreign Generals book to an Aemilius Probus due to a poem by Probus, who had copied the archetype manuscript. Our survey will begin with Francesco Petrarch (–), who traditionally has been seen as the originator of humanism, although a more recent assessment puts him in humanism’s third generation (Witt ). Petrarch’s Illustrious Men (De viris illustribus) took different forms in the several versions that he made of it over his lifetime (Latin text, with Italian translation, is Ferrone, Malta, Namia, and de Capua –). We find two main versions in the manuscript tradition. One comprises twenty-two Lives of Roman republican heroes, and the occasional villain, from Romulus to Cato the Elder. A second version adds twelve biblical and mythological heroes at the beginning, as well as an extraordinarily long Life of Julius Caesar at the end. Various prefaces, sometimes circulating independently, give the impression of four versions, and occasional remarks in his letters suggest that there were other times when Petrarch considered expanding the scope of the project. The content and chronology of these versions are disputed, but the following is likely (Witt ). In –, Petrarch created the Roman Lives. Given that the Roman Lives are all from the period of the Republic, it is tempting to see these as a complement to Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, though at various points he evidently planned to continue the Lives up to Titus or Trajan. The biographies of Suetonius and the Augustan History had covered periods of time that were relatively recent for their authors. The focus on a time long past is a Petrarchan innovation, in keeping with his creation of a sense of an ancient greatness that had subsequently been lost. Ten years later, Petrarch expanded his work and included twelve Lives of biblical and mythological figures. In , Francesco da Carrara invited him to design a room for his palace at Padua with portraits of heroes, and Petrarch took the occasion for a modest revision of the literary work as well. Versions of the Life of Scipio (perhaps first composed in –) and Julius Caesar (early s) are far longer than the others and may have been composed independently. Petrarch also began work on a compendium of abbreviated Lives, which had to be finished by Lombardo della Seta, who had also added Lives to the edition. Petrarch’s Illustrious Men is important partly because it renewed the genre of the biographical collection of famous figures, apart from those who were purely literary. Two notable continuators, each very different from each other and indeed from Petrarch, are Boccaccio and Bartolomeo Platina. Giovanni Boccaccio (–) wrote his Famous Women (De mulieribus claris) largely in –, citing the example of Petrarch in his preface (Latin text, with English translation, is V. Brown ). The text contains Lives of famous women, mostly from classical Antiquity but including a few from more recent times, such as Johanna, Queen of Sicily, at whose court he completed the work. Among the ancient Lives, Boccaccio avoided those from the Hebrew and Christian traditions—apart from Eve, whose Life begins the collection. The ancient Lives blended together real women and mythological figures. One finds, for instance, Julia (daughter of Augustus), Cleopatra, Agrippina (the Elder and the Younger), and Poppaea Sabina, as well as Juno, Venus, Medea, and Medusa. The presence of mythological figures suggests inspiration from Petrarch’s expanded edition, as does the fact that Boccaccio began the work with Eve (Petrarch’s expanded edition began with Adam). In general, Boccaccio’s women are censured when they behave with what he considers to be female qualities, like Eve’s levitas feminea (‘feminine foolishness’)
that doomed all subsequent humans.6 Conversely, Boccaccio praises women who surpass, as he sees it, their womanly sex and achieve manly virtues. The logical end of such thinking becomes clear in the Life of the mythical Pope Joan. Joan was a woman of such extraordinary intelligence and character that she was believed to be a man, even to the point of being elected to succeed Peter. Bartolomeo Platina (–) almost certainly did not see himself as working in the tradition of Boccaccio, but rather in the tradition of Suetonius, the Augustan History, and Aurelius Victor. (Platina also shows the influence of Plutarch, in particular, in his tendency to use a Life as a history of the era.) Platina was a member of Pomponio Leto’s Roman Academy and made his living in the papal curia as a member of the College of Abbreviators for the humanist pope, Pius II (r. –).7 Platina found less favour with Pius’s successor, Paul II (r. –), who had him imprisoned and tortured. Platina wrote a laudatory Life of Pius II, and then later expanded the project to include Lives of all previous popes.8 He completed the work in and dedicated it to Sixtus IV (r. –), who rewarded him with the post of head of the Vatican Library. Platina’s Lives of the Popes was a fundamental historical and ideological monument for the Renaissance papacy, even though Platina was sometimes bitterly critical of individual popes (Latin text is Gaida – but see also Hendrickson et al. : xviii-xxi; first volume of a Latin text with English translation is D’Elia ). In this regard it is helpful to keep in mind that Suetonius was highly critical of some emperors, though he was hardly a critic of the principate as a system. Platina’s Lives of the Popes provided a parallel vision to Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars: an imperial succession of the rulers of the world. Where the focus of Petrarch and Boccaccio on Antiquity created a division between the past and the present, Platina created an unbroken chain linking the two. Petrine succession, for obvious reasons, was important to the papacy. Platina took the idea a step further, though, and began his biographies with Jesus, whom he calls a ‘pope’ (pontifex) and ‘emperor of the Christians’ (imperator Christianorum, Vita Christi ). The Lives of the Popes enjoyed widespread success, and Onofrio Panvinio updated and expanded the work in .
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.................................................................................................................................. Ancient biographical collections of literary figures were largely lost after the end of Antiquity. As noted above, Cornelius Nepos’s Illustrious Men certainly contained Lives of Greek and Roman historians, and perhaps Lives of poets. The Atticus and Cato the Elder, 6
Shemek () provides an overview of women in Boccaccio, and in particular in the Famous Women. 7 Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini) was a humanist, and he himself composed an Illustrious Men biographical collection of famous figures from his own era (text in Van Heck ). 8 Platina’s Life of Pius II was not the first Renaissance Life of a pope: Giannozzo Manetti had written a Life of Nicholas V in (Latin text with Italian translation is Modigliani ). Nor was Platina the only one to write a Life of Pius II Giovanni Antonio Campano did so as well (text in Zimolo ).
from his book on Roman historians, survived together with his book on generals to be rediscovered in the s by Ambrogio Traversari. Suetonius’s Illustrious Men focused entirely on literary figures, comprising Lives of poets, historians, orators, philosophers, and teachers of grammar and rhetoric. After Late Antiquity, the work was lost, apart from a section comprising the teachers of grammar and some teachers of rhetoric, which was copied in the ninth century and later seen by Poggio Bracciolini in . In , Enoch of Ascoli brought the manuscript to Rome, where it was copied several times before its editio princeps in .9 Suetonius’s Lives of Virgil, Horace, Terence, and Lucan probably form the core of the biographies transmitted independently with the authors’ works. Yet despite these paltry remains, the genre of collective biographies of literary figures survived and flourished through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, largely thanks to Jerome. Jerome’s Illustrious Men applied the Suetonian model of literary biography to Christian authors. The work features short biographies of writers, beginning with Simon Peter and ending with himself. These biblio-biographies, sometimes only one sentence long, do mention biographical information such as date, location, and involvement in controversies, but they mostly focus on listing the author’s works. The nature of Jerome’s Illustrious Men made it highly suitable for continuation, revision, and expansion. In the West, the tradition was carried on by Gennadius, Isidore, and then a handful of medieval authors.10 In the East, it was translated into Greek by Pseudo-Sophronius (a translation reintroduced to the West by Erasmus in ), where its influence can be seen in Photius’s Bibliotheca and the Suda. Around the same time that Petrarch was reviving the genre of Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, others were continuing the tradition of Suetonius’s more literary Illustrious Men (through the mediation of Jerome). Two particular examples are the Illustrious Men of Giovanni Colonna (–) and Guglielmo da Pastrengo (d. ).11 Both men, friends of Petrarch, expanded on the old tradition by reintroducing non-Christian writers, and both men innovated by arranging authors alphabetically rather than chronologically. On these matters Pastrengo, whose Illustrious Men dates from c., seems to have followed Colonna, whose Illustrious Men dates from c.–. The biblio-biographical tradition continued to develop, ultimately leading to the vast bibliographical works of Johannes Trithemius and Konrad Gesner.12 Sicco Polenton (/–) wrote a Lives of Illustrious Writers of the Latin Language (Vitae scriptorum illustrium latinae linguae) that took the tradition in an entirely new direction. Polenton made a first edition around , followed by a much-expanded version completed around (Latin text is Ullman , which is the editio princeps). Polenton, who served as chancellor of Padua, had a varied literary output, which included an early 9 Kaster (: xlviii lviii) and L.D. Reynolds (: , ) survey the textual transmis sion of Suetonius’s Illustrious Men. 10 For an overview of the influence of Jerome’s Illustrious Men in the medieval, Byzantine, and Renaissance worlds, see Blum () and Barthold (: ). 11 Colonna’s Illustrious Men exists only as a manuscript in the Vatican (Barb. lat. ). The manuscript has not been digitized, so I must rely on secondary reports as to its structure and contents. For Pastrengo, there is the edition of Bottari (), which also includes his On Origins (De originibus), a biographical dictionary in the style of his Illustrious Men, but featuring first inventors, founders of cities and institutions, the original names for various things and places, and various famous cultural figures. 12 On the development from biography to bibliography, see Blum () and Arnold (); on Trithemius in particular, see Barthold (: ).
Renaissance comedy (Catinia) and a work summarizing Cicero’s orations (Argumenta). The Illustrious Men works of Colonna and Pastrengo had been essentially bibliographies of writers of all times, alphabetized with entries no longer than a sentence or two. Polenton, however, wrote an expansive eighteen-book opus dedicated almost entirely to Antiquity, with six books for Cicero alone. After an alphabetical index of authors, the first book outlines the origins of the alphabet and various arts, Books – treat poets, – historians, – eloquence (Cato, Varro, and Cicero), Seneca, and various minor writers. Polenton gave detailed treatments of his subjects’ biographies, long descriptions of the contents of their works, analyses of their literary merit, and a historical sense of their place in the literary tradition. Polenton made use of a vast array of ancient sources for his biographies, and he was the first Renaissance biographer to show a direct knowledge of Cornelius Nepos. A manuscript subscription (to a codex of Suetonius) relates a claim that Polenton discovered the parts of Suetonius’s Illustrious Men dealing with orators and poets, plagiarized it, and then burned the original.13 Such a tradition gives a sense of the impact among his contemporaries from the scale and quality of Polenton’s vast knowledge of ancient history and literature.
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.................................................................................................................................. Individual Lives of historical figures and philosophers did exist in Antiquity, though they rarely survived into the Renaissance. The chief impetus to stand-alone biographies came rather from Suetonius and Plutarch, whose collective Lives were individually long enough to circulate as single volumes. As we saw above, Petrarch’s Scipio Africanus and Julius Caesar were far longer than his others; they seem to have circulated independently as well as with the collected Lives. Plutarch’s work had survived in the Greek East (and some places in the West), and made a triumphant return when Manuel Chrysoloras brought it to Florence in . Chrysoloras used Plutarch as a teaching text, along with the Panegyric of Athens of Aelius Aristides, and in doing so influenced an entire generation of Florentine humanists. Jacopo Angeli da Scarpeia made the first translation of Plutarch in / (the Lives of Brutus and Cicero). Then Leonardo Bruni translated seven Lives in the period from –, and Guarino Guarini translated thirteen others in –.14 Diogenes Laertius had a minor presence in the Middle Ages—one twelfth-century manuscript was copied in Greek-speaking southern Italy or Sicily; also in the twelfth century there was a partial translation into Latin attributed to Henricus Aristippus.15 The history of Diogenes Laertius in the Italian Renaissance, however, begins with the Latin translation made by Ambrogio Traversari during the years – (editio princeps of that translation is Rome, ; editio princeps of the Greek is much later in Basel, ). The text of the subscription can be found at Reifferscheid (: ). The manuscript (Leiden Periz. Q. ) was the work of Giovanni Pontano. 14 Plutarch was wildly popular in Renaissance Italy. Pade () provides a detailed examination of the reception of Plutarch in fifteenth century Italy. 15 Dorandi (: ) gives the textual history. 13
Leonardo Bruni (–) was the protagonist in the development of the individual and comparative biography. Although Petrarch had influentially attempted the goal of recovering the studia humanitatis from Antiquity, most humanists saw Bruni as the first to actually restore Latin eloquence. Bruni studied under Coluccio Salutati and Manuel Chrysoloras, worked in the papal curia, and ultimately served as chancellor of Florence. Bruni was among the premier historians of the Renaissance, and he wrote a monumental history of the city of Florence in the style of Livy. Aside from his work translating Plutarch, Bruni made three major contributions to biography, a Vita Ciceronis in (Latin text with Italian translation is Viti : –), a Vita Aristotelis in (ibid.: –), and a set of parallel Lives in the vernacular, his Vite di Dante e del Petrarca of (ibid.: –). Bruni’s Cicero began as a revision of the Latin translation done a decade earlier by Jacopo Angeli. Yet Bruni soon found himself revising not just the translation of Angeli, but the very text of Plutarch, through the recourse he had to other sources like Sallust’s Catiline and Cicero’s own works. Bruni’s revision was more favourable to Cicero and more focused on politics than morals (Ianziti : –). Bruni’s Cicero achieved massive popularity, and the editio princeps of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives in Latin in printed Bruni’s Cicero rather than Plutarch’s (ibid.: ). Bruni wrote his Aristotle, as Ianziti has recently argued (ibid.: –), with a view to protecting Aristotle’s reputation. Ambrogio Traversari was in the process of producing a translation of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers, which included embarrassing traditions about Aristotle. Bruni, who promoted a new view of Aristotle as a guide for life and ethics, meant to pre-empt Traversari. Bruni’s Lives of Dante and Petrarch, complete with preface and final comparatio, is more Plutarchan than either of his earlier biographies, though notably innovative in that they compare literary rather than political or military figures. Giannozzo Manetti (–) was another major author of both individual and comparative Lives. Manetti was a Florentine, but he spent time in the papal curia under popes Nicholas V and Pius II, punctuated by time in Naples at the court of Alfonso of Aragon. Manetti wrote two works that included some collective Lives of historical and literary figures, the Illustrious Men of Great Age (De illustribus longaevis, ) and Against the Jews and Gentiles (Contra Iudaeos et Gentes, –).16 Manetti wrote two individual biographies for two of his patrons, Nicholas V in (Latin text with Italian translation is Modigliani ) and Alfonso of Aragon (now lost, unless it happens to be Baldassarri and Maxson ). Individual biographies of patrons, both for popes and for secular figures, continued to be popular throughout the Renaissance. The Nicolaus V, in three books, is a history not just of the man, but also of his era, much like Tacitus’s Agricola and many Plutarchan Lives. Other individual biographies of popes of princes followed the same pattern. Manetti’s Lives of Three Illustrious Florentine Poets (Trium illustrium poetarum florentinorum vita, ) built on the tradition of Bruni’s comparative Lives of Dante and Petrarch (Latin text with English translation is Baldassarri and Bagemihl ). Manetti differed from Bruni by the addition of Boccaccio and by the fact that his composition was in Latin rather than the vernacular. The former point is a notable innovation, since the Plutarchan Lives were always pairs; the latter point is also not unimportant. These biographies in part
16
Neither work has received a full publication, but excerpts of both can be found in Baldassarri and Bagemihl ().
aimed to justify a central place for the three Florentines in the emerging historiography of humanism, despite the fact that their virtuosity was in the vernacular (Baker : –). Manetti also wrote comparative Lives of Seneca and Socrates (), in which he followed Plutarch in comparing Roman and Greek figures but innovated in that the compared figures were philosophers (Latin text and English translation in Baldassarri and Bagemihl ). These Lives circulated with his Lives of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio as a group of five. The collection bears some resemblance to the work of Sicco Polenton, of which Manetti was aware. The collection also has a kind of unity in that all the Lives, literary and philosophical alike, focus to some degree on the proper engagement with public life.
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.................................................................................................................................. Jerome cited Satyrus among his antecedents as a biographer (Illustrious Men, Praef. ).17 It was a surprise for the scholarly world when it was discovered in that Satyrus had structured his biography of Euripides as a dialogue.18 It is less remarked on, though no less surprising, that Jerome also cited Cicero’s Brutus as a spur to emulation (Illustrious Men, Praef. ). The Brutus rarely comes under the view of scholarship on ancient biography, but the ever-increasing fragments of Hellenistic biography raise the possibility that Cicero and his contemporaries would have seen it as a biographical work.19 The Renaissance world, on this point, seems to have been more in tune with the ancient one. A small fragment of a manuscript of the Brutus survives from the ninth century, but the work was not generally available until Gerardo Landriani discovered it in the Cathedral at Lodi in .20 The Lodi manuscript was lost before , but by that point it had been copied by Niccolò Niccoli and (at least in part) by Flavio Biondo. Several humanists took the rediscovered Brutus as a model for their biographies, in particular, Paolo Cortesi, Marcantonio Sabellico, and Paolo Giovio. None of these works reached the fame of works like Bruni’s Cicero or Platina’s Lives of the Popes, nor were they even among their authors’ best-known works. Yet they are remarkable innovations on the biographical genre and are beginning to receive greater attention. Paolo Cortesi (–) was a curial humanist and a student of Bartolomeo Platina and Pomponio Leto. He is most famous now for his role in the Ciceronian controversy, in which he clashed with Poliziano and advocated the strict use of Cicero as a model. While 17
It is generally believed that Jerome copied this list of antecedents from Suetonius’s Illustrious Men, on the grounds that Jerome was unlikely to have had access to figures like Hermippus (fragments at FGrHist ), Satyrus (fragments in Schorn ), Antigonus Carystius (fragments in Dorandi a), and Aristoxenus (fragments in Wehrli ). 18 The discovery came from a papyrus fragment, POxy. (see Chapter in this volume). For the (now numerous) fragments of Satyrus, see Schorn (). 19 It is notable here that Aristotle’s De poetis (fragments in Janko ) and the De poetis of Praxiphanes (e.g. fragment in Martano, Matelli, and Mirhady ) were also structured as dialogues. 20 On the rediscovery of the Brutus, see L.D. Reynolds (: , esp. ).
Pastrengo and Colonna had treated writers of all times, and Polenton had focused almost exclusively on Antiquity, Cortesi’s Learned Men (De hominibus doctis, –) explored the rebirth of eloquence through a biographical treatment of recent figures, principally from Bruni to Platina; it is, essentially, a history of humanism.21 The speakers in the dialogue are Cortesi himself, Alessandro Farnese (the future Pope Paul III), and a ‘certain Antonio’, who is the primary speaker. Cortesi’s dialogue portrays the humanist movement as the rediscovery of the ars of Latin, in which the imitation of the ancients, and especially Cicero, were key (Baker : –). Marcantonio Sabellico (–) made his reputation as a humanist in Venice, where he composed his most famous work, a history of the Venetian state ‘from the founding of the city’ (ab urbe condita). Sabellico’s The Restoration of the Latin Language (De latinae linguae reparatione, finished by ) was among his minor works (Latin text is Bottari ). Sabellico’s work was contemporaneous with Cortesi’s, but they appear to have been independent. Sabellico’s work is less Ciceronian, both in its form, which is a dialogue more complex in its narrative than the Brutus, and in its overall world-view, which is less concerned with oratory and Ciceronian Latin. As the title suggests, the work considers the ‘restoration’ of Latin after the Middle Ages, and it takes the form of a biographical survey of the humanists. The bulk of Sabellico’s text, set in Venice, is a dialogue within a dialogue.22 At the start, three speakers chat about the contribution of recent figures to the improvement of Latin. One of the speakers asks the opinion of Sabellico (himself an interlocutor); he demurs, but recounts a conversation on the matter between Benedetto Brugnoli and Battista Guarini. Each gives a single long answer, Benedetto covering humanism until the later fifteenth century and Battista covering contemporaries. In Sabellico’s history of humanism, the definitive moment (and the point of transition between the two speakers) is the creation of the printed philological commentary (Baker : –). Cortesi and Sabellico, to varying extents, imitated Cicero’s Brutus in composing biographies of literary figures as a dialogue. In the next generation, Paolo Giovio would stretch the paradigm further by including non-literary figures. Paolo Giovio (–) was one of the most famous biographers of the sixteenth century. Giovio was a curial humanist of the generation after Paolo Cortesi. He wrote biographies of several patrons, including one for Pope Leo X (r. –). Giovio also composed collected biographies with portraits, which will be treated below.23 He wrote his Notable Men and Women of Our Time (De viris et foeminis aetate nostra florentibus) in the wake of the sack of Rome in . The work did treat literary figures, as Sabellico and Cortesi had done, but it also treated noble women and military men. Giovio set the work at Ischia, where he stayed at the home of Vittoria Colonna after the sack, and he attributes the work to her encouragement. Giovio himself is one of the interlocutors, along with the general Alfonso d’Avalos and the jurist Giovanni Antonio Muscettola. The three have discussions on three separate days, each of which receives its own book. The first book treats military men, the second men of letters, and the third noble women. The overarching concern of the book is the evaluation of the status of Italy and how
21 22 23
M.T. Graziosi () and Ferrau () give Latin texts, the former with an Italian translation. On the structure of the work, see Baker (). For a list of Giovio’s works, see T.C.P. Zimmermann (: ).
it had failed to stay free of foreign domination. Giovio never had the work printed, and it did not receive its editio princeps until (Latin text with English translation is Gouwens ).
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.................................................................................................................................. One of the most creative appropriations of ancient biography in the Renaissance is the tradition that sought to follow in the footsteps of Varro’s Portraits (Imagines). The Portraits did not survive, but Renaissance biographers recreated the genre. Varro’s Portraits, also called the Sevens (Hebdomades), comprised a collection of short biographies, each accompanied by a portrait and an epigram (Pliny, H.N. .). It is difficult to identify fragments with any certainty, but Salvadore () has gathered some possible fragments. Cicero’s friend Atticus wrote a similar, if less extensive work, which likewise did not survive. Atticus made portraits of famous Roman figures, accompanied by four or five verses extolling their achievements (Nep. Att. ). One can imagine the varying degrees of success with which scribes were able to reproduce these images, or whether they would have been drawn in by separate craftsmen, or perhaps left out altogether. In any case, the advent of the printing press and woodcuts made it possible to reproduce illustrations, and biographers took full advantage of the possibilities. Biography is a genre particularly suited to visual complement. Apart from Varro and Atticus, we can see this in the physical descriptions that close Suetonius’s biographies of the Caesars. Francesco da Carrara, inspired by Petrarch’s Illustrious Men, invited him to design a gallery of illustrious men (sala virorum illustrium) in Padua in —and such galleries became popular in Renaissance palazzi. Manuscripts too had sometimes carried portrait series, and a few early print editions added portraits to biographical works (Rave : –). At the same time, the interest in (and creation of) classical Antiquity fuelled and was fuelled by discoveries of ancient portraits in marble and on coins. Thus it became possible to rediscover some of the faces that had been lost to time. In , a book entitled Portraits of the Illustrious (Illustrium imagines) took up Varro’s mantle (reprinted edition is Besterman ). It is a collection of famous figures, in roughly chronological order, all but one of whom have a medallion portrait set above an ornate architectural frame that contains a short text. The figures are mostly Roman emperors, but they include some republican figures (Pompey and Cato), some women (Fulvia and Cleopatra), and a few Holy Roman Emperors (ending with Henry III and Conrad II in the eleventh century). Andrea Fulvio, a teacher and antiquarian who also published on Roman topography and antiquities, appears to have been primarily responsible for the content, and it was printed by Jacopo Mazzocchi. Mazzocchi styled himself as ‘the bookseller of the Roman Academy’, and in his preface he stakes his claim to follow the examples of Varro and Atticus. The texts appended to the portraits were short and somewhat moralizing; the portraits themselves generally had coins as their sources, though many were purely invented (Cunnally : –). Fulvio and Mazzocchi’s Portraits of the Illustrious was the first of many works that would use the new advances in printing and scholarship to explore the possibilities of biography for numismatics, physiognomy, and epigraphy.
Paolo Giovio published two major biographical works in the style of the Portraits: a Inscriptions Appended to True Portraits of Famous Men (Elogia veris clarorum virorum imaginibus apposita) and a Inscriptions of Men Famous for Martial Valour (Elogia virorum bellica a virtute illustrium) (Latin texts in Meregazzi ). The former featured literary figures, mostly from the Renaissance, in a single book. The latter was seven books of military figures from Romulus to Giovio’s own day. Giovio had been collecting portraits of famous historical figures since the s, and he put them on display, each with a tag of parchment giving biographical details, in the villa he built on Lake Como in –. As Giovio represented it, the biographies in his books were taken from the notices in his Museum, as he called his villa. The biographies were also accompanied by short poems— generally written by others but sometimes by Giovio himself. Neither of the works actually included portraits of the subjects, although Giovio seems to have hoped that they would. Fulvio Orsini (–) took the genre another leap forward with his Portraits and Inscriptions of Illustrious and Learned Men (Imagines et elogia virorum illustrium et eruditorum). Orsini was a scholar who oversaw the library and the antiquities collection of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (grandson of the Alessandro Farnese from Cortesi’s dialogue, and collector of the famous Farnese Marbles, now in Naples). Orsini included images of herms, coins, statues, and inscriptions, together with short biographical texts and occasionally a few verses. The difference between Orsini and the Portraits of the Illustrious shows how much progress had been made in printing, in archaeology, and in epigraphy over not much more than a generation. The images in Fulvio and Mazzocchi’s Portraits were imaginative composites: the frames resembled ancient altars surrounded by Renaissance decoration and topped with medallions loosely modelled on coins. All figures were known from literature, and faces were invented for them if nothing was known. The epigrams were short and superficial. Orsini’s book was not so much a gallery of famous people as a scholarly work on the remains of Antiquity. He found it important to represent the artefacts themselves, so he includes numerous herms that were headless. Moreover, he represents figures apart from those that were famous from surviving histories. He included numerous slaves and freedmen, for instance, who were known only from inscriptions. When the figures were those known from history, he provided thorough information, including citations to classical authors.
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.................................................................................................................................. I conclude with a quick look at the work of Giorgio Vasari (–), which remains a high point in the world of biography and the Italian Renaissance. It would be teleological to present his work as the culmination of the trends in Renaissance biography, but it is certainly the case that he took his models to a new level with his work, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori). The title points to Cornelius Nepos. The structure took much from the tradition of Jerome’s Illustrious Men in providing an extensive listing of the known works of each figure, and also took much from the innovations of Sicco Polenton, who expanded the bare bibliographical entries of his predecessors into long discussions of how those
works fit into the subjects’ lives. In the organization of Lives according to ‘schools’, and in the emphasis on succession and influence, Vasari is most like Diogenes Laertius. Although he did not pair his biographies, the Plutarchan method of comparison through biography is also evident. Vasari himself declared his most important debt to be owed to Paolo Giovio, whose two books of Inscriptions (Elogia) had just been published and who provided both inspiration and encouragement. Like Giovio, Vasari did not include portraits in his first edition, but he added woodcut portraits in the expanded edition of . Vasari’s Lives is also an index of how much biography had changed since the early Renaissance. Vasari was able to draw extensively on the new developments on the old models. The comparison is most pronounced when one looks back at Petrarch and Bruni. Petrarch was barely a break with the past, especially in comparison to the writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, whose radical experiments in biography were fuelled by the reintroduction to the West of Plutarch (the s), Cicero’s Brutus (the s), Suetonius’s Grammarians and Rhetoricians (the s), Diogenes Laertius (the s), and Cornelius Nepos (the s). Bruni’s biographies sought to recover the lives of a philosopher and a statesman from Antiquity as a guide for the present. Given that he began his Cicero as an improvement on an existing translation, the Latin style of the work seems to have been nearly as important as its substance. As for Vasari, although he clearly saw Antiquity as important, his focus was squarely on the Renaissance. His subjects were not philosophers or statesmen, nor even popes or literary figures, but artists. Latin style was not a central concern, and the work itself was in the vernacular.
F R Cochrane (: ) provides the most comprehensive overview of biography in the Italian Renaissance, though many will disagree with some of his classifications and characterizations. The burgeoning field of Renaissance Latin has seen many editions of biographical texts newly edited since Cochrane, some of which are appearing in print for the first time. I have cited these editions throughout, and their introductions often provide the best background for their authors and sub genres. Apart from editions, a few particular works give a broader perspective on ancient biography and the Renaissance. Ianziti () highlights the critical contribution of Bruni’s biographies to the development of humanist historiography. Barthold (: ) and Arnold () survey the tradition of Jerome’s Illustrious Men into the Renaissance world. Baker (), who examines humanist biographical collections as self reflective evaluations of humanism, furnishes analysis of comparative and dialogic biographies, including those of Manetti, Cortesi, and Sabellico. Baker () provides a selection of collective biographies with introductory essays. Rave () traces the development biographies with portraits. T.C.P. Zimmermann’s () monograph on Paolo Giovio is a crucial resource, though he does not focus on biography in particular.
A I would like to thank Patrick Baker for many helpful comments and suggestions.
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T popularity of biography in seventeenth-century Europe was mainly due to the numerous translations of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. Amyot’s French version () was immensely successful: it was re-edited in , , and , and translated from Amyot’s French version into English by Thomas North (). In , Dryden directed a new translation, closer to the original text, while in Spain, after a partial translation by Francisco de Enzinas (–), the Parallel Lives were edited by Antonio Ranz Romanillos (–). Plutarch’s Lives greatly influenced modern historians, for example, Ménestrier (), but also philosophers, such as Vico, and writers such as Shakespeare and Defoe in England, and Madame de Lafayette and Rousseau in France (see several contributions in M. Beck : –). Conversely, Suetonius, whose Lives of the Caesars (as we have seen in Chapter in this volume) were extremely influential in the early modern period, was less read in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians at the time, such as Pierre Bayle, criticized his taste for doubtful anecdotes and the lack of morality of his biographies (Bayle : –). Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers contributed to the rise of literary and philosophical biography, such as History of Philosophy by Thomas Stanley (–) and Brief Lives by John Aubrey (–). Vasari’s Vite (), whose influence was great in the Italian Renaissance (as Chapter discusses), gave rise to an abundant production of artists’ Lives, such as Karel van Mander’s Schilder-boek, published in in the Low Countries, or Joachim von Sandrart’s Teutsche Academie (–). More generally, by the end of the seventeenth century a biography of the author regularly introduced his or her published works. The financial and social autonomy acquired by the authors in that century partially explains the emergence of biography as an editorial practice. The hagiographical tradition invited important biographies and autobiographies, mainly inspired by Augustine’s Confessions. Teresa de Avila’s Libro de la vida (), Ribadeneira’s Life of Loyola (), as well as Philip Jacob Sperner’s Pia Desideria () set the model of
exemplary biography mainly used within a religious and apologetic scope. The word ‘biography’ (and ‘biographie’ in French) appeared in seventeenth-century England (Dryden : xi, in his Life of Plutarch) and later in France ()1 and thus attests to the importance of the genre in modern Europe. The increasing interest in particular details and private events contributed to the success of fictional biography and autobiography. However, the more life-writing is considered a literary practice, the less its historical reliability is valued. If in the seventeenth century Lives were generally regarded as a historical genre, eighteenth-century philosophers criticized the historical interest of biography, at a time in which history began to be studied as a science more than as a pedagogical device.
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.................................................................................................................................. In the seventeenth century, Lives were considered as a historical genre. In De argumentis scientiarum (), Francis Bacon stated ‘history is of three kinds, with regard to the three objects it designs to represent; which are either a portion of time, a memorable person, or an illustrious action. The first kind we call writing annals or chronicles, the second lives, and the third, narratives or relations’ (Clifford : ). Lives were then a historical genre, devoted to the depiction of memorable people. Ménestrier too distinguished between particular history, dealing with ‘particular people’, and universal history (Ménestrier : –). Mably asserted that the historian may write about ‘general history’ or trace the ‘portraits of illustrious men’ (Negroni : ). Although Plutarch had stated in his Life of Alexander (trans. Dryden : ) that biography does not constitute a historical genre, in the seventeenth century his work was considered a form of ‘particular history’. In his translation, Dacier claimed that Plutarch is ‘the most useful of all historians’ (Dacier : preface) and Lenglet du Fresnoy praised the interest and the diversity of his writing (Lenglet du Fresnoy : .). If Lives were considered a historical genre, it was because historiography was not yet regarded as a social science, devoted to the meticulous understanding of the past, but rather as an ars, whose aim was the moral and political instruction of the reader (Guion : –). That is why Le Moyne argued that the task of the historian is to draw lessons from good and bad lives, and to consider the consequences of both (Ferreyrolles : ). In this context, life-writing is praised and encouraged. Dryden, in his Life of Plutarch (), asserted that, if biography is inferior in dignity to annals and history, ‘in pleasure and instruction it equals, or even excels, both of them’ (Clifford : ). This is because biography, relating the unique story of a single person, is easier to read, to remember, and to imitate. According to Lenglet du Fresnoy, Lives have a strong ethical relevance: instead of describing facts, they depict men, and thus offer portraits of virtue and concrete models of action (Lenglet du Fresnoy : .–). The use of conversation in aristocratic circles increased the popularity of biographies and portraits, seen as less erudite and more attractive than military memoirs (Anonymous : ).
1
See ‘Biographie’ in Ray ().
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.................................................................................................................................. Whereas life-writing was often praised for its pedagogical and ethical qualities, the historical relevance of biography was strongly criticized from the end of the seventeenth century onwards. Gilbert Burnett asserted in The Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale (), that biographies aim more at pleasing than at teaching the reader (Clifford : ). In an article published in , Joseph Addison inveighed against biographers, who, according to him, watch for the death of a great man, like so many undertakers, on purpose to make a penny of him. He is no sooner laid in his grave, but he falls into the hands of an historian; who, to swell a volume, ascribes to him works which he never wrote, and actions which he never performed; celebrates virtues which he was never famous for, and excuses faults which he was never guilty of. (ibid.: )
Addison criticized the lack of accuracy of modern biographers, who wish to interest the reader rather than to recount the historical truth. In France, many historians asserted that ancient Lives are not reliable since they tend to alter historical facts and to focus on private anecdotes only. Rapin, in his treatise of , claimed that biography only provides a degraded historical insight. According to him, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Nepos were mere compilers whose work was based on a rough and approximate understanding of their times (Ferreyrolles : ). Besides, many historians criticized Plutarch’s Lives and intended to correct his factual mistakes. Secousse, a member of the French Academy, published in an essay in which he pointed out the chronological errors, the factual contradictions and the narrative deformations of the Lives. According to him, if Plutarch was extremely keen on narrative strategies, he had no interest in historical truth (Secousse : –). In the same way, Voltaire criticized Plutarch’s inaccuracy (von Proschwitz : ) and decried the weak reliability of life-writing (S. Davies : –). Voltaire wished to restore the ancient genre and thus wrote the biography of Charles XII king of Sweden (). In the eighteenth century, the rise of a modern form of historiography seriously questioned the historical relevance of Lives. The article ‘histoire’ of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, written by Voltaire, states that history is less to be considered as an ethical and pedagogical discourse than as a science, whose aim is to establish ‘certifiable facts, precise dates, authority, greater attention to customs, laws, morals, commerce, finance, agriculture, and population’ (Encyclopédie, , trans. Caradonna ). Biographies, argued Voltaire, may be useful, if they are reported faithfully. But if portraits and anecdotes only satisfy idle curiosity and scandal, they are not relevant to history. Biography was then regarded not so much as a historical genre than as a literary and narrative form. Yet ancient Lives, and especially Plutarch’s, were used as a source of information, not only concerning Roman and Greek leaders, but also for the complex international relations arising from the picture that Plutarch traces of the nations and customs of ancient men. Giambattista Vico, who crucially contributed to the philosophy of history, drew from Plutarch many examples and comparisons (M.W. Howard : –) that appeared in his Scienza Nuova (–). Later Montesquieu, in his Considérations sur les causes de la
grandeur des Romains et leur décadence (), and Herder, in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (–), gleaned from Plutarch (and possibly from Vico) the material of their inquiries. Besides, Plutarch’s Lives was an important source for the historians of Antiquity. Charles Rollin, in his Histoire ancienne (), essentially rearranged and translated excerpts from Plutarch’s Lives and Moralia. Edward Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (–) censured Plutarch, but used his Lives as a source. In short, while in the seventeenth century biography was still seen as a historical subgenre, by the end of the eighteenth century it was rather regarded as a literary narrative. Yet life-writing continued to flourish in the nineteenth century. Biography was valued as a useful pedagogical aid, providing a simplified approach to historical matters. French historian Michelet, who devoted his doctorate to the study of Plutarch’s Lives, argued in his Histoire de France () that the historian has to apply the biographical method to general history, in order to approach the past of a nation as the organic evolution of a living being (Michelet : .i–xliv). Carlyle stated that we do not seek in history the ‘garrulities and insipidities’ of chronicles, but the hope ‘of gaining some acquaintance with our fellowcreatures, though dead and vanished, yet dear to us; how they got along in those old days, suffering and doing’ (Traill : ). According to him, then, biographies are important sources of historical knowledge and practical wisdom.
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.................................................................................................................................. In the seventeenth century biography was extremely popular as a genre, and many collections of Lives were published and read. Modern biographies developed from the tradition of moral exempla and hagiography, as well as from Boccaccio’s collections of De mulieribus claris (see Chapter ), and from the ancient practice of eulogy (France and St Clair : –). The success of Plutarch’s Lives helped to revive and to reform older biographical practices and established biography as a literary genre. Court sociability, at least in France and in Spain, implied the practice of biographies and portraits allowing explicit praise and satisfying social curiosity. Brantôme wrote Les Vies des dames galantes and Les Vies des hommes illustres before , Perrault published in Les Hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle, Fernando Pizarro y Orellana depicted Spanish conquerors in his collection of Varones ilustres del Nuevo Mundo in . In Britain, John Aubrey wrote a collection of short biographies (later called Brief Lives) in the last decade of the seventeenth century (Barber ). He was largely inspired by Cornelius Nepos, whose Lives were translated into English by Leopold Finch (Finch ). Aubrey’s depictions are full of wit and anecdotes, providing an unofficial portrait of late seventeenthcentury England. Boccaccio’s collection of female Lives were widely imitated and played a part in the seventeenth-century debates concerning gender equality. Biographies were written in verse in occasional works such as eulogies and praises, which generally portrayed patrons and noblemen, as well as in elegies and epitaphs, celebrating and mourning friends through poetry, as in the poem Lycidas () by John Milton, dedicated to his college-mate Edward King, or in Adonias () written by Percy Bysshe Shelley for his fellow poet John
Keats. Biographical dictionaries were published: Le Grand Dictionnaire historique by Moréri () and Le Dictionnaire historique et critique by Bayle () reported on the lives of prominent men and women of all times. The popularity of biographical compilations inspired the hagiographical work of the Bollandists who had published, by , volumes of Lives of saints (Acta sanctorum). Collections of Lives of poets and literary authors were also extremely popular. The dignity acquired by writers and artists in the seventeenth century made their lives worthy of interest. Pascal’s Pensées were edited in with a biographical preface written by his sister Gilberte; Racine’s work was also published with a biography of the author composed by his son Louis. Imitating Diogenes Laertius’ Lives, Izaak Walton depicted the characters of his fellow poets (and clergymen) John Donne, Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Hebert, and Dr Sanderson (–). Walton was largely inspired by hagiography and his biographies aim at rousing meditation and sympathy for the men he sketched vividly, relating anecdotes and reporting improbable dialogues (Stauffer : –). The art of Walton was later imitated by Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (–), which are short biographies of poets including a critical appraisal of their works (Lonsdale ; see also Wheeler ). Johnson’s Lives was conceived as an introduction to the works of each one of the poets, and constitutes an important piece of literary criticism dwelling upon the relation between the life of the author and his literary work. Besides, Johnson’s Lives defined the modern practice of biography. Johnson insisted on the pleasure and utility of the genre: ‘Biography is, of the various kinds of narrative writing, that which is most eagerly read, and most easily applied to the purposes of life’ (Clifford : ). Johnson pointed out the most relevant feature of modern biography: ‘It is frequently objected to relations of particular lives, that they are not distinguished by any striking or wonderful vicissitudes . . . But this notion arises from false measures of excellence and dignity, and must be eradicated by considering, that in the esteem of uncorrupted reason, what is of most use is of most value’ (ibid.: ). Indeed, if in the seventeenth century biographers were interested in depicting their contemporaries as heroes, glorifying their achievements and proverbial sayings, Johnson claimed in that the use of biographies is mainly moral and that what really interests the reader is not the great achievements of heroes, but the secret and private merit of particular people. Roger North’s Lives of the Norths (–; Jessopp ) was also concerned with private and particular deeds. North depicted the lives and habits of his three brothers, and intended to save them from oblivion less by describing their public achievements than by interesting the reader with realistic details and lively anecdotes. The revival of Plutarch’s Lives not only led to the rise of modern life-writing, but also influenced dramatic practice. Ben Jonson, in The Devil is an Ass, satirized the enthusiasm of his fellow authors for Plutarch. He staged a character called Plutarchus, and let his father explain why he chose that name: That year, sir That I begot him, I bought Plutarch’s Lives, And fell s’ in love with the book, as I called my son By his name, in hope he should be like him, And write the lives of our great men. (Parr : )
Indeed, Plutarch’s Lives was very often brought on stage and became one of the major sources of modern tragedy. Etienne Jodelle’s Cléopâtre captive (), which is considered the first French tragedy, was adapted from the Life of Antony. Later in the seventeenth century, many dramatic works derived from Plutarch’s Lives, including Hardy’s Coriolan () and Alexandre (), Corneille’s Sertorius (), Othon (), Agésilas (), and Racine’s Mithridate (). In Britain, Shakespeare not only drew from Plutarch many subjects for his tragedies, but directly imitated North’s translation in his own plays (Braden ). Julius Caesar (), Antony and Cleopatra (), Coriolanus (), Timon of Athens () are largely inspired by Plutarch. Shakespeare is not the only dramatist inspired by North’s translation: Sir William Alexander gleaned from Plutarch the subject of his closet dramas Croesus, Darius, The Alexandrian, and Julius Caesar, while Caesar and Pompey by George Chapman (c.) refers to the Lives. Plutarch’s narrative strategies affected the poetics of tragedy, which was mainly based on the Senecan model at the time. Horror was progressively discarded, while surprise, wonder, and admiration for the moral greatness of the hero became the favourite expression of tragic pathos (T.E. Duff : ). One of the reasons why Plutarch brought such a major contribution to the rise of tragedy is that his narrative techniques are surprisingly quite close to the tragic rules. Plutarch’s art of depicting heroes is extremely useful to the poets in search of a tragic hero. Caesar, for example, is portrayed as a great ruler, but also as an extremely ambitious man (trans. Dryden : ). His moral ambiguity perfectly suits the Aristotelian prescription of a hero neither totally good nor morally bad. Besides, Plutarch’s narrative devices act as precious guidelines for modern dramatists. Cleopatra’s final trick in the Life of Antony (trans. Dryden : ) provides a last twist to the plot and surprise to the reader; Alexander’s unexpected and inexplicable death arouses wonder and questions the hero’s free will and the power of fate (ibid.: –). If Plutarch’s Lives was a precious source for seventeenth-century tragedy, it also greatly helped to shape the eighteenth-century dramatic heroes. In , Addison wrote Cato, a Tragedy and staged the Plutarchan hero as an icon of republicanism and liberty (Stadter c). This play not only provided literary inspiration for the American Revolution, but was also a source for many neoclassical tragedies such as Gottsched’s Der sterbende Cato (), Metastasio’s Catone in Utica (), and Voltaire’s Brutus (). In the eighteenth century, Plutarch’s Lives gave particular embodiments to the desires of liberty and to the idealization of political virtues. Roman characters were often brought on stage, because the values of liberty, moral strength, and republicanism that they epitomized in the ancient narratives reflected the aspirations of the pre-revolutionary writers. If in seventeenthcentury life-writing the hero was mainly celebrated for his courtly skills and military achievements, the tragic hero of the Enlightenment was praised as the living embodiment of ideal virtues and philosophical ideas. Timoleon’s Life is the main source of Alfieri’s Timoleonte (–), La Harpe’s Timoléon () and Chénier’s Timoléon (). In these three plays, the hero’s fight against his brother’s fraudulent ambitions conveys a radical desire for political liberty. More generally, many of the German Sturm und Drang literary heroes are inspired by Plutarch’s characters: Karl Moor, the protagonist of Schiller’s Die Räuber (), makes his first appearance on stage reading Plutarch’s Lives. Biographies then, and more specifically Plutarch’s Lives, greatly contributed to the rise of modern tragic drama. Lives not only provided characters and subjects for dramatic plays, but also helped at shaping dramatic poetics. Ancient Greek and Roman heroes embodied on stage the ideological aspiration of pre-revolutionary writers.
The early modern tradition of life-writing also fostered the rise of the novel in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, ancient biographical sources were literary models for heroic idealization: Madame de Villedieu, whose writings were deeply influenced by Plutarch, contributed to the art of romance (Les amours des grands hommes, ) and to the genre of memoirs (Mémoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière, –). On the other hand, the care for particular history and for personal biographical details, evidenced greatly in Johnson’s and Aubrey’s biographical works, promoted the development of realistic narratives. Ancient models of life-writing contributed, though indirectly, to the rise of the modern novel. If novelists such as Defoe, Sterne, or Marivaux scarcely mentioned ancient biographers, they called their novels ‘Lives’, as we can see in the Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (), and The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy () and La Vie de Marianne (–). Daniel Defoe’s plots are generally close to authentic biography. In the preface of Moll Flanders, he carefully explains that ‘the author is here supposed to be writing her own history’ according to ‘her account’ of it that he puts ‘into new words’ (Starr and Bree : ). Defoe asks the reader to consider his novel an authentic biography, not only because he trusts truth to be more respectable than fiction, but also because he believes that life-writing is the only literary form capable of bringing a character to life. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century novels were generally composed as fictional biography. Henry Fielding explains in Tom Jones that he has not the advantage of the historian who can use public records and testimonies to relate ‘public transactions’ and stage the lives of ‘Trajan and Antoninus, Nero and Caligula’, unless he ‘forsakes his character and commences a writer of romance’. His work is focused on the ‘scenes of private life’ (Bowers : ). Fielding playfully claims he is writing neither a Life like Suetonius, nor a romance. He aims at describing a private character, but in order to do so fiction is better than history, since the chronicled material is scarce, and because public details matter less than ‘the most retired recess’ of the character, that only probable fiction can recreate (ibid.: ). Both Fielding and Defoe admire and imitate life-writing, but at the same time clearly depart from it. Fielding’s novel focuses on a particular character, but his adventures are neither idealized, as in romance, nor historically grounded, as in biography. Besides, the protagonist has neither the prominence nor the rank of the heroes portrayed by Suetonius or Plutarch and the author insists on his social and moral mediocrity (ibid.: ). However, the explicit care for psychological and factual realism is partly inspired by the art of biography. Hagiography too was a model for the modern novel, and in particular for picaresque writings. El Buscón by Quevedo (), one of the main examples of the picaresque novel, accounts for the life of a swindler but echoes and parodies the tradition of the Lives of saints. Quevedo wrote many Vidas (e.g. the Vida de Santo Tomás de Villanueva and the Vida de San Pablo ) and regarded hagiography as an extremely useful and prominent genre (Fernández-Guerra : ). In his Buscón, he explicitly referred to the hagiographical tradition: the novel tells a vida which is supposed to be an ‘ejemplo’ (example) and an ‘espejo’ (mirror). But the example is intended for tramps and the mirror for misers.2 Actually Quevedo used the form of the vida less to satirize the genre than to promote a form of negative exemplarity, grounded in the plain style depiction of particular characters’ 2 The full title of Quevedo’s novel is Historia de la vida del Buscón, llamado Don Pablos, ejemplo de vagamundos y espejo de tacaños (History of the Life of the Swindler, Called Don Pablos, Model for Hobos and Mirror of Misers).
adventures. He discarded idealization and focused his narrative on chance events, turning eventually to the advantage or to the disadvantage of the hero, who possibly draws from them less a morality than a practical and temporary advice. Simplicius Simplicissimus (whose subtitle is Die Beschreibung des Lebens eines seltsamer Vaganten) written by Grimmelshausen in (Hartmann ), is also an extended and picaresque version of a Life of a saint. The hero, after traversing many tumultuous adventures of the Thirty Years War, finally repents of his sins and turns to a life of hermitage. Grimmelshausen’s novel adopts the structure of a hagiographical account, but the adventures it relates are less concerned with spiritual elevation than with the horror of the war. The hero’s pilgrimage on earth becomes a hazardous roaming, the moral meaning of biographical episodes is less important than the numerous adventures the hero is living through. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century novels therefore draw many features from biography and hagiography. Their focus on one single character and on his private deeds is reminiscent of the practice of particular history; their structure, based on a series of adventures involving the hero, is similar to the organization of Plutarchan plots, formed by the unexpected confrontation of the hero’s will with chance.
T R T
.................................................................................................................................. At the end of the eighteenth century, two main events affected the practice of life-writing: the French Revolution raised the interest in great men and noble deeds, while Rousseau’s Confessions radically transformed life-writing into the expression of individual sensibility. Revolutionary aspirations to liberty found a literary echo in Plutarch’s Lives. Ancient heroes, like Brutus or Caius Graccus, became the embodiment of a neoclassical desire for liberty. Plutarch’s influence is visible in eighteenth-century memoirs. Indeed, memoirs used to be more focused on the public events the writer happened to witness, than on his or her life. Yet pre-revolutionary memoirs were deeply influenced by Plutarch’s Lives: Alfieri, who greatly encouraged political independence in Italy, explained in his Vita () how he voraciously read the Lives of Timoleon, Caesar, Brutus, Pelopidas, and Cato while he was a young man (Ferrero and Rettori : ), and how these readings fostered his love for virtue and liberty (ibid.: ). Madame Roland, who supported the French Revolution, wrote her Mémoires () in prison, and stated how Plutarch’s Lives excited her love for the republic (Roland de la Platière : .). Plutarch thus became a precious model for revolutionary writers. His heroes embody the virtues and the ideals that deeply moved the readers of the time; his biographies describe the great men of the past, to whom the leaders of the Revolution and of the Empire could be compared; his report focuses on history rather than on fiction, and history was the main subject of revolutionary writings. Biography, thus, was very popular at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Walter Scott wrote a Life of Napoleon in and so did Stendhal (–); Robert Southey wrote a Life of Nelson (). Biography was seen as the genre that better represents and records revolutionary aspiration to civic heroism. If life-writing were promoted by the French Revolution, the rise of sensibility in fiction radically reshaped biographical practices. The expression of the characters’ private feelings
became crucial in the eighteenth-century epistolary novel. In Richardson’s Pamela, the heroine writes about her inner feelings in order to save her soul and to convert her master and the reader. As in hagiographical writings, the testimony of her secret life is supposed to lead to edification, but in Richardson’s novel the disclosure of her feelings rather serves the powerful expression of her inner self. The interest in sensibility greatly fostered the rise of modern autobiography: Rousseau, in his Confessions (), aimed at expressing the emotions and impressions of the self. In order to do so, he created a new biographical style, inspired both by the Christian tradition of introspection established by Augustine’s Confessions, and by ancient Greek biography. Rousseau was indeed a great admirer of Plutarch’s Lives, as he stated in his Confessions: Plutarch was my especial favourite, and the pleasure I took in reading and re reading him did something to cure me of my passion for novels. Soon indeed I came to prefer Agesilaus, Brutus, and Aristides to Orondates, Artamenes, and Juba. It was this enthralling reading, and the discussions it gave rise to between my father and myself that created in me that proud and intractable spirit, that impatience with the yoke of servitude, which has afflicted me through out my life. (Rousseau, trans. Cohen : )
Plutarch’s Lives was not only Rousseau’s favourite reading, but also his writing model and ethical example. Rousseau admittedly chose to write a biography because he refused to compose a fiction, i.e. a ‘roman’, which he considered frivolous and false. Only through biography, which he regarded as the sincere expression of the self, he believed he could express the truth and thus be useful to the reader. Plutarch’s Lives was also for him an ethical example: Rousseau aspired to become like one of Plutarch’s heroes, but the discrepancy between his inner struggle for liberty and virtue and the public recognition and understanding of it caused him pain and eventually brought him to write his Confessions. Besides, Rousseau was largely inspired by Christian introspection, and knew Augustine’s work (Rousseau : ). Yet his practice of writing the self radically differed from the tradition of Christian autobiography. The reason why Augustine decided to account for his own life was his conversion, which revealed the divine truth and led to redemption. Indeed, the core of Rousseau’s autobiographical writings is also the revelation of the truth, but according to him, this truth lies in his own private deeds and thoughts. Therefore, the aim of his work is neither his own conversion nor his salvation, but the full and exhaustive expression of the self. In other words, according to Rousseau, the disclosure of one’s life is not the instrument of general edification, but is the scope of writing itself. Rousseau’s Confessions fostered the rise of autobiography, which became extremely popular in nineteenth-century Europe. Rousseau’s work immediately gave rise to different autobiographical accounts, such as Restif de la Bretonne’s Monsieur Nicolas (–), Karl Philipp Moritz’ Anton Reiser (composed in –), and Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit (). Nineteenth-century authors imitated, developed, or criticized Rousseau’s biographical strategies. Wordsworth’s Prelude (–) brought to poetry the autobiographical longing for self-knowledge and developed further Rousseau’s desire of reconciling the nature and the self. Wordsworth poem was intended to be a monumental ars poetica, a celebration of memory and a lyrical understanding of the role of the poet. Conversely, Chateaubriand censured the lack of morality of the Confessions. He argued that the exposure of one’s immoral behaviour is the sign of vanity and self-indulgence,
rather than of sincerity (Regard : ), and intended to set a useful and ethical example in his Mémoires d’Outre-tombe (–), describing the complex intertwining of historical events and private life. George Sand, in her Histoire d’une vie (–), also criticized Rousseau’s self-centredness and self-indulgence and recommended a different sort of biography. Her declared model is Augustine’s Confessions, and she believed that the scope of autobiography is ‘The recital of struggles in the life of each’ because this faithful report may be ‘a lesson for all’ and even contributes to the reader’s salvation ‘if each of us could analyse the cause of our suffering and realize what has saved us. It is with this sublime intention and under the influence of a passionate faith that Saint Augustine wrote his Confessions.’ From this point of view, ‘there is a gulf between Les Confessions of JeanJacques Rousseau and those of the Church father’ (Jurgrau : ). Chateaubriand and George Sand meant to justify their autobiographical writings: the former stressed the similarity between autobiography and memoirs, and intended to depict a period more than a character; the latter claimed the moral utility of her work and referred explicitly to the hagiographical tradition. Stendhal was also deeply influenced by Rousseau. He explained that his Vie d’Henry Brulard (–) must be read as ‘his own Confessions, like those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, except for the style’ (Martineau and del Litto : .). Indeed, Stendhal criticized Rousseau’s style and wished to write ‘with less talent but more frankness’ (ibid.: .). Stendhal argued that Rousseau’s pretence to sincerity is only a rhetorical strategy that he displays in order to defend himself and to embellish his work. Conversely, Stendhal intended to write a truly ‘sincere’ biography, discarding any apologetic aim and rejecting Romanesque. Besides, if Rousseau’s self-writing were a way of unveiling his thoughts and intentions, and thus of justifying his deeds, Stendhal’s depiction of his inner feelings was rather a heuristic process aspiring to reveal his true identity. Stendhal justified his desire to narrate his own life asserting that it is only through the autobiographical introspection that the self may eventually become known: ‘I should write my own life, so that I may know, when this work will be achieved, who I have been’ (del Litto –: .). De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater ( and ; Morrison ) subverted Augustine’s introspective approach. It is admittedly the work of a reformed addict, who describes the events that led him into drug dependency and then out of it. But if De Quincey’s Confessions seems to flow from addiction to redemption, its moral frame is less vivid than the depiction of drug effects and alienation. Sincerity and truth, in De Quincey’s report, are less to be found in sanity than in the power of opium which displays ‘the whole of my past life – not as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated in the music; no longer painful to dwell upon; but the detail of its incidents removed or blended in some hazy abstraction, and its passions exalted, spiritualised, and sublimed’ (ibid.: ). From Augustine to De Quincey, the Christian practice of biographical self-analysis was reversed. If, according to Augustine, introspection was mainly a method leading to the universal truth, in nineteenth-century biography, sincere introspection was the only effective truth. Besides, if in ancient Lives the depictions of particular deeds were the means of exposing an exemplar lesson, nineteenth-century autobiographies focused entirely on the peculiar experiences of the self. Life-writing was no more based on the generalization of a particular story, but on the overt demonstration of the uniqueness of the narrated life.
C
.................................................................................................................................. In the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, ancient biographies deeply influenced historiographical and literary practices. If biography used to be considered, by many seventeenth-century theorists, as a historical sub-genre, and namely as a form of ‘particular history’, its historical relevance was strongly criticized in the age of the Enlightenment, and Lives were progressively regarded as a form of fiction, and used as a pedagogical aid. Ancient biographies, and especially Plutarch’s Lives, fostered the modern practice of lifewriting, and provided modern dramatists with subject matter and narrative strategies. The new concern for private and particular deeds increased the popularity of biographical writings, which eventually contributed to the rise of the novel. Modern novels were indeed composed as fictionalized biographies, focusing on a single character and telling his or her particular adventures. The Christian (auto-)biographical tradition of self-analysis contributed to the rise of autobiography in the late eighteenth century. Augustine’s Confessions influenced Rousseau’s Confessions and thus aroused nineteenth-century interest in first-person narratives. However, the disclosure of one’s life was no longer an instrument of general edification: conversely, the full and exhaustive expression of a particular self became the essential scope of biographical writing.
F R Despite the lack of a general overview on life writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, Biography as an Art (Clifford ) provides a comprehensive anthology of the theoretical discourse about biography in modern Europe and America. The history of life writing in English speaking countries is thoroughly depicted by Stauffer (; ) and Pritchard () while precious insights about life writing in France, Italy, Germany, and Spain can be found respectively in the works by Mombert and Rosellini (), Casalena (), di Francia (), Niggl (), and R.H. Goetz (). Some specific issues concerning modern life writing have raised critical interest. The influence of Plutarch’s Lives on modern historiography and literature is the object of several critical essays: M. W. Howard () on eighteenth century Europe, Shackford () on England and Guerrier () on modern France. The seventeenth and eighteenth century concern with the historical relevance of biography is well analysed by Guion (), Dubois (), and J.H. Anderson (). The influence of life writing on the novel is studied by Wheeler Cafarelli (), Batchelor (), Hipp (), Jefferson (), and Kendall (). The contribution of life writing to the rise of autobiography is described by Spengemann (), Spacks (), and Delany () for modern England, by Shering ham () for France, and by Steussy () for German speaking countries. On life writing and artistic identity in eighteenth century Britain, see Junod ().
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- Biographical Receptions of Greek and Roman Poets in the Twentieth Century ......................................................................................................................
R work on the Lives of the Greek and Roman poets has increasingly urged us to move away from the traditional view of ancient biographies as factual reports about the ‘real’ historical lives of the poets of ancient Greece and Rome. With little but the texts of the poems themselves to go on, ancient biographers consistently invented the Lives of the poets substantially from the poetic texts themselves. Rather than viewing these Lives with suspicion since their so-called ‘facts’ can often be seen to have been extrapolated from the texts themselves, scholarship has now begun to recognize ancient biography as a creative mode of reception. The Lives, in other words, become a narrative means of interpreting, digesting, and distorting the texts (see Chapter in this volume on the Lives of one poet in particular). That mode of reception—of reading the life from the text—does not end in Antiquity, however. Further removed in time and taking more and more imaginative liberties in blurring fictional and factual boundaries, later readers have increasingly imagined and reimagined the lives of the ancient poets. From the medieval accessus (see Chapter in this volume) to the Romantic myth of the poet-bard, the lives of the poets continued to be invented and re-invented by later readers, often mirroring contemporary literary and cultural concerns in a creative mesh that saw, for example, Virgil using his magical powers to ride griffins to a magic mountain (Putnam and Ziolkowski : –), ‘St Naso’ meeting John the Baptist in exile and converting to Christianity (Trapp : ), the spirit of Homer possessing his most famous Renaissance translator, George Chapman, on a grassy hill ‘near Hitchin’s left hand’ (Underwood : ), or Sappho dying, High Romantic style, with a leap from a sublime rocky cliff (M. Reynolds : –). In the twentieth century—viewed here as a ‘long’ century extending backwards to the s and forwards to the present—reading the texts of Greek and Roman poetry for the lives of their authors becomes an especially rich and multifaceted mode of reception, providing for many readers a means of grappling with the ancient texts within the changing cultural landscape of modernity. Yet unlike the medieval and early modern traditions of literary biography, in the twentieth century, academic and creative Lives have tended to
part company. When it comes to Greek and Roman poets, although a few full-length literary biographies that still attempt to claim factual status have been produced (e.g. Levi a; b), conventional narrative biographies that aim to set out the ‘facts’ are generally only found in isagogic contexts such as introductions to texts and translations, or textbooks of literary history. Although the century as a whole has seen a broader rise in the popularity of literary biography of more modern writers, when it comes to Greek and Roman poets’ lives, partly because there is no real documentary evidence on which to base such works—no diaries, no extant letters, no new archive material found mouldering in the family attic—the most interesting and significant biographical interpretations have shifted almost exclusively to the realm of fiction. Even the classical scholar Luca Canali wrote his biography of Lucretius as prose fiction (Canali ). Furthermore, partly because modern authors are acutely aware that there are few ‘facts’ beyond the poets’ works themselves on which to base their material, and partly as a broader consequence of twentieth-century obsessions with fragmentation and the limits of knowledge, creative life-writing about the ancient poets in this period is found more frequently in ludic snapshots rather than full-blown narrative biographies: the scene of Virgil’s death, for example, Ovid’s experiences in exile, the reappearance of Homer’s ghost, or Sappho cast as a film star talking in abstract fragments become more characteristic topics than the historicized birth-to-death accounts more frequently produced in other periods. The particular richness and experimentation of twentieth-century imaginative biography—or rather ‘life-writing’, to give the genre a more inclusive title that extends beyond traditional birth-to-death narrative—are closely linked to the period’s particular literary obsessions. The century witnessed a series of seismic paradigm shifts in the ways in which texts are viewed, which still structure our approaches today. Three themes, in particular, deeply influenced life-writing in the period, and especially the life-writing about Greek and Roman authors: () ‘The Death of the Author’ and the postmodern turn in conceptions of texts and authorship; () intertextuality; and, finally, () the rise of psychoanalysis. This chapter is structured around these three themes. While a number of examples will be drawn upon, the core case studies here will be formed by three key texts: Hermann Broch’s novel, Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil, Broch a), Christoph Ransmayr’s novel Die letzte Welt (The Last World, Ransmayr ), and Anne Carson’s poem, couched as a series of fantasy filmic encounters framed by appearances of the Greek lyric poet Sappho, ‘TV Men’, published in her collection, Men in the Off Hours (Carson ).
T D ( R) A
.................................................................................................................................. In the twentieth century, ideas about the nature of texts and the nature of authorship profoundly changed how the author was, and still is, conceived. In his revolutionary essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (‘La mort de l’auteur’), Roland Barthes influentially pronounced, once and for all, the author’s decease (Barthes ). In a declaration of radical textuality, Barthes urged a new mode of interpretation, one that would not try to extrapolate from the text the author’s putative ‘intention’ or try to read his or her real-life consciousness or biography into or out of the text. Instead, the author—that ‘somewhat
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decrepit deity of the old criticism’ (Barthes : )—should be seen as irrelevant to our reading. ‘To give a text an Author’, he argued, ‘is to impose a limit on that text’ (Barthes : ). With the removal of what seemed like the ‘tyranny’ of the author concept, for Barthes, modern criticism and writing could now embrace a new concept of textuality without origin: for ‘it is language which speaks, not the author’ (ibid.: ). Furthermore, an important implication of this is that ‘a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination’ (ibid.: ): not in the mysterious author who made the work, but the reader who reads it: as Barthes famously put it towards the end of the essay, ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’ (ibid.: ). Taken together with the implicit reply by Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ (‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, ; , first published in ), which attempted to place the issue within a broader socio-historical perspective, Barthes’ essay, published in the same year as Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, tends to be singled out as a hallmark of the postmodernism that characterized the second half of the twentieth century. As Barthes himself acknowledged, these ideas were part of the cultural climate of the period: he had ‘in bmany respects only recapitulated what is being developed around me’ (Bennett : ). Yet the idea of the dissolution of the author was in the air long before Barthes’ influential essay. Barthes himself constructed an implicit (if tendentious) genealogy of the death of the author that went back to Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, and Marcel Proust. But the embracing of authorial absence went beyond the French canon. The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (–), for example, had deliberately and playfully masked and fractured his identity by writing under a series of fictional and semi-fictional ‘heteronyms’, including ‘A Factless Autobiography’ (in Livro do Desassossego, ‘The Book of Disquiet’, published posthumously in ), deconstructing the writerly self long before postmodern deconstruction. In the Anglophone world, too, writers like T.S. Eliot and James Joyce had been arguing strongly as early as the first two decades of the century for the conscious eradication of the authorial subject in modernist writing, comparing the author to a catalyst in a chemical experiment that disappears as the new creation is made (‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (), Eliot : ), or a gas which ‘refines itself out of existence’ (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (–), Joyce : ). In the world of life-writing, Gertrude Stein took authorial disappearance to a new level, publishing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (), an ‘autobiography’ whose author is not its subject (Saunders : –). Paradoxically, however, despite this embrace of the death of the author, the twentieth century witnessed a revivification of the figure of the author (Burke ). This rebirth was already inherent in the writing of Barthes and Foucault (Bennett : , ). As Barthes puts it, ‘in the text, in a way, I desire the author, I need his figure’ (Barthes : ), or as Foucault articulated it, ‘it is a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator and of analysing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse’ (Foucault : ). In other words, the author is no longer to be seen as a real-life historical figure, but something inherent in the text, a variable and complex function of discourse, and invented—desired—from the text by its readers. The result of this kind of thinking in the cultural and literary practice of the period is that, for many writers, this was an act of liberation, leaving room for the play of fiction in the conception and reception of the authors of the past. If there is no god-like author behind the text, that ‘author’ can be multiple, and indeed invented from the texts themselves. ‘The very postmodernism that proclaimed the death of the author and the demise of character delights in resurrecting
historical authors as characters’ (Franssen and Hoenselaars : ), and Greek and Roman authors were no exception in the dramatis personae of modern fiction. One of the best examples of this kind of reading which consciously engages with the absent presence of the author is Christoph Ransmayr’s Die letzte Welt (The Last World), first published in German in the autumn of , at the height of the postmodern turn. In simple narrative terms, the novel takes as its starting point the story of Ovid’s exile to Tomis on the Black Sea, where the poet was relegated by Augustus in , a story Ovid himself tells in multiple versions in his poems written in exile, notably the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. In Ransmayr’s novel, prompted by rumours of the poet’s death, ‘Cotta’ (based on M. Aurelius Cotta Maximus Messalinus, a friend to whom Ovid addresses a number of verse letters: Pont. .; .; .; .; .; .) travels to the iron-mining town of ‘Tomi’ on the fringes of the Roman Empire in order to search for Ovid and the text of his lost masterpiece, the epic Metamorphoses. Yet, significantly, the poet upon whose biography and upon whose works Ransmayr’s novel is based conspicuously never appears in the novel. Instead, the book presents a landscape of the imagination riffing on characters and scenes from Ovid’s text. Tereus is a butcher; Arachne a deaf-mute weaver; Fama, the personification of gossip and rumour in Ovid, becomes the grocer’s widow and source of local gossip. Characters, too, dream of the metamorphosis of themselves and those around them (Cyparis the dwarf day-dreams that he transforms, Daphne-like, into a tree, touching both heaven and earth; Cotta dreams of his change, Io-like, into a cow, as ‘a strange animal sound . . . filled his throat . . . [f]rightened, transfixed by his own voice’, Ransmayr : ). The whole scene is a carnival of inverted characters from the Metamorphoses: ‘a pale shadow’ of their Roman counterparts (ibid.: ). At the same time, transformed fragments of the text of the Metamorphoses itself are inscribed onto the landscape, scrawled on scraps of cloth attached to cairns and engraved on slug-covered stones in the vanished poet’s garden (ibid.: , –). Hailed as a quintessentially postmodern novel (Glei ; Gallagher : –), Ransmayr’s work enacts Barthesian ideas about authorship. As the rumour circles that ‘Naso is dead’ (Ransmayr : ), Cotta, a stand-in for the reader, desires the author, he needs his figure—the god-like figure who can make the fragments of text he finds make sense. He sees, or thinks he sees, the author in Pythagoras, Ovid’s old Greek servant (ibid.: ), or in a shadowy figure at a carnival wearing what turns out to be a large cardboard nose, the incarnation of Ovid’s nick-name Naso, ‘Nosy’ (ibid.: –). He calls out the name of the poet once so obsessed with his own name (‘MY NAME/WILL BE INDESTRUCTIBLE’, ibid.: ), shouting, whispering, and mumbling it like a magic word that might conjure him up. But as any reader of Foucault knows, and as Cotta finds out, the author’s name is a ‘paradoxical singularity’ (Foucault : ), inextricably linked with his texts, and little to do with the ‘real’ author. At the end of the novel, Ransmayr goes one step further than the Barthesian (or Ovidian view of) discourse: rather than language and text being the only reality, Cotta, as he gives up his readerly desire for the author, comes to recognize that texts disappear, even when they are inscribed in stone: ‘[r]eality, once discovered, no longer needed recording’ (Ransmayr : ). What he finds in the landscape, in the end, is not Ovid’s name, but his own (ibid.: ), a final escape from the language in which Ovid’s absent presence has always been enmeshed ‘into an unmediated reality’ (Hardie : ).
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Other appearances and disappearances of Greek and Roman poets are common in twentieth-century fiction, too. The absent presence of Ovid is at the heart of David Malouf ’s novel, An Imaginary Life (Malouf ), a fictional biography which sees the Roman poet in exile finally renouncing language in a rediscovery of the reality of sensory experience, and thereby disappearing into the landscape of his exile (‘I am turning into the landscape’, ibid.: ). Homer, whose existence as the author of the Iliad and Odyssey is itself a matter of scholarly debate, haunts a number of modern works. In Wim Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin (or The Wings of Desire, ), released two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, a mysterious old man in a tattered suit, credited as ‘Homer’, haunts the Staatsbibliothek in Potsdamer Platz. Climbing the iconic spiral staircase like a character in Dante’s Inferno, he inhabits a liminal world between life and death, wondering why it is that no-one writes poems about peace (cf. E. Hall : ). In Derek Walcott’s Omeros (), ‘Omeros/Seven Seas’, a blind sailor ‘muttering the dark language of the blind’ (III. ii.), like Homer in the ancient Vitae traditions discussed in Chapter in this volume, figures the absent ancient poet at the heart of the work on which Walcott bases his own. The Greek lyric poet Sappho, meanwhile, haunts Anne Carson’s ‘TV Men’ (published in Men in the Off Hours: Carson ), a sequence of portrayals of historical authors framed by twin appearances of Sappho, who features in paired poems at the beginning and the end of the collection. Unlike Ovid or even ‘Homer’ (the nature of the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey may be contested, but the poems themselves ultimately survived: cf. Bennett : –), Sappho is a special case of authorial demise. Not only is the author inaccessible from her texts, but the texts themselves are not quite there. Her original poems would have filled nine books when she lived around , but now only two survive substantially complete; the rest have come down to the modern world in highly fragmentary form, some as tenuous and fleeting as a single word. Carson—a scholar of ancient Greek as well as a gifted poet—translated a selection of Sappho’s fragments as If not, winter (Carson ). This version of Sappho deliberately emphasizes the fragmentary nature of the text as we have it: Carson leaves a substantial amount of white space on the page that, in its echo of the mise-en-page of a modernist poem, emphasizes absence rather than presence; she also uses square brackets liberally to mimic the technique employed by scholars of papyrology when they mark the place where text is absent or damaged in the ancient papyrus, thereby deliberately drawing attention to the gaps in the text in what she calls ‘an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event rather than an accurate record of it’ (ibid.: xi). Her rendition of fragment D is characteristic: ] ] ] ] ] ] in a thin voice ] (ibid.: )
A fragment like this almost invites readers to construct the author from it: mysterious, ephemeral, ultimately unreachable. If, according to Barthes, the author is to be viewed as inaccessible from the text because writing involves ‘the destruction of every voice, of every
point of origin’ (Barthes : ), in Sappho’s case, where the text is itself ‘destroyed’, the author becomes all the more elusive—and the desire to find her in the text all the more compelling. In Carson’s ‘TV Men’, the elusiveness of the author is intimately related to the elusiveness of her texts. Carson’s ‘imaginary biography’ of Sappho (Klock : ) reincarnates the ancient poet as a modern movie star. Updated to the fleeting contemporary medium of film in order to emphasize her impalpability, we see Sappho in no more than a series of snapshots (‘Sappho stares into the camera’, ‘Sappho makes her way onto the set’, Carson : ), or hear only snatches of her thoughts in staccato stream-of-consciousness (‘I notice the leaves in the Jardin have changed/overnight’, ibid.: ). When we first see her, she is walking through a scene shot in a graveyard: as the gravestones in the background spill slowly out of the frame (ibid.: )
recalling the moment in the biographical tradition which came to define her—the poet’s death (M. Reynolds : ). Like the translations Carson produced, moreover, this Sappho speaks in riddling fragments. She quotes herself, deconstructing her most famous poem, fragment , a poem apparently about the physical effects of jealousy or fear, until it is reduced to nothing but a string of verbs and nouns: ‘Laugh Breathe Look Speak Is . . . Tongue Flesh Fire Eyes Sound’ (Carson : ).1 Yet, as Carson puts it in the essay that accompanies the volume, ‘Sappho is one of those people of whom the more you see the less you know’ (ibid.: ). Access to the author is even more difficult than access to the fragmentary text, and the paired poems, here, effectively stage Sappho’s disappearance. In the end, in this biographical incarnation, the author’s ‘reality’ is more tenuous and fragmentary than her texts. Even as the director shouts ‘Action!’, the author ultimately ‘[d]isappears disappears’ from Carson’s poem (ibid.: ). As Wallace Stevens had put it in a poem which Carson’s epigraph to the sequence deliberately recalls, ‘[t]here are words/Better without an author, without a poet’ (Klock : ).
I M
.................................................................................................................................. Closely connected to ideas of the death of the author and just as paradigm-shifting in twentieth-century attitudes to texts and authors has been the concept of intertextuality. Intertextual theory views a text as, in Barthes’ words, ‘a new tissue of past citations’ from other texts (Bennett : ). Rather than carrying an inherent independent ‘meaning’, any single text—whether literary or non-literary—obtains its meaning by its relation to other past (and indeed future) texts as part of the broader textual system. As Julia Kristeva, a key figure in the development of intertextual theory put it, ‘the literary word is an 1 The epigraph of the collection is adapted from Longinus’ On the Sublime, the source of fragment . Carson will probably have known Jesper Svenbro’s famous interpretation of fragment which reads it, alternatively, as a poem about writing that foresees the death of the poet (Svenbro ).
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intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings’: for ‘any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another’ (Kristeva : , ). The implications of this for literary life-writing in the period are multiple and crucial. First, intertextuality makes no distinction between literary and non-literary texts: all are viewed as discourse. The author’s life and the author’s work are, therefore, effectively considered as part of the intertwined mesh of discourse, with no distinction between factual and fictional genres. Second, when it comes to life-writing about poets, the poet’s texts and the poet’s life take on a new and equal standing. Virgil’s poetry, for example, and the later biographical traditions about Virgil, as well as interpretive writing about Virgil’s poetry, can all become coexistent components in a new textual biographical incarnation of ‘Virgil’. Finally, intertextuality takes no account of direct chronology: past and future texts coexist in the ‘mosaic of quotations’ that makes up the new text. A number of instances of life-writing of Greek and Roman poets in twentieth-century literature can be seen as underpinned, at least in part, by the principles of intertextuality. Ransmayr’s Die letzte Welt is a rich intertextual fabric that takes its material substantially from Ovid’s texts, which are themselves often autobiographical, or rather—since Ovid himself notoriously plays on the fictionality of his own life-narrative—‘autofictional’ (Goldschmidt : –, –). The novel enacts, in Kristeva’s words, ‘the absorption and transformation of another’ text, in this case, Ovid’s own (Kristeva : ). Ransmayr includes an appendix, which he calls an ‘Ovidian Repertoire’, detailing the connections between Ovid’s epic and Die letzte Welt. The novel’s very title intersects with Ovid’s lament for his exile, nobis habitabitur orbis/ultimus (Tr. ..–, ‘I shall continue to live at the end of the world’, with a double entendre on ultimus as both ‘furthest’, ‘most extreme’, and ‘final’, ‘last’), its fifteen chapters mirroring the fifteen books of Ovid’s epic. But Die letzte Welt goes beyond what might be seen as traditional ‘parallel’ or ‘allusion’. Embedded in the structure of the work itself is the fragmentary nature of intertextual discourse. Ovid’s epic is quoted and misquoted in barely readable fragments, and appears as part of a complex intertextual pastiche that incorporates not only ancient and modern texts, but the microphones and cinema screens that are the trappings of popular culture (Vollstedt ; Lützeler : ). A corollary of the intertextual revolution is the increasing awareness in life-writing of the irrecoverability of the biographical subject outside texts (there is no attainable subject ‘out there’), and the inescapable multiplicity of previous biographical writing—and the broader biographical reception within various memory cultures—of the biographical subject: what has been termed ‘metabiography’ (Rupke ; Ní Dhúill : ; ).2 Rupke usefully quotes Steven Shapin: ‘ “shifting biographical traditions make one person have many lives,” none of these necessarily more real than any other, because all are “configured and reconfigured according to the sensibilities and needs of the changing cultural settings” of the biographers’ (Rupke : n. ). Although Ovid has no ancient biographical tradition beyond his own autofictional texts, the issue gets more complex with other
2 The term ‘metabiography’ is still inchoate (Ní Dhúill : ), and has also been used to characterize the metatextual dimension of modern biographical fiction: life writing that is self conscious about its own role as life writing (cf. e.g. Middeke and Huber : ; Saunders : ).
ancient authors, who have a deep-rooted tradition of biography. Virgil, in particular, a figure who has haunted a number of twentieth-century authors, has a far-reaching and multiform biographical tradition reaching back millennia. From the ancient Vitae of Suetonius, Donatus and others, the tradition about the poet’s life expanded and refracted within the contexts of its various reception cultures: the medieval period cast him both as a harbinger of Christianity (anima naturaliter christiana) and as a magician endowed with mysterious powers (Comparetti ; Putnam and Ziolkowski ), and Virgil appears in various biographical adventures in Renaissance biography (Spargo ) as well as other forms of biographical incarnation, notably Dante’s Divine Comedy. For later centuries, the political implications of the poet’s personal relationship to Augustus and to Rome mirrored the tensions in the reception of the Aeneid as a pro- or anti-Augustan poem. That mode of reading life and work flourished in the twentieth century, when the poet’s life, like his work, was appropriated by pro-fascist biographers in light of the new ideology (F. Cox : ; R.F. Thomas a: –). For a modern author, ‘Virgil’, therefore, inevitably involves confronting not only the poet’s texts and their later receptions, but also the later Lives and traditions about the poet and his reception. One crucial work which engages with the broader idea of ‘Virgil’ in both metabiographical and intertextual terms is Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil) (Broch a), often identified as one of the key experimental novels of the first half of the twentieth century. Broch’s title evokes that of Barthes’ later essay on authorial demise, and although published before Kristeva or Barthes, the novel might well be seen as one of a group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts whose complex literary discourse made the concept intertextuality a necessary tool of analysis. Broch, who fled his native Austria in following a period of imprisonment by the Gestapo, originally conceived the novel as a short story (‘Die Heimkehr des Vergil’, ‘Virgil’s Homecoming’) and completed the fullblown work in exile in the United States. This ‘interior monologue of the poet’ (‘innerer Monolog des Dichters’, Broch b: ), tells the story of the final eighteen hours of Virgil’s life, and is divided into four stages structured around the four elements: ‘Water— The Arrival’, on Virgil’s arrival by sea at Brundisium; ‘Fire—The Descent’, describing a fevered night of soul-searching, in which Virgil decides to burn the manuscript of the Aeneid (a final wish related in the ancient Vitae); ‘Earth—The Expectation’, involving a long discussion with Augustus at the end of which Virgil agrees not to burn his poem, and finally ‘Air—The Homecoming’, in which Virgil, once he has granted an afterlife to his masterwork, dies. As Broch’s Virgil tells Augustus, ‘there is no such thing as a new creation’ (Broch a: ), and in the novel, Virgil’s life, like Broch’s text, is fundamentally ‘intertwined’ within a wider textual and cultural mesh (Broch uses the term ‘eingewoben’: Broch b: ; F. Cox : ). From the outset, the paratext of the novel—its framing material— encourages readers to approach the text in this way. At the back of the book, readers could find an appendix of ‘sources’ that included not only Virgil’s own texts, but also selections from the ancient Suetonian Life of Virgil and the famous supplemented version of the fourth-century life by Aelius Donatus known as ‘Donatus auctus’, which was frequently reprinted as a component part of editions of Virgil’s text, thus encouraging readers to see the life and work of the poet as part of a textual continuum. At the front, two epigraphs from Virgil’s own work and one from Virgil’s great Christian successor Dante,
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who had likewise revivified Virgil in the Divine Comedy, orient the text within a broader intertextual context, too. The first, fato profugus (Aen. .), in particular, links Virgil with his own character (a technique also seen in the ancient Vitae). Like the hero of the Aeneid, Broch’s Virgil ‘had become a rover, fleeing death, seeking death, seeking work, fleeing work . . . a lodger in his own life’ (Broch a: ), treading a path similar to ‘that which was trod by Aeneas’, who likewise, ‘pressed on in the darkness, pressed on for the homecoming journey, there where the moonbeams quivered in the light on the ebbing sea’ (ibid.: ). The phrase fato profugus has been read on a metatextual level, too: ‘driven by past literary voices, by what has been said’ (F. Cox : ), applying not only to the Aeneid (a work of notorious intertextual density), but to Broch’s own novel. Beyond its literary intertexts, moreover, the novel engages in the wider reception of the figure of ‘Virgil’, in Virgil’s metabiography. Broch was deeply influenced not only by the ancient Lives from which he quotes and gleans his ‘facts’, but by a more recent reading of the poet, Theodor Haecker’s Vergil, Vater des Abendlandes (, Virgil, Father of the West), in part, a response to fascist biographies of Virgil written for the poet’s bimillennium in , as well as the wider appropriation of the poet as a figurehead for contemporary fascism (Ziolkowski : –). For Haecker, himself drawing on several layers of late antique, medieval and Renaissance cultural constructions of the poet, Virgil is an anima naturaliter christiana (‘a naturally Christian soul’), which for Haecker means transcending ‘the nation’, and transcending the traditional link between Virgil’s poem and the princeps, Augustus (as Haecker would put it shortly afterwards, Virgil would ‘today be silenced in a concentration camp’, Tag- und Nachtbücher, ‘Journal in the Night’, May ; R.F. Thomas b: ). Intertwining his text with Haecker’s as well as, implicitly, the layers of cultural memory surrounding the biographical tradition of Virgil and the reception of his work, Broch counters pervasive ideas of the poet’s pro-Augustan reception. It is partly Virgil’s crisis of conscience about what is potentially the proto-fascist function of his epic that is the motivation behind his desire to ‘Burn the Aeneid!’ (Broch a: ).
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.................................................................................................................................. The twentieth century is also the century that saw the birth of psychoanalysis, associated primarily with the figures of Sigmund Freud, C.G. Jung and their various predecessors, collaborators, and successors. Freudian theory, in particular, has been closely linked with life-writing, and especially with biography and autobiography (Marcus : –; Elms ). Freud once told Jung that it is time for psychoanalysis to ‘take hold of biography’ (Elms : ), and the two disciplines have much in common. Much of his work—from The Interpretation of Dreams () to An Autobiographical Study ()—includes autobiographical material from his own life; Freud himself wrote biography and analysed Leonardo da Vinci’s autobiographical fragments in psychoanalytical terms. He and his followers also turned their attention to the lives of authors: the famous ‘Wednesday night meetings’ in Freud’s office in Vienna included discussion of the lives and works not only of Leonardo, but others such as Heinrich von Kleist and Frank Wedekind (Marcus : ).
More broadly, the whole concept of the ‘case history’ that underlies psychoanalysis—a narrative drawing a line from infancy to the present—has been seen not so much as a ‘clinical’ genre, but rather as a hybrid form of novel and biography, with Freud finding what ‘we are accustomed to find in the works of imaginative writers’ more useful than simple ‘logical diagnosis’ (Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (), in Strachey –: II: –; Marcus : ). Some of those ‘works of imaginative writers’ are famously Graeco-Roman in origin, and derive from Freud’s own ‘compulsion for antiquity’ (R.H. Armstrong ), which has led to, and goes far beyond, now well-known concepts such as the ‘Oedipus complex’ or ‘narcissism’. In turn, Freud’s writing has deeply influenced not only the professional practice of biography and autobiography, but the ways in which fictional life-writing has been conducted in the twentieth century and beyond. In both, even after the rise and fall of so-called ‘psychobiography’, a new focus on the subject’s unconscious, sexuality, illnesses, dreams, infancy, and childhood have taken on new and prominent roles. In imaginative life-writing about the Greek and Roman authors, it is clear that there is a focus on these aspects of the subject which had been mostly lacking in ancient Lives and which modern authors, in various modes of experimentation, partly sought to fill. The need to account for the unconscious mind had been felt long before Freud, and indeed Freud has been seen to have codified insights that had already been emerging throughout the nineteenth century (Williams and Waddell ; Saunders : ). Some of those proto-Freudian insights can be seen in the imaginative biographies of ancient poets. Tennyson’s ‘Lucretius’ (), for instance, draws on the forces of unconscious sexual repression to explain the legendary insanity of Lucretius, the Roman poet-philosopher said to have been driven mad by a love potion before committing suicide. In a monologue in Lucretius’ voice, Tennyson imagines how the poet’s ‘settled, sweet, Epicurean life’, is invaded as ‘some unseen monster lays/His vast and filthy hands upon my will/wrenching it backwards into his’ (lines –), a line which has been seen as the dramatization of the ‘unseen monster’ of the id invading the ‘settled’ ego, as the poet dreams of voyeuristic sexual encounters and the fetishized breasts of Helen of Troy against his ‘impotent sword’ (Platizky ; W.R. Johnson ; Goldschmidt : –). Similarly, Marcel Schwob’s ‘Lucrèce’, in Vies imaginaires (), riffs on the poet’s earliest memories of his ordered Roman childhood, and attributes his disturbed mind to sexual inadequacy with ‘an African woman, beautiful, barbarian and bad’ (Schwob : ). By the s, Freud’s theories had become so influential that ‘it became impossible for writers not to respond’ (Saunders : ). Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil is, directly or indirectly, a response to Freud. Broch, a fellow resident of Vienna (and later, like Freud, an exile), was, as Elias Canetti put it, ‘permeated by Freud, as by a mystical teaching’ (Donahue : ). Broch conceived his novel as ‘an interior monologue of the poet . . . although written in the third person’, seeing the workings of Virgil’s inner life as key to his biography, a biography closely bound up with the poet’s work: Der Tod des Vergil ‘is therefore above all a confrontation with Virgil’s own life . . . [and] with the justifiability or unjustifiability of the poetry to which his life had been dedicated’ (Broch a: ). What had arguably been missing or underplayed in the biographical tradition—the poet’s subjectivity, his interiority—now takes centre stage. Recounted substantially in free indirect speech, particularly in its second section, the novel’s notoriously difficult long sentences echo the processes of the mind, following Virgil’s ‘innerer Monolog’ (Broch b: )
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where the poet’s thoughts lead him. As if laid out for the reader on the analyst’s couch, we glimpse the inner movements of the poet’s mind as he falls into dream, half-dream, and semi-conscious reverie (as an illusory figure beckons the protagonist, ‘Come, Virgil, come with me, lie there with me on my couch, for we must go back; we must keep going back’, Broch a: ). From the outset, memory, childhood and infancy, and in particular the figure of the mother, mark out the poet’s consciousness, for ‘nothing ripens to reality that is not rooted in memory, nothing can be grasped in the human being that has not been bestowed on him from the very beginning’ (Broch a: ). In his reverie Virgil imagines his mother calling him in the pre-linguistic state of infancy, ‘as if she were summoning him to return to a namelessness which had its home in the maternal and beyond the maternal’ (ibid.: ), and the poet is haunted by the mysterious young slave-boy ‘Lysanias’, an unknown figure vaguely associated with his past, unseen by other characters, who functions as a Doppelgänger of the poet himself in childhood. Whether or not we see Der Tod des Vergil as quite so permeated by Freud, or identify the death of Virgil with a Freudian death-drive, it is clear that Freudian thinking has influenced the novel’s themes and modes of investigation, just as later in the century it influenced Gabriel Josipovici in Virgil Dying (), a monologue in Virgil’s voice written for radio performance. Consciously indebted to Broch and equally intertextual—incorporating lines and phrases from Ovid, Virgil, and a letter from Franz Kafka (who also wanted his manuscript to be posthumously burned) to his editor Max Brod—Josipovici, too, dramatizes Virgil’s death in order to get to the poet’s consciousness, ‘Wanting to understand the dark. The time before. Before you came into the light of this world. Wanting . . . ’ (Josipovici : ; cf. Ziolkowski : –).
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.................................................................................................................................. It has been suggested that we are living in a renewed heyday of the ‘author as character’ (Franssen and Hoenselaars : ). Modern writers have been fascinated by biography, and ancient Greek and Roman poets have played an important role as subjects of that biographical fascination. In a period that is self-consciously belated, twentieth-century writers have been concerned not only to construct versions of the lives of the poets, but also of their multiple afterlives, their Nachleben (Goldschmidt : -). Lives, texts, and reception come together in a number of different ways in the work of the period, from the intertextual to the metabiographical, with writers drawing on ancient poems and their reception to mirror many of the central preoccupations of the twentieth century and beyond. The ludic aspect of the literary text has been exploited and explored, boundaries between fact and fiction have been deliberately elided, and, in the process, the poets of Antiquity have been given a new hybrid subjectivity which has enabled them to come alive again as biographical subjects.
F R There are no general works on twentieth century Lives of classical authors. The ‘Living Poets’ website at Durham University provides a useful repository of primary resources with accompanying essays, a
number of which also include discussion of reception beyond Antiquity (https://livingpoets.dur.ac. uk). Goldschmidt () explores key issues and contains a chapter on Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil as a biofictional response to Virgil’s work and the traditions about him within the context of twentieth century culture. The collection by Franssen and Hoenselaars () deals with the author as character more generally rather than with ancient poets in particular, but includes some relevant material covering a number of periods, while Klock () touches on Sappho and Thucydides in a larger study of imaginative biography in modern authors. Marcus () provides a good overview of life writing and its issues and influences, while Saunders () is a compelling study of life writing in modernist authors. A useful exposition of the concept of the author from Antiquity to modernity is Bennett (), while Burke () provides a seminal critique of the twentieth century ‘Death of the Author’. On intertextuality, G. Allen () provides a useful initial overview, while Hinds () is foundational for the concept in Classics (though it does not deal with modern reception). The individual authors discussed here are covered by numerous studies: more specifically, on Broch and Virgil, Ziolkowski () and F. Cox (; updated as F. Cox ) are useful and include references to further bibliography; Hardie (: ) deals sensitively with Ransmayr, Malouf, and Ovid within the wider theme of authorial absent presence, and Klock (: ) discusses Anne Carson’s ‘Sappho’ in ‘TV Men’.
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Note : The following pages index both names of ancient authors and titles of primary texts, and also (abbreviated) titles of the most cited reference works. Note : Ancient titles and authors are either cited according to the conventions of the Greek English Lexicon (eds. Liddell, Scott, Jones, and McKenzie; LSJ, for Greek) and A Latin Dictionary (eds. Lewis and Short, for Latin), or take the form in which they for the most part occur in the book. Note : For ease of use, as in the General Index, titles of Lives that are part of collective biographies are indexed alongside (rather than under) the overarching titles. Acts of Epipodus and Alexander BHL Adam of Bremen Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum . . . . . Aelian Varia Historia . n. Alciphron .. Alexander Romance .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. , , .. .. . . .. , , ,
. .. .. .. , .. .. .. , . .. , , .. . .. . .. .. .. , .. .. .. n. . .. . .. n. .. n. .. .. . , .. .. n. .. .. . , .. n.
Alexander Romance (cont.) .. .. , .. . .. . .. .. , .. n. . . .. .. n. .. .. .. .. n. . .. n. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. n. .. .. n. .. .. .. .. . .. .. n. .. , .. .. . .. .. .. n. .. n. .. n. .. . .. .. n.
. .. .. .. .. .. n. . .. . . .. . .. .. n. , .. .. n. .. . n. .. n. .. , .. , n. .. n. .. .. .. n. .. n. . .. n. .. n. .. , .. .. .. . .. .. . . , n. , .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. n. . ..
.. , .. .. , , .. , .. , .. .. .. n. .. .. n. .. . , n. , .. .. . . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . Alexis F n. AMS I (Memra on Habib) : I (Memre on Gurya and Shmona) VI (Memre on Sergius and Bacchus) Anthologia Palatina .. n. . .. n. .. n. . .. n. . . n. Antimachus of Colophon . Antipater . Horace
Antimachus of Colophon AP . Antipater AP . Antony Rhetor . Appian Hispanica n. Apuleius Apologia . Aristides Orationes . Aristophanes Acharnenses n. Equites F n. Nubes Pax n. Ranae Thesmophoriazusae n. Vespae n. Aristotle Ethica Eudemia b n. b n. a n. Ethica Nicomachea b n. a b n. a b n. a n. F n. F F F
Aristotle (cont.) Magna Moralia a b n. Metaphysica b Physica b Poetica b a n. b b a a a b b b b n. a b n. Politica b a n. Rhetorica b b b n. b a b n. Aristoxenus of Tarentum F F F F Athanasius of Alexandria Defence of the Nicene Definition De incarnatione verbi Dei Vita Antonii
. . Athenaeus .a n. .b n. , .e .d .d e .d e .a f n. Augustine of Hippo Confessiones .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..
.. .. .. .. .. De civitate Dei . De fide rerum invisibilium . Epistulae . Retractationes .. Augustus Res Gestae Divi Augusti . Aurelius Victor De Caesaribus . n. Barb. lat. n. Basil of Caesarea Epistulae Bede, Venerable Lives of the Abbots BHG (Passio of Hadrian and Natalia) (Passio of Agatha) d (Acts of Matthias and Andreas among the Anthropophagi) (Passio of Barbara) (Life of the Man of God) (Testament of Ephrem) (Passio of Golindouch) p pb (Infancy Gospel of Thomas) z (Passio of Indes and Domna) z (Passio of Iuliana) (Passio of Iuliana) (Protoevangelium of James) (Passio of Nicephorus) (Passio of Pancratius of Rome) z (Passio of Panteleemon) (Martyrdom of Peter) g (Passio of Photina)
(Passio of Saba the Goth) (Passio of Sergius and Bacchus) y (Passio of Theodosia) (Passio of Theodotus of Ancyra) (Passio of Gordianus) BHL (Life of the Man of God) (Acts of Epipodus and Alexander) (Martyrdom of Maximian and Isaac) (Passio of Marculus) (Passio of Nereus and Achilleus) (Passio of Salsa) BHO (Doctrina Addai) (Life of the Man of God) (Life of Barsamya) (Lives of Behnam and Sara) (Life of Dionysius the Areopagite) (Testament of Ephrem) (Life of Gabriel) (Lives of Gurya, Shmona and Habib) : (Passio of Habib) : (Life of Mar Qardagh) (Acts of Matthias and Andreas among the Anthropophagi) (Doctrine of Simon Kepha in the City of Rome) (Life of Peter the Iberian) (History of Philip in the City of Carthage) (Life of Rabbula) (Life of Samuel) (Life of Sharbel) (Life of Shemʾun) (Life of Symeon the Stylite) (Life of Symeon the Stylite) (Acts of Thomas) Bible Genesis : :
Bible (cont.) : : Exodus : : : n. Samuel : Kings Psalms : [] Ezekiel Daniel , , Matthew : n. : n. : : Mark : n. : : n. : : : : Luke : : : : : : John : : : n.
: n. : : Acts : n. : : n. Romans : Corinthians : n. n. Hebrews : Bible: apocrypha Tobit : Maccabees : : : Maccabees Bible: apocryphal acts of the apostles Acts of John Acts of Matthias and Andreas among the Anthropophagi BHG d BHO CANT Acts of Pilatus CANT . Acts of Thomas BHO CANT .I Doctrina Addai BHO Doctrine of Simon Kepha in the City of Rome BHO CANT Callimachus Iambi F
CANT . (Acts of Pilatus) .IV (Martyrdom of Peter) (Doctrine of Simon Kepha in the City of Rome) (Acts of Matthias and Andreas among the Anthropophagi) .I (Acts of Thomas) Carneïscus Philistas PHerc. Cassiodorus Variarum libri XII .. Cassius Dio .. .. n. .. n. .. n. . .. n. , .. .[].. n. Cicero Brutus De divinatione . De officiis .. De optimo genere oratorum , n. De oratore . n. Epistulae ad Atticum .. Epistulae ad familiares .. CIL I2 n. III V VI , n. , VI ,, n.
VI ,, n. VI ,, VI ,, VI VI VI VI n. VI VIII n. X X XIV Clemens of Alexandria Stromateis . n. Contest of Homer and Hesiod (or Certamen) n. , , n. n. , n. , , , n. , n. , n. , , , , , , n. , n. , , CPG (Helladius of Caesarea, Life and Encomium of Basil of Caesarea) (Helladius of Caesarea, Life and Encomium of Basil of Caesarea) (Testament of Ephrem) (Passio of Golindouch) Damascius In Phaedonem . . . Philosophical History (Life of Isidore) A B C C A
Damascius (cont.) F I Demetrius of Magnesia Poets and Authors of the Same Name . . Didymus of Alexandria On Demosthenes col. n. Dio Chrysostom/Dio of Prusa Orationes . . . n. Diodorus Siculus Bibliotheca historica .. . n. . n. n. .. Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers . . . . . . . . . . . . . , n. , , . n. . . . n. . . . n. . n. . n. . n.
. . . n. . n. . . . n. . n. . n. , . . . . n. . . . , . . . . n. . . . n. . , . . . . . n. . n. . . .. n. . . . . , . . . . , n. , . . . a .b
. n. .b a . n. . .b a .b . .a .b . . . . . . . , n. . . n. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . n. . . n. . . . . . .. . . , ,
. . , . . . . . . . n. . . n. . . n. . n. , . n. . . n. . . . . . . . . , . Dionysius of Halicarnassus Antiquitates romanae .. n. .. De compositione verborum , n. De Demosthene De Thucydide , n. Epistula ad Pompeium . . Doctrine of Simon Kepha in the City of Rome CANT Ephorus FGrHist F n. Éracles .
Eunapius Lives of Philosophers and Sophists .. [] . [] , .. [] , .. [] .. [] . [] .. [] .. [] .. [] .. [] .. [] .. [] , .. [] .. [] . [ ] .. [] . [ ] .. [] .. [ ] . [] .. [] . [ ] .. [] .. [] .. [] .. [] . [ ] . [ ] . [] .. [] , .. [] .. . [] .. [] , . [ ] . [ ] .. [] .. [ ] .. [] .. [] .. [ ] . [ ] , .. [] .. [ ] .. []
.. [ ] .. . [ ] .. [] .. [] .. [] .. [ ] .. [] . [ ] .. [] .. [ ] .. [] .. [] .. [] .. [] .. [] .. [ ] .. [ ] .. [] , .. [] n. . [] .. [] [] [] [] , , [] , , [] , . [] . [] .. [] .. [] .. [] [] , .. [] [] .. [] .. [] .. [] .. [] (Boissonade) n. , n. (Boissonade) , (Boissonade) (Boissonade) (Boissonade) (Boissonade)
Euripides Bacchae Phoenissae Eusebius of Caesarea Contra Hieroclem , n. , Contra Marcellum .. De Martyribus Palaestinae (recensio prolixior) . n. . n. Historia ecclesiastica .. .. n. .. .. . .. .. .. n. .. n. . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. n. .. .. .. , n. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. , n.
.. .. .. .. .. , n. .. . .. .. .. .. .. . Vita Constantini .. . . . n. . n. .. .. , n. .. .. .. . n. .. .. .. n. . .. , , , , .. , .. .. . .. .. .. n. . .. . .. n. . . . n. .. n. . . .. . .. n. .. .. ..
Eusebius of Caesarea (cont.) .. . . .. .. . , . .. .. . .. n. . . . . .. . .. . . . .. . .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. . .. , , n. , .. , .. .. . . .. .. .. . .. . . .. ..
.. .. Eustathius of Thessalonica Commentarius ad Homeri Iliadem . . , n. . n. Eutropius . n. FGrHist F n. F F n. F II A II D n. Ephorus F n. Hermippus of Smyrna F n. Ion of Chios: Visits/Epidēmiai Neanthes of Cyzicus: Lives of Illustrious Men F F F F F a F b F F F F Nicolaus F Stesimbrotus of Thasos [] FGrHistCont IV A , Frontinus Strategematica .. n. Gellius Attic Nights
. . .. Praef. Gregory of Nazianzus Oration .. . Gregory of Nyssa Life of Moses Gregory the Great Dialogues .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. : Prol. .. .. .. .. . . .. .. .. .. .
. . . .. .. .. . .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. . .. Prol. Heliodorus Ethiopian Story . . n. , , n. .. .. Helladius of Caesarea Life and Encomium of Basil of Caesarea CPG CPG Heraclides Lembus Politeiai n. Heraclitus DK B DK B DK B Hermippus of Smyrna FGrHist F n. On Aristotle F On Gorgias F On Hipponax F On Isocrates F
Hermippus of Smyrna (cont.) On Lawgivers F On the Pupils of Isocrates F On Pythagoras F On the Seven Sages F On Theophrastus F Hermodorus of Syracuse On Plato T Herodian .. n. Herodotus Histories . n. . . , . , . . . . . . . . . n. . . n. . .. n. . n. . n. . . . . .. , n. . , n. . n. .. .. . . .
Hesiod Works and Days Hesychius/Suda nn. & n. , n. , n. n. n. Himerius Orationes . . . Historia Augusta Hadrian . Historia monachorum in Aegypto . History of Philip in the City of Carthage BHO Homer Iliad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Margites (ascribed to) F . Odyssey .
. . . . . . . . . . . . Horace Ars Poetica n. n. n. Epistulae .. Odae . n. .. Satirae .. .. .. n. .. n. .. Iamblichus De mysteriis . n. De vita Pythagorica n. . n. , . , , ,
n. I.Erythrai Klazomenai IG I3 bis II/III2 ; n. II/III2 II/III3 ,, II/III3 ,, n. II/III3 ,, V , XII ,, n. XII ,, XII ,, nn. & IGLS ILLRP n. ILS n. n. n. l. l. n. Infancy Gospel of Thomas BHG p pb InscrIt XIII , n. XIII , n. XIII , n. XIII , n. XIII , n. Ion of Chios FGrHist IOSPE I2 I.Priene
I.Priene (cont.) + I.Priene B M I.Sestos Isocrates Antidosis , , Evagoras , n. , , , , n. , , n. Helen Nicocles Panathenaicus
Jacob of Serugh Metrical Homily on the Holy Mar Ephrem PO . Jerome Contra Iovinianum .. n. Epistulae Illustrious Men Praef. n. Praef. Praef. Life of Hilarion . () . () . () . () . () . () . () . () . () . () . () . () . () . . ( ) . . () ( ) . () . () . () . () . () Life of Malchus . Life of Paul of Thebes Josephus Jewish Antiquities . n. . . . n. .
Jewish War . . Life of Joseph/Vita laudatio Murdiae CIL VI n. ILS n. laudatio Turiae CIL VI , CIL VI Col. I l. n. Col. II l. Col. II l. n. Libanius Epistulae . . . Orationes . . . . . Life of Aesop W Life of Barsamya BHO Life of Dionysius the Areopagite BHO
Life of Gabriel BHO Life of Mar Qardagh BHO Life of Pachomius B B B B B B B B B B B n. B n. B B n. B B B B B B B B B B G G G G G G Life of Peter the Iberian BHO Life of Pindar LDAB POxy. , MP3 Life of Rabbula BHO Life of Samuel (abbot of Mar Gabriel) BHO Life of Samuel of Qalamūn Life of Sharbel BHO
Life of Shemʾun BHO Life of Symeon the Stylite BHO BHO Life of the Man of God BHG BHL BHO Life of Theodore the Alexandrian B n. B n. Lives of Behnam and Sara BHO Lives of Gurya, Shmona and Habib : BHO Livy Ab urbe condita Praef. n. .. .. .. .. Lucian Alexander or the False Prophet . , n. , , ,
, , , Bis Accusatus Contemplantes n. De domo Demonax , De morte Peregrini , ,
, Dialogi mortuorum . Gallus Icaromenippus Juppiter Tragoedus Necyomantia . Philopseudes Pseudologista Quomodo historia conscribenda sit Rhetorum praeceptor
Verae historiae . n. , n. , , n. , .. Lucilius F n. Marinus Proclus, or On Happiness . , . n. Martyrdom of Maximian and Isaac BHL § Martyrdom of Peter BHG CANT .IV Maximus of Tyre Orationes . n. Menander Rhetor On Epideictic n. Memra on Habib : AMS I Memra on Isaac ms. Dayr al Suryan syr. f. v v n. Memre on Gurya and Shmona AMS I
Memre on Sergius and Bacchus AMS VI Neanthes of Cyzicus Lives of Illustrious Men FGrHist F FGrHist F FGrHist F FGrHist F a FGrHist F b FGrHist F FGrHist F FGrHist F FGrHist F FGrHist F Nepos, Cornelius Agesilaus . Atticus . . . . . . , . . . . , . , . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . , , . . . . . . Praef. Epaminondas . Eumenes . Hannibal . . Illustrious Men Praef. Miltiades . Pelopidas , . , , .. Thrasybulus . Timotheus . Nicetas David Paphlagon Vita Ignatii Nicolaus of Damascus History , n. F F F Life of Caesar (Augustus) , , ,
, , , , , ,
, , F F , , n. Origen Contra Celsum . n. Ovid Amores .. n. Epistulae ex Ponto . . . . . . Fasti . n. . Tristia .. Palladius Dialogue Concerning the Life of John Chrysostom Lausiac History Panegyrici latini () n. Parisinus gr. Passio of Agatha BHG Passio of Barbara BHG Passio of Dativus, Saturninus and others § n. Passio of Golindouch BHG CPG
Passio of Gordianus BHG Passio of Habib : BHO Passio of Hadrian and Natalia BHG Passio of Indes and Domna BHG z §§ §§ Passio of Iuliana BHG z BHG Passio of Marculus BHL Passio of Nereus and Achilleus BHL Passio of Nicephorus BHG Passio of Pancratius of Rome BHG Passio of Panteleemon BHG z Passio of Photina BHG g Passio of Saba the Goth BHG §. Passio of Salsa BHL Passio of Sergius and Bacchus BHG Passio of Theodosia BHG y Passio of Theodotus of Ancyra BHG Patrologia graeca /: (Life of Mary of Egypt) : (Passio of Agatha) : (Passio of Iuliana) : (Passio of Panteleemon) Patrologia latina : (Jerome, Lives of Paul, Malchus and Hilarion) n.
Pausanias .. .. n. .. .. .. .. PBerol. LDAB MP3 Petronius Satyrica . PHaun. , n. MP3 LDAB Philippus of Opus On Plato T Philo I Moses n. n. , n. , n.
n. II Moses n. n. De opificio mundi Philodemus of Gadara Academicorum index PHerc. PHerc. PHerc. PHerc. PHerc. , col. PHerc. col. . cols. . . cols. . . PHerc. + PHerc. PHerc. PHerc. , PHerc. On Epicurus PHerc. col. col. col. PHerc. col. col. On Philonides PHerc. + + Poetica/Περὶ ποιημάτων .. .. n. Pragmateiai PHerc. col. . Rhetorica . Philostratus, L. Flavius Imagines Proem .. .. ..
Life of Apollonius . . .. n. , . , , , n. .. .. .. .. . . . .. n. , . .. .. n. .. .. . . . . . . . . .. .. .. . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . .. . .
Philostratus, L. Flavius (cont.) . . . . . . . .. . .. . . . . . .. . .. . . .. Lives of the Sophists n. , , , , , , , n. ,
, , , , , n. , , , , , n. , , , , n. , , , , , n. , n. , , n. , ,
n. , , , , , , Photius Bibliotheca , a b Pindar Isthmian Odes . P.KRU , , , ,
n. n. n. n.
Platina, Bartolomeo Lives of the Popes Vita Christi Plato Alcibiades Apologia b c Gorgias
e b c d d a Parmenides b Phaedo c d c d Phaedrus e c Protagoras d e e a c d Respublica e Sophista d Symposium a b b b a b Theaetetus a b Plinius Maior/Pliny the Elder Historia naturalis . .. . n. .. .. . , . . . . . .. .. . n. Plinius Minor/Pliny the Younger Epistulae . .
Plinius Minor/Pliny the Younger (cont.) . n. .. n. .. .. n. . .. n. , . .. . , n. .. n. . n. . .. n. . .. . .. .. n. .. .. n. , .. n. .. .. .. . Panegyricus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . , . , n. . , .
. . n. . . . . . n. . . . . . . n. , Plotinus Enneads . Plutarch Adversus Colotem A Aemilius Paullus . . . Agesilaus . . . . . . . Agis Alcibiades . Alexander . n. , . . . , , . , . n. , . . n.
. . n. . . . Antonius . n. Aratus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . n. .
. . . . . Aristides . n. . n. . n. . n. . n. . , n. Artaxerxes . . , . . . . , . . , . . . . . . . . . . .
Plutarch (cont.) . . . n. . . . , n. . . , . , . n. , . . . . . . Camillus . Cato Maior . , n. . n. . n. . n. . n. . n. . . Cato Minor . n. . n. . . Cicero . Cimon
. . , . . n. . . . Convivium Septem Sapientium A E , Coriolanus . Crassus . . Demosthenes . . . . Demetrius . . n. . n. De recta ratione audiendi B D F D De sera numinis vindicta D F Galba . . . . . . . . . . , .
. . . . . . . . . . Lucullus . Lycurgus . . Lysander Marcellus . Moralia B n. B F C n. D F A E n. Nicias . , . . Numa . . Otho . . . . . , Pericles . n. , n. . . . . .
Philopoemen . Phocion . . . Pompey . n. Praecepta gerendae rei publicae B C B n. Quaestiones romanae Quomodo quis suos in virtute sentiat profectus B Romulus . Solon . n. n. n. . n. . Sulla . Themistocles . . . . . Theseus . . n. . Timoleon . Polemo Physiognomy Leiden A Leiden B
Pollux . Polybius Historiae .. n. .. n. .. .. .. . n. .. .. , .. .. Porphyry Life of Plotinus n. . , n. , . , . n. Life of Pythagoras n. Sentences Leading to the Intelligible Possidius of Calama Life of Augustine Proclus (Eutychius Proclus) Chrestomathy n. n. n. , n. , n. , , nn. & nn. & , , n.
Proclus (of Athens) Commentary on Plato’s Republic . n. Propertius Elegy .. n. .. n. Protoevangelium of James BHG Prudentius Peristephanon . Pseudo Callisthenes see Alexander Romance Pseudo Demetrius On Style Pseudo Dio Chrysostom . . , Pseudo Herodotus see Vita (Homeri) Herodotea Pseudo Longinus Περὶ ὕψους (de Sublimitate) . n. Pseudo Lucian In Praise of Demosthenes n. , , , Pseudo Plato Hipparchus b Pseudo Plutarch On the Life and Poetry of Homer . n. , n. , , nn. , & . , , .. n. . . , n. . , , nn. & . n. , n. , , n. .. n.
Quintilian Institutiones oratoriae .. .. n. .. .. n. .. .. n. .. n. .. n. .. n. .. n. .. n. .. n. .. n. .. n. .. n. .. n. .. n. .. .. .. n. .. .. n. Sallust Catiline (or Catilinarian War) . .. Jugurtha Sappho F Satyrus of Callatis Pontica Life of Euripides LDAB POxy. , POxy. , MP3 Seneca, L. Annaeus Apocolocyntosis Epistulae SEG , , Sextus Empiricus
Adversus mathematicos . SH Sopater Prolegomena in Aristidem , Sophocles T Speusippus Funeral Banquet of Plato/Encomium of Plato F Statius Silvae . Stesimbrotus of Thasos FGrHist () F Strabo .. .. Suetonius Augustus . , Caesar (Julius) . . Claudius Domitian Grammarians . . Nero
Suetonius (cont.) Otho . Rhetoricians . Tiberius Tacitus Agricola , n. , . n. , . . . , . . . . . . , . , . . , . . , . . . . . . . . . . . . , . .
. , . . , . n. , , . . . . . . , Annals . .. . .. . . Dialogus de oratoribus . n. , Historiae .. n. .. Tatian Oratio ad Graecos . .. n. Testament of Ephrem BHG BHO CPG II, Themistius Orationes . . .b Theocritus Idylls . Theodoret of Cyrrhus Religious History of the Monks of Syria Prol. . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . Theon Progymnasmata . n. . n. . n. . n. . n. . n. . n. . n. Theophrastus F D De sensu Thucydides . n. .. . n. .. .. , . . . n. . . , .. , .. . n. .. . Tropaea Augusti CIL V Tzetzes Chiliades
. . . .
n.
Valerius Maximus .. Velleius Paterculus Historia romana .. . n. . . n. Virgil Aeneis . . Georgica . n. Vita (Homeri) Herodotea (Pseudo Herodotus) n. , n. , , , n. , , , Vita (Homeri) Romana n. , , , n.
Vita (Homeri) Romana (cont.) n. , n. , n. , Vita (Homeri) Scorialensis . n. , nn. & . , . Vita Sophoclea n. William of Tyre Chronicon : , : : : Wordsworth, William Prelude . . Xenocrates On Plato’s Life F Xenophanes DK B DK Xenophon of Athens Agesilaus . n. . n. . n. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ,
Anabasis .. . .. .. . .. . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Cyropaedia .. .. .. .. n. , , n. . .. .. .. . . ..
Hellenica .. .. n. Memorabilia . .. ..
.. .. Respublica Lacedaemoniorum . Symposium . ,
G I
.................................................
Note : Due to different name inversion rules across time spans of history and different cultures, for the sake of consistency and ease of use, only modern names have been inverted (e.g. Stanley, Thomas). Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, for example, will be found under M (not A or S). Excep tions are those parts of names that commonly and unambiguously occur in isolation (e.g. Nepos under N, not under C of Cornelius). Note : Arabic names beginning with al are indexed under the root portion of the name (e.g. al Husayn will be found under Husayn). In the bibliography, however, such names will be found under the ‘a’ to facilitate digital cross referencing. Note : As many biographies start with Life of, these have been indexed with the name of the person first and in the case of multiple sub entries just the name of the person. Titles of acta, passiones, and Martyrdoms are found under A, P, and M respectively. Note : For ease of use, titles of Lives that are part of collective biographies are usually indexed alongside (rather than under) the overarching titles. Under Plutarch, for example, Alexander and Parallel Lives have separate entries, even if the former is part of the latter.
A
Abaris abbreviations ‘Abd Allāh al Husaynī: on Daniel ‘Abd al Rahmān ibn Abī Hātim al Rāzī: Kitāb : : al Jarh: wa’l Ta‘dīl ‘Abd al Razzāq al S: an‘ānī Abdisho: Tragedy Abonotichus Abraham , memra Abraham, Life of n Abraham of Pboou, Life of Abraham of Qidun and his Niece Maria, Life of Abraham Qidunaya Abū Dāwud Sulaymān ibn al Hassān : (Ibn Juljul): Ṭ abaqāt al At:ibbā’ wa ’l Hukamā’ (The Classes of : Physicians and Philosophers) Abū ’l Hasan ‘Alī al Mas‘ūdī : Acacius
Academicorum index , Academics , , Achilles, Tale of Acts of Andrew , Acts of John , Acts of Mar Mari Acts of Matthias and Andreas among the Anthropophagi Acts of Paul Acts of Paul and Thecla Acts of Peter Acts of Philip Acts of Pilatus (Hypomnemata Ananiou) Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs Acts of Thomas , , Adam of Bremen , Adalbert Adams, S. Addai/Thaddaeus (apostle) , , Addison, Joseph Cato, a Tragedy Aedesius , ,
Aelius Aristides , , , Panegryic of Athens Sacred Orations Aelius Donatus: ‘Donatus auctus’ Aeneas: epigrams Aeschines of Athens (orator) , , Aeschines of Sphettus (or Aeschines Socraticus; philosopher) Alcibiades n Aspasia Aeschylus: Ion of Chios Aesop , , , , Aesop, Life of n, , n, , , animal fables Byzantine biographies colloquial Greek Koinē death deformity and ugliness embedded narratives fluidity and complexity folk narrative tradition , G version ironic mise en abyme Joseph novella, parallel with mega fable myths and folktales orally transmitted folk materials parallel circulation of variant forms Perriana version popular biography scabrous novellas Seven Sages Tale of Ahiqar, based on , : tripartite structure W version Westermanniana version Afranius Silo Agallianus, Theodore Agapitos, P.A. Agathangelos History of Armenia , Agathion Agathobulus , Agathocles Agesilaus encomium on see Xenophon of Athens Lives of see Nepos; Plutarch Agricola see Tacitus
Agrippa, M. Ahiqar : Ahiqar, Tale of , , , : Ahmad al Khat:īb al Baghdādī: Tārīkh : Baghdād (The History of Baghdad) Ahmad Ibn Hanbal : : Ahudemmeh : Aigrain, R. n ‘Ā’isha bint Abī Bakr akhbārī transmissions Alcidamas: Contest of Homer and Hesiod , Alexander see Plutarch Alexander of Abonotichus Alexander the ‘Clay Plato’ , , Alexander or the False Prophet see Lucian of Samosata Alexander the Great , Alexander, Life of: Syriac translation Alexander Polyhistor Alexander Romance see Pseudo Callisthenes Alexander, Tale of Alfieri, Vittorio: Timoleonte ‘Alī ibn Asākir: Tārikh madinat Dimashq Allen, T.W. , Amaury, King Ambrogio Traversari , Ameinias Amphilochius of Iconium: Life of Athanasius of Alexandria (false attribution) Amyntianus Anabasis see Xenophon of Athens Anania Širakac’i , Anarchus of Abdera Anaximander Anaximenes of Lampsacus Anderson, G. , n Andrew the Fool anecdotes , Augustine of Hippo: Confessions biographical dictionaries , Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers , , , Hellenistic biography , Herodotus: Lives of Croesus and Cyrus
anecdotes (cont.) holy men inscriptions and epigraphic sources Ion of Chios , , Jewish biography Lucian: Demonax, Life of monks (Lives of) Pachomius, Lives of Philostratus: Apollonius , Plutarch: Parallel Lives n political biography popular biography , Ps. Callisthenes: Alexander Romance , seventeenth and eighteenth centuries , , Suetonius: Illustrious Men and Caesars , , Angeli da Scarpeia, Jacopo: Cicero translation Anna Comnena Alexias Anselm anti bios anti features n Antigonus of Carystus , , , n On His Art Antimachus of Colophon , , Antiochus, Gregory n Antiochus I of Commagene (epigram) Antipater Antisthenes of Rhodes , Cyrus (or On Kingship) Antoninus Pius , Antonius Diogenes: Wonders beyond Thule , Antony, Life (and Regimen) of (Saint) see Athanasius of Alexandria Antony, Life of (Mark, triumvir) see Plutarch Antony Rhetor Aphou of Pemje (Oxyrhynchus) , Aphrahat Apocalypse of Peter n Apocalypse of Pseudo Methodius Apocalypse of Samuel of Qalamūn n apocrypha see apostles and apocryphal literature
Apollo (anchorite) Apollodorus of Athens Chronologies , Apollonius see Philostratus Apollonius (Martyrdom) n Apollonius of Rhodes Apollonius of Tyana , Apology see Justin Martyr; Plato; Xenophon of Athens apologetic works n, Byzantium Philostratus: Apollonius political biography in the age of Augustus speeches Xenophon of Athens , apostles and apocryphal literature , n, , , , , , Addai Byzantium Daniel David Elijah , , , hand lists under pseudonyms heterodoxy James John , , Luke , , , Mark n, martyrdoms as centrepiece of narrative Matthew n, , monks (Lives of) , narrative style Paul , , , , , , Peter , , rewriting, expansion and epitomization saints’ Lives , Syriac (Lives in) , , , Thecla , Thomas , Apuleius , De Platone et dogmate eius Metamorphoses , , Ara Arabic (Lives in) , akhbārī transmissions ascetics
authenticity biographical dictionaries anecdotes , chronological order , historiography illustrative material of local orientation philologists , physicians and philosophers poetry and poems professionals topographical arrangement variegated biographies of transmitters ‘books of disparaging and authentication’ (books category) Book of Disparaging and Authentication (book title) chronology , Church Fathers ‘eminent men’ epic texts expeditions feats genealogy hadīth transmitters , , : hagiography , historiography , individual biography Islamic tradition Jesus later developments martyrs , miracles monks nomenclature poetical verses prophets, pre Islamic , Sābiqah criterion saints , science of trustworthy authorities Sīra: prophetic biography (Biography of Prophet Muhammad) , : , , , Sunna t:abaqāt biographies tarjama
virtues vitae ‘wide range of fields and classes, a’ (later format) Aratus: Memoirs Aratus see Plutarch Arcadius Arcesilaus , , Archelaus II of Cilicia aretalogy/sacred biography n, , , , , , argumentative tone n Arianus Aristarchus Aristippus of Cyrene Ariston of Ceos n Aristocles of Messina , Aristodemus of Nysa , Aristodemus of Sparta Aristophanes and Aesop Aristotle , , and Aesop birth to death life writing and Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers Ethics genre hierarchy and relationships , genre overlap and differentiation and Homer On Poets , n poetic tradition of praise , Poetics Rhetoric n, , Rhetoric to Alexander (Pseudo Aristotle) n, song to Virtue , sophists , unity and multiplicity Aristotle, Life of see Diogenes Laertius Aristoxenus of Tarentum , , , , , n, , n Archytas (of Tarentum) , On Flute Players On Tragic Poets Plato , ,
Aristoxenus of Tarentum (cont.) Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans , Socrates , Telestes the musician , Armenian (Lives in) , , autobiography bards (gusan) Bible causation Christianity , chronology collective identity and values first person narrative geopolitical transformation of Armenia Greek provenance hagiography , Hamazasp and Sahak (martyrology of) heroic tales , historiography , , , : Hrip’simē, Saint (biographical treatment of) hymnography hyperbole integral epic Koriwn: Life of Maštoc‘ , Ƚazar P‘arpeci‘i: History and its three biographical sketches , literary significance martyrs , , , memorial monasticism motivation oral culture oral myth historicized , paradox prominence of individuals portrayed rhetoric , , scribal schools series of tales speeches Syriac provenance utilitarian aesthetic Arrian Alexander , Anabasis
Discourses Tillorobus, Life of Arrighetti, G. n, , , Artaxerxes see Plutarch artists , , , Arulenus Rusticus: Thrasea Paetus Asclepius , , Ašxarhac’oyc’ (anonymous) Athanasius of Alexandria Antony, Life (and Regimen) of , , n, , , , , , n Coptic (Lives) , martyr accounts and scholarship monastic biographies , , Syriac version ascetic and monastic Lives , Byzantine biographies , collective biographies Defence of the Nicene Definition holy men seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, influence in Syncletica, Life of (spurious attribution) Athanasius of Athos Athanasius of Panagiu Athanasius of Athos, Life of Athanassiadi, P. n, n Athenaeus , , , n Stesimbrotus of Thasos: ‘On Themistocles, Thucydides and Pericles’ Athenocles Athenopolis (honorific decree) Attaleiates, Michael Atticus see Nepos, Cornelius Attus Navius (statue) Aubrey, John: Brief Lives , , Auffarth, C. Augustan History see Historia Augusta Augustine of Hippo: Confessions n, , allusiveness anecdotes authenticity , , , authority , autobiography , , , , , , ,
beliefs, motivations and intellectual development Book , , , , , Book , , Book , , Book , , Book , , Book , , , Book , , Book , , Book , , , Book , , , n, , Book Book Book chronology , and City of God complexity content dual perspective God , , , , , , honesty identity of author and narrator indefinite and distancing language individual account of a life infancy and early childhood , , , , , inner feelings and self awareness of writer memory, central role of narrative span narrator further identified with author paratextuality past and present self, discontinuity of public life, preaching and achievements reliability of narrative religious conversion , representation of an individual and Retractationes , , , retrospective narrator to be identified with protagonist of past events self analysis self assessment self disclosure self examination, retrospective
self representation separation of protagonist and narrator seventeenth and eighteenth century biography, influences on , , , solitude spiritual development structure style truth/honesty Augustus epigrams portraiture, statues and arches , , , Res Gestae Divi Augusti , , Aulus Gellius , Attic Nights Aurelius, Marcus see Marcus Aurelius Aurelius Victor Book on the Caesars (Liber de caesaribus) authenticity Arabic (Lives in) Augustine of Hippo: Confessions , , , Coptic (Lives in) Eusebius of Caesarea and bishop’s biography , martyrs (Lives of) , , autobiography Armenian (Lives in) Augustine of Hippo: Confessions , , , , , , , Byzantium , Herod, King inscriptions and epigraphic sources (biographical material in) , , Jewish biography monuments in ancient Egypt , receptions of Greek and Roman poets in twentieth century , , seventeenth and eighteenth centuries , , solitude and biography ,
autobiography (cont.) Xenophon of Athens , Avagliano, A. Avila, Teresa de: Libro de la vida
B
Babai the Great , Abimelek of Qardu Christina of Karka d Bet Slok John the Arab Bacon, Francis: De argumentis scientiarum Bahram V Baldwin (leper king) Bar Hebroyo Bar Shabba Barhadbeshabba ‘Arbaya: Ecclesiastical : History Barlaam Romance (or Edifying Story of Barlaam and Joasaph) Barnes, T.D. , , Barns, J.W.B. Barone, F.P. n, n Barsamya Barthes, R. , , , Basil, Life of Basil of Caesarea , , , History of Joseph Longer Responses Basil Camaterus n Basil the Younger Bastiaensen, A.A.R. , n Batstone, W.W. Baumeister, T. Baur, F.C. Baybars (sultan) Bayle, Pierre Dictionnaire historique et critique, Le Bearzot, C. n Bede, Venerable: Lives of the Abbotts Benedict Biscop Benedict of Nursia: Rule Berschin, W. , n, Betz, H. D. n Bias of Priene (sage) , , Bible , , see also apostles and apocryphal literature;
gospels; Old Testament; New Testament biblical figures , , , see also apostles and apocryphal literature; holy men (Lives of); martyrs (Lives of); saints (Lives of) biblical stylization , bibliography, biography as Bidez, J. n Bieler, L. biographical dictionaries see under Arabic (Lives in) Biondo, Flavio birth to death life writing , n, , , , , , , , , , bishop biographies , see also Eusebius of Caesarea: Life of Constantine Boccaccio, Giovanni: Famous Women (De mulieribus claris) , Bolland, J. Bollandists: Acta sanctorum Bompaire, J. n Boniface of Ferentum Book of Sindbad ‘Book of Women’ Borg, B. Boter, G.J. n Boud’hors, A. Bourdieu, P. Bowersock, G.W. n, n Bowie, E.L. Bracciolini, Poggio Brakke, D. n Brantôme, Pierre de Vies des dames galantes, Les Vies des hommes illustres, Les Bremmer, J.N. n Bretonne, Restif de la: Monsieur Nicolas Brinkman, A. n Brisson, L. n, n Broch, Hermann: Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil) , , Brock, S.P. , Brown, P. Bruni, Leonardo
Vita Aristotelis Vita Ciceronis Vite di Dante e del Petrarca Bruns, I. n Buddha, Life of Budge, E.A.W. , Bulagoras (honorific decree) Bultmann, R. Burckhardt, J. n Burgess, T.C. , Burkert, W. , n Burnett, Gilbert: Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale, The Burridge, R.A. , Buzio, Ippolito Byzantium (Lives in) , adventures as important element Aesop narrative tradition Alexander the Great narrative tradition anti bios apologetic writing apostles and apocryphal literature , ascetical life attachments or introductions autobiography , biographical sketches ‘biographization’ bios bios kai politeia , canonization character drawing character traits church leaders collective biographies education and learning emperors , encomia , , , , , , , on living persons non hagiographical patriarchal n, epitaphios logos , , ēthopoiia (characterization through speech) fictional Lives followers and founding monasteries
funeral orations , hagiographical calendars in metrical form hagiography hēsychia (tranquillity) , historical persons historiography , biographical arrangement homily (not clearly distinguished from encomium) hypomnēma invective (psogos) linear narrative structure logoi logos basilikos (imperial speech) , , love romances/novels martyrium , mēnologia , metaphraseis Metaphrastic mēnologion miracles , monastic biographies , , , , overcoming obstacles panegyricum , passiones , patriarchs , preface to collected works preface to a monastic rule (typikon) or to a will progymnasma pseudo autobiography rhetoric saints fictitious secular biography , short biographies speculum principis structure stylistic elaboration synaxarion topoi virtue , visions vita/bios , will, autobiographical
C Caesar (Augustus) see Nicolaus of Damascus Caesars see Aurelius Victor; Epitome de Caesaribus; Plutarch; Suetonius Caine, B. Calasiris , , Caldarelli, G. n Callaghan, Jim Callias of Sphettus (honorific decree) Callimachus , Iambi Pinakes n Callisthenes Callu, N.P. n Calzolari, V. Cameron, A. , , , , , n Campano, Giovanni Antonio: Life of Pius II n Candida Canetti, Elias Capasso, M. Caracalla , Carlyle, Thomas Carneïscus: Philistas Carrara, Francesco da , Carson, Anne If not, winter (translation of fragments of Sappho) Men in the Off Hours , ‘TV Men’ , Carterius Cassian, John Conferences Institutes Cassiodorus Cassius Dio n Castelli, E.A. Caster, M. Catalogue of the Academics see Academicorum index; Philodemus of Gadara Cato the Elder: Origines Cato the Younger Celestinus of Rome: Encomium of Victor the General (false attribution) Celsus (said in Lucian to be the author of) Against the Magicians
Cerri, G. n Certeau, Michel de Chamaeleon of Heraclea Pontica , , Charlemagne Chateaubriand, François René de: Mémoires d’Outre tombe Chénier, Marie Joseph: Timoléon Chilon of Sparta (sage) Choniates, see Michael Choniates; Nicetas Choniates Christian biography n, , n, , , , , , bishops see bishop biographies communal, polemical and interpretive mode Coptic (Lives in) geographical accuracy hagiography see hagiography historical and moral information holy men see holy men (Lives of) interpretive traditioning knowledge, organization of linguistic plurality Manichaeans martyrs see martyrs (Lives of) miracles see miracles monks see monks (Lives of) orthodox narrative philosophy of history saints see saints (Lives of) truth, relationship of biography to see also apostles and apocryphal literature; bible Christianity , Armenian (Lives in) , monks (Lives of) , Syriac (Lives in) , , Christina of Karka d bet Slok Christodulus of Patmos Chronicle of the Logothete chronicles , , chronology n, , , Arabic (Lives in) Armenian (Lives in) Augustine of Hippo: Confessions , biographical dictionaries , ,
Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers , , genre Hellenistic biography , Homer Isocrates: Evagoras , Italian Renaissance Jewish biography Lucian: Alexander or the False Prophet , Marinus: Proclus, or On Happiness , martyrs (Lives of ) , Philo of Alexandria: biographical works , , philosophers (Lives of) Pliny the Younger: Panegyricus Plutarch: Parallel Lives , political biography Ps. Callisthenes: Alexander Romance sophists , Suetonius: Illustrious Men and Caesars Xenophon of Athens Chrysanthius Chrysippus , Cicero, Marcus Tullius Brutus , , exempla For Marcellus genre hierarchy and relationships , n Italian Renaissance, influence in On the Command of Gnaeus Pompey On the Orator , parallelism and comparison portraiture, statues and arches Cimon , , citation of sources Clark, G. , Claudius: portraiture, statues and arches , Claudius Pollio: Annius Bassus Clay, D. , Clearchus of Soloi: Encomium of Plato Cloelia Cluvius Rufus Coconnas
codex Hersfeldensis codex Memmianus Coetzee, J.M.: Summertime , coin portraiture collective biographies , , , , Byzantium , historical figures , Jerome: Illustrious Men literary figures , Nepos: On Foreign Generals Plutarch: Parallel Lives portraiture , Suetonius: Caesars Syriac (Lives in) Cologne Mani Codex, On the Origins of His Body Colonna, Giovanni Illustrious Men comedy , , n, commemorative and mobilizing function of life writing comparative biographies , see also syncrisis competitive biographies conceptualization (of biography) Confessions see Augustine of Hippo Conrad of Hirsau: Dialogue on the Authors Constans I (emperor) Constantine Acropolites Constantine the Great , , , Constantine, Life of (anonymous) Guidi version Constantine, Life of see Eusebius of Caesarea Constantine Manasses: World Chronicle Constantine VII Constantius Constantius of Ancona Constantius II (portraiture, statues and arches) Contest of Homer and Hesiod , , , Conybeare, C. Cooper, C. n Coptic Encyclopaedia, The Coptic (Lives in) , , , anti Chalcedonians
Coptic (Lives in) (cont.) authenticity basileiai (political history) bishop biographies child donation deeds Christian biography cultural values deeds and documents Egypt , , , encomia , entertainment literature exhortation explanation first person narrative formulaic standardized and repetitive writing fragments of life writing hagiography , immediacy inheritance or divorce settlements invective invocation koptischer Konsens martyrs , , mini vitae miracle stories monastic life stories , morality private legal documents rhetorical elements saints social cohesion Upper Egypt White Monastery library wills Coquin, R. G. Corellius Rufus n Cornelius Nepos see Nepos, Cornelius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, P. Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium corpus tripartitum Cortesi, Paolo Learned Men Cosmas Indicopleustes: Christian Topography n Côté, D. n
counter suggestibility Cox Miller, P. Cox, P. cradle to grave life writing see birth to death life writing Crates of Thebes , Hipparchia honorific decree Critias Croesus Cronius , cross cultural and cross linguistic inclusiveness Ctesias , , Culcianus Curtius Rufus Cynics , , Cyprian of Antioch , n Cyprian, Life and Passion of Cyrenaics Cyril of Scythopolis , , , Cyropaedia see Xenophon of Athens Cyrus (the Great) , n see also Herodotus: on Croesus and Cyrus; and under Xenophon of Athens Cyrus (the Younger) see also under Xenophon of Athens
D
Dacier, A. Dagron, G. n Damascius , n, In Phaedonem Philosophical History or Life of Isidore , n, , , , Damastes and Homer Damgaard, F. , Damianus of Ephesus Damis , Daniel of Sketis, Life of Dante Divine Comedy Inferno Danzig, G. n Daredevils of Sasun Darius ,
David the Armenian David, King defining biography Defoe, Daniel Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Moll Flanders Dekker, R. n Delehaye, H. , della Seta, Lombardo Demeter (statue) Demetrius (author of fragments) Demetrius (patriarch) Demetrius (teacher of Demonax according to Lucian) Demetrius of Corinth (philosopher) Demetrius Cydones Demetrius of Magnesia: Poets and Authors of the Same Name Demetrius of Phalerum Democritus Demonax , Demonax, Life of see Lucian of Samosata Demosthenes , , ‘Departure of the Virgin’ (transitus) Derrida, J. Dexileus (epigram) diachronic focus on specific types of biographies diachronic surveys Dicaearchus of Messina Bios Hellados (Life of Greece) Lives of Philosophers (Peri Biōn, On Lives) n dictionaries, biographical see under Arabic (Lives in) Dictys Cretensis: Ephemeris belli troiani Diderot: Encylopédie Didymus of Alexandria: On Demosthenes , , , n Diels, H. Digenis Akritis Dihle, A. , , Dillon, J.M. n, n Dillon, S. Dio of Prusa (or Dio Chrysostom) , , Borysthenicus
Kingship orations Oration , Diocles of Magnesia n Diocletian , Diodore of Tarsus Diodorus Siculus Diogenes and Alexander the Great (story) Diogenes the Cynic Crates of Thebes Pammetros Diogenes Laertius , Aesop Aristotle biography t, career choice sayings death homonyms , identity key doctrines summary linear sequence list of writings omissions and muddles philosophical activity t, prosopography t, structure topical outline t will catalogues of writings colleagues and associates and Epaminondas and Pelopidas n Epicurean biography, influence on , family background and youth fellow students friends and associates Heraclitus intellectual activity and teachings , interaction Italian Renaissance biographies, influence on , , , Lives and Insights of the Eminent Philosophers and Abbreviated Summary of the Tenets (or Doctrines) of Each Stance , Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers n, , , , , , , ,
Diogenes Laertius (cont.) addenda afterlives and audience ambition anecdotes , , , anthology apophthegms arguments bibliography , , biodoxography bon mots Book , , , , Book , , , Book , , , Book , , , Book , , , , , Book , , , , Book , , , Book , , Book , , , , , Book , , , , caricatures chreiai chronicles and mythography in Hesiodic catalogue style chronology , , citations , content descent, branches of diachronic network dialogues doctrines documents (letters, wills, decrees, epitaphs) , , doxography , , , , elegiac couplets excerpts formats formulaic phrases about death genealogy of philosophy genre overlap and differentiation n geographical sweep Greek and foreign traditions hairesis (choice of standards for truth and value) historical research homonyms ,
Imperial scholarship innovation insights length life of philosophy linear narratives, disregard for long lists of writings method , miniature anthologies of sayings parody parts or domains of physics, logic and ethics pax romana periegetic biography philosophical focus progeny of subjects prologue , prosopography quotations , reading sayings scope seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, influence in stances or schools of thought , , successions , , summaries of doctrine template adapted to subjects temporal sequence, disregard for variety verse virtual heading or lemma mentors Parmenides affiliation and thematic prominence doxography hexameters mini doxography successions periegetic biography , , personal and intellectual descent Pythagoras n, rival families or ‘schools of thought’ , sages Seven Sages n
seventeenth and eighteenth century biographies, influence on Sextus Empiricus solitude Sotion cited studies stylization teachers and teachings , , travels treatises wills wives and children writings , Xenophon Xenophon of Athens: Memorabilia Dionisotti, A.C. Dionysius of Halicarnassus , , Letter to Pompeius Theopompus Dionysius of Miletus Dionysius Thrax Dionysodorus Dionysus Dioscorus of Alexandria distortion Doctrina Addai Doctrine of Simon Kepha in the City of Rome Dolbeau, F. n Dometeinos of Aphrodisias (L. Antonius Claudius Dometeinos Diogenes) , , f Domitian , , , , , , death of Domitius Corbulo: commentarii Dorandi, T. n, n Dorion, L.A. n Dorotheus of Tyre: Lives of the Prophets (attributed to) Doufikar Aerts, F. n doxography Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers , , , Parmenides Philostratus Drake, H.A. n
dramatic representations (acta or praxeis) Drusus Minor Dryden, John: Life of Plutarch Du Toit, D.S. n Duff, T.E. n, , n, Durante, M. Düring, I. n
E
eastern/Near Eastern influences and texts , , , , n, , Ecclesiastical History (Coptic) Eclectics Eco, U.: Il superuomo di massa educational value/pedagogic purpose of biographies , , Armenian (Lives in) Byzantium (Lives in) Hellenistic biography , inscriptions and epigraphic sources (biographical material in) , monuments in ancient Egypt Philostratus: Apollonius n Plutarch , seventeenth and eighteenth centuries , Suetonius Syriac (Lives in) Xenophon of Athens see also Isocrates: Evagoras Edwards, M.J. , , , eighteenth century see seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Einhard: Charlemagne, Life of Elagabalus (statue reconfigured to Severus Alexander) Elea elegies , , Eleucius Elia of Qart:min Philoxenus of Mabbug memra Eliot, T.S. Elisha Elliott, A.G. Elsner, J. Emmanuel of Bet Garmai: Rabban Hormizd memra
Emmel, S. Empedocles , , , , emplotment, modes of ‘Enanisho: Paradise of the Fathers encomium/praise , , , , Byzantium (Lives in) , , , , , , Coptic (Lives in) , fifth century preliminaries Gryllus Hellenistic biography Isocrates: Evagoras , on living persons (Byzantium) Lucian: Demonax, Life of martyrs (Lives of) , medieval life writing non hagiographical (Byzantium) patriarchal (Byzantium) n, Philostratus: Apollonius Pliny the Younger: Panegyricus , poetic tradition of political biography , , , , , , portraiture in Imperial Rome , Ps. Callisthenes: Alexander Romance , rhetorical tradition of , seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sophists , , Syriac (Lives in) , Tacitus: Agricola in Trajanic Rome annalistic structure apologetic works commentarii (notes or reports) on military campaigns , dangerous Lives exitus literature , heroizing accounts of ‘Stoic’ deaths historical features self praise set piece battle scenes speeches syncrisis see also Pliny the Younger: Panegyricus; Tacitus: Agricola Xenophon of Athens , , , ,
Encyclopaedia Judaica Encyclopaedia of the Novel Engels, J. n, n Enoch of Ascoli entertaining aspect of biography , Enzinas, Francisco de Ephesus: Lucius Verus portrait Ephorus of Cyme , , , Seven Sages Ephrem the Syrian , Abraham Qidunaya madrasha Julian Saba madrasha epics , , Epictetus Epicurean biography , Epicureans , , Epicureans in the Garden , Epicurus Anaximenes Aristobulus Callistolas Hegesianax Key Doctrines , epigrams , , , , , character traits Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers , t, funerary epigrams Homer , Italian Renaissance , Philostratus: Apollonius Plutarch: Parallel Lives self representation virtue Epiphanius of Salamis: Lives of the Prophets (attributed to) Epistles/Letters see Pliny the Younger epitaphs , , , epithets, biographical Epitome de Caesaribus Equitius of Valeria Erasmus Erbse, H. Eretriacs Errington, R.M. n, Eshleman, K. Estienne, H. n
Estoria de Espanna (promoted by King Alphonso X) ethics and morals Coptic (Lives in) inscriptions and epigraphic sources (biographical material in) , , monuments in ancient Egypt , Plutarch: Parallel Lives , , political biography , ethnic and cultural factors ethnography Euagon Eualces (epigram) Eucrates Eudaimonics Eudocia (empress) eulogies , , , , , , Byzantium , inscriptions and epigraphic sources , , , , , philosophers , seventeenth and eighteenth centuries , Tacitus’s Agricola and Pliny’s Panegyricus , , Eunapius genre overlap and differentiation n, n, History Lives of (the) Philosophers and Sophists , , , , , , , , sophists , , Euphanes (epigram) Euphemia and the Goth Eupolemus Euripides: Bacchae , Euripides, Life of see Satyrus of Callatis Eusebius of Alexandria Eusebius of Caesarea Against Hierocles n on biographical tradition Chronicle , Constantine , , , n authenticity , bishops caesaropapism , , casual equivalency
content context emperors as bishops (and bishops as bishops) episcopal equivalency , , , genre history Moses typology , , , panegyrical features political importance theological importance Defence of Origen n, , n, , Demonstration of the Gospel n Dionysius , Ecclesiastical History , , , , , , genre overlap and differentiation , n martyrs Martyrs of Palestine, The , , n On Biblical Place Names n Oration to the Saints n Pamphilus , Preparation for the Gospel n Eusebius of Emesa Eustathius of Thessalonica , Eustathius (in Eunapius’ VPS) Euthymius Iber (‘the Georgian’) Eutropius: Breviarium n Evagoras see Isocrates Everett, N. n exaggeration, use of , n, , , , exempla , , martyrs (Lives of) Philostratus: Apollonius portraiture in Imperial Rome seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Suetonius: Illustrious Men and Caesars exemplariness of individual inscriptions and epigraphic sources (biographical material in) , , , medieval life writing , political biography seventeenth and eighteenth centuries , exitus literature ,
Ezechiel: Life of Paul of Tamma (purported author) Ezekiel
F
fables , , , , , Fairweather, J. family prestige Faustina Maior (statue) , f, Favorinus of Arles , , , , , , Fedeli, P. n Felicitas (martyr) n Felix of Fundi fictional life writing n, Byzantium conventional structures medieval life writing Philostratus: Apollonius , , and political biography Ps. Callisthenes: Alexander Romance , receptions of Greek and Roman poets in twentieth century , , saints seventeenth and eighteenth centuries , , , Syriac (Lives in) Xenophon of Athens Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones fifth century BC fifth century preliminaries , eastern preliminaries epics, Homeric hymns , Ion of Chios: Visits/Epidēmiai , poems, epic proto biography and historiography speeches Stesimbrotus of Thasos: The Mysteries , visual art financial and social autonomy of authors Finch, L. first hand knowledge of biographer first person narratives Armenian (Lives in) Coptic (Lives in)
inscriptions and epigraphic sources (biographical material in) Ion of Chios monuments in ancient Egypt Plutarch: Parallel Lives Ps. Callisthenes: Alexander Romance seventeenth and eighteenth centuries solitude and biography Flacelière, R. Flavius Josephus see Josephus Flavius Philostratus see Philostratus Fletcher, R.: Lives of poets and artists Flower, M. Foley, J.M. folk poetry, anonymous folktale motifs n Fontaine, J. , formal features in two or more genres Fortenbaugh, E. Fortunatus of Todi fortune telling handbooks Foucault, M. , , Fowden, G. n, Fredriksen, P. Freud, S. Autobiographical Study, An Frickenschmidt, D. n Frood, E. , Fructuosus (martyr) n Fulvio, Andrea: Portraits of the Illustrious (Illustrium imagines) funeral orations see eulogies funerary inscriptions , , ,
G
Gabriel (b. John of Bartelli) , Gaia Caecilia Gaius Fannius Galaction and Episteme, Life (and Martyrdom) of Gallo, I. Gargiulo, T. n generic essentialism generic inclusiveness Genesius: History Genevieve, Saint, Life of Gennadius
genre ancient understanding of author n consciousness core determinative features development dominant epics n era n geographic locale n Greek , , hierarchy and relationships , holy men Latin , overlap , overlap and differentiation: history and biography personal genre hierarchies of prominent individuals prestige purpose of , ranking secondary societal genre hierarchy specific features , subordinant , system tradition of biography according to ancient biographers Xenophon of Athens Gentili, B. n geographic locale George Acropolites on John III Batatzes and son Theodore George, bishop of the Arab tribes Severus of Antioch memre George of Cyprus George (martyr), Life of George Pachymeres: Michael VIII and Andronicus II George (Saint) George Tornices: Anna Comnena (funeral oration) Gesner, Konrad Geta (portraiture, statues and arches)
Gibbon, Edward: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Gilgamesh epos Gill, C. n Giovio, Paolo Inscriptions Appended to the True Portraits of Famous Men (Elogia veris clarorum virorum imaginibus apposita) Inscriptions of Men Famous for Martial Valour (Elogia virorum bellica a virtute illustrium) Notable Men and Women of Our Time (De viris et foeminis aetate nostra florentibus) Pope Leo X Giwargis Warda George, Saint ‘onyatha Hormizd, Saint ‘onyatha madrasha Paul, Saint ‘onyatha Sabrišo of Bet Koke ‘onyatha Stephen, Saint ‘onyatha Tahmazgerd ‘onyatha Gleason, M.W. n, ‘gnostic’ documents n Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Dichtung und Wahrheit Goldhill, S. Golindouch Gomperz, T. Gordian Gorgias , Encomium of Helen Gorman, P. n Gospel of Thomas gospels , , , , , , , , apocryphal , birth to death biography canonical , , , , cognitive impact competitive aspect of interpretive traditioning definitions hagiography Jesus Christ , ,
gospels (cont.) John , , , , , John the Baptist , Judas Iscariot Luke , , , , Mark , , , , martyrs (Lives of) Matthew monks (Lives of) , narrative Nathanael oral textual nature of composition orthodox narrative performative setting Peter , Philip redaction criticism saints’ Lives synoptic Syriac (Lives in) Thomas Goulet, R. n, n Goulet Cazé, M.O. n graphic descriptions Gray, V. n Graziosi, B. , , , Lives of Homer Gregory the Great Benedict Dialogues Gregory the Illuminator, Saint (biographical treatment of ) , Gregory of Nazianzus encomium Epitaphios of Basil of Caesarea Oration (In praise of Cyprian of Carthage) Oration on Basil the Great Gregory of Nyssa encomium Macrina Moses Gregory Pacurianus Gregory Thaumaturgus: Origen panegyric Gregory of Tours: Liber de miraculis Andreae Apostoli Gryllus
Guarini, Guarino Gurya
H
Habib : Hadot, P. Hadrian (emperor) , , , portraiture, statues and arches , f, , Haecker, Theodor: Vergil, Vater des Abendlandes (Virgil, Father of the West) Hägg, T. , , , n, n, , , n, , , , n, n, , , , n, , hagiography n, , , Arabic (Lives in) Armenian (Lives in) , Byzantium calendars in metrical form in Byzantium Christian biography , Coptic (Lives in) , gospels holy men , , Jerome: Life of Hilarion Jerome: Life of Malchus , Jewish biography martyrs (Lives of) , , medieval life writing monks (Lives of) , , pagan Philostratus: Apollonius picaresque seventeenth and eighteenth centuries , , Syriac (Lives in) , , , , hagiology Haight, E.H. n Hall, S.G. , , n Halliwell, S. n Hamazasp and Sahak (martyrology of) Handyside, P. n Hanink, J.: Lives of poets and artists Hannibal: epigrams Harrison, S.J.
‘harvester of Mactar’ (epigram) Harvey, A.S. , n Havelock, E. Heath, M. Hegesippus n Helena (statue) Heliodorus Ethiopian Story Hellanicus Hellenism , Homer , Lucian: satirical and idealizing Lives , , sophists , , , Hellenistic biography , , anecdotes , argumentum e silentio association of individuals based on doctrinal affinities character and personality of heroes chronology lack of commemorative writing compiled biographical texts composing by compiling method credible, trustworthy testimonies criticism diadochē dialogue form encomia Epicurean biography epistolary evidence grammatical (or Alexandrian) genre historiography idealized biographies institutional form of succession investigation letters and doctrinal texts memoirs monographs , multiplicity On so and so books (Peri + personal name in the genitive) oral tradition periegetic biography: Neanthes of Cyzicus vs. Antigonus of Carystus , Peripatetic genre ,
personal principles and criteria unity written form , , see also Jewish Hellenistic literature Hellenistic period , , , , , , Alexander Romance Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers , holy men , Homer , inscriptions and epigraphic sources (biographical material in) , Jewish biography , martyrs philosophers Philostratus: Apollonius political biographies , n, , portraits, statues and arches Suetonius , Xenophon of Athens Hellenistic philological commentaries and surveys Henricus Aristippus Hephaestion Heraclea Heracles , , , Heraclides Lembus Heraclitus , , , Herder, Johann Gottfried: Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit Herennius Senecio: Life of Helvidius Priscus Hermes Logios Hermias Hermippus of Smyrna , n, , , , n On Aristotle On Gorgias On Hipponax On Isocrates On Lawgivers On the Pupils of Isocrates On the Seven Sages On Pythagoras On Theophrastus ,
Hermodorus of Syracuse: On Plato Hermogenes of Tarsus , n hero myth , Herod, King Autobiography (or Memoirs) , Herodes Atticus , , , Hellēnes honorific decree sophistic self representation , f, , sophists , , , , Herodotus , , , , , , , on Croesus and Cyrus , ethics historiography personal behaviour political biography eastern influences genre hierarchy and relationships poetic tradition of praise political biography proto biography and historiography sages Tatian: Oratio ad Graecos Training of Epicurus as a Cadet Vita Homeri (Life of Homer) (Pseudo Herodotus) see Vita Herodotea heroic tales Armenian (Lives in) Hershbell, J. n, n Hesiod and Homer Works and Days Hesychius of Miletus , Index of Famous Authors heteronyms, fictional and semi fictional Hieronymus see Jerome Hilarion, Life of see Jerome Hilhorst, A. n Himerius , , , Hipparchus Hippias Hippodromus of Thessaly Historia Augusta (or Augustan History) , , , , , Historia Lausiaca (or Lausiac History) , , ,
Historia monachorum in Aegypto (or History of the Monks in Egypt) , , Historia romana n historiography , n, , n Arabic (Lives in) Armenian (Lives in) , , , biographical dictionaries bishop biographies Byzantium , , fifth century preliminaries , Hellenistic biography Herodotus: Lives of Croesus and Cyrus inscriptions and epigraphic sources (biographical material in) , intellectual historiography Lucian: Alexander or the False Prophet medieval life writing Philostratus: Apollonius n Plutarch: Parallel Lives political biography , , seventeenth and eighteenth centuries , , sophists Suetonius: Illustrious Men and Caesars , , Syriac (Lives in) , history , , , , and biography, relationship between , , , History of Apollonius King of Tyre History of Basil , , History of Euphemia and the Goth History of the Great World Conqueror, Alexander of Macedon. A Life of Bravery and Heroic Deeds and also a Death Marqued with Marvels History of Our Lady Mary History of the Monks in Egypt see Historia monachorum in Aegypto History of the Patriarchs History of Philip in the City of Carthage History of Sergius Bahira : Hodkinson, O. Hollerich, M. holy men (Lives of) anecdotes apologetic writings
apophthegmata apostles and apocryphal acts , aretalogy , believers biblical stylization bios or vita and charlatans (distinction) Christian biographies , , deities, miracles Desert Fathers divine beings , , formal characteristics genres gods and demigods gospels , , , apocryphal , canonical , , , , synoptic ‘Gottmensch’ , n hagiography , , pagan hagiology hagios and sanctus Heiligkeit Hellenistic period , intermediate beings invented characters Jewish biographies , , , , Late Antiquity , , , Manichaean martyrs , , , , miracles/miracle workers , , , , , Neoplatonic philosophers Neoplatonic saints non Christian sources ‘pagan’ influences and pagan holy men , , and philosophers (distinction) philosophical dialogue philosophy, definition of rhetorical aspects Roman period sages , saints , and saints (distinction) sceptics
spiritual biographies , , , , , stylization Syriac (Lives in) , terminology thaumaturges theios anēr , topoi , , Homer , , authorship biographical tradition blindness chronology content Contest of Homer and Hesiod (or Certamen) , , date (of Homer) , , death dialect first person pronouns genealogy , Iliad , , , , , , Lives of Homer , Margites (ascribed to) , , mythical genealogies name Odyssey , , , , , , , , , , parentage , place of origin , , , popular biography portraits Proclus: Chrestomathy quote in Plutarch’s Aratus Seven Sages Homer, Life of, Byzantine biographies Homeric Hymn to Apollo Homeric Hymn to Hermes Homeyer, H. Honoratus of Fundi , honorific decrees Horace n, Horsiesius , humanism , , , ibn Ishāq Hunayn : : Hunger, H. Hunzinger, C.
Hurley, D.W. al Husayn ibn Abī Ṭ ālib : Hyginus Hymn of the Pearl (or Hymn of the Soul) Hyperides
I
Iamblichus n, , , , , , , , On the Pythagorean Life , , , , , , De mysteriis n Ianziti, G. Ibn Abī Us: aybi‘a Life of Aristotle ‘Uyūn al Anbā’ fī Ṭ abaqāt al At:ibbā’ (The Best Tidings, about the Classes of Physicians) Ibn al Anbārī: Nuzhat al Alibbā’ fī Ṭ abaqāt al Udabā’ (Amusement of the Intelligent about the Classes of Authors) ibn Hanbal Ibn al Jawzī: on Ahmad : : Ibn al Najjār al Baghdādi: Dhayl Tārikh Baghdād aw Madīnat al Salām Ibn al Qift:ī: Tarīkh al Hukamā’ (History of : Wise Men) Ibn Hishām , Ibn Ishāq: al Sīra al Nabawīya (Biography of : the Prophet Muhammad) : Ibn Juljul (Abū Dāwud Sulaymān ibn al Hassān): Ṭ abaqāt al At:ibbā’ : wa ’l Hukamā’ (The Classes of : Physicians and Philosophers) Ibn Qutayba: Kitāb al Shi‘r wa al Shu’arā’ (The Book of Poetry and Poets) anecdote about death Ibn Sa‘d, Muhammad: Kitāb al Ṭ abaqāt al : Kabīr (The Great Book of Classes) Ibn Shākir al Kutubī: Fawāt al Wafayāt (Beyond the Obituaries) Ibn Shihāb al Zuhrī idealized biographies , , Ieremias (anchorite) Ignatius the Deacon Nicephorus (Life of) Tarasius (Life of)
Ignatius, Life of Iliad see Homer illustrative material in biographical dictionaries Illustrious Men and Caesars see Suetonius Illustrious Men (De viris illustribus) (anonymous or Pseudo Pliny) , Illustrious Men see Colonna; Jerome; Manetti; Neanthes of Cyzicus; Nepos; Pastrengo; Petrarch; Pius II image and text, combination in inscriptions and epigrams , In Praise of Constantine n individual and collected Lives in Antiquity , Herodotus: Histories ‘Lives’ of Croesus and Cyrus Nepos: On Foreign Generals Plutarch: Parallel Lives Suetonius: Caesars Infancy Gospel of Thomas , Inowlocki, S. inscriptions and epigraphic sources (biographical material in) , abbreviations abridged versions accomplishment, type of anecdotes Archaic period Asia Minor , , Athens Augustan period autobiography , , in bronze Byzantine period categories character traits , , cradle to grave narrative cursus honorum diachronic changes educational aims elogia encomia epigrams euergetic gestures eulogies ,
exemplary individuals , , family prestige first person narrative formulae of epigraphic prose funerary inscriptions , , funerary monuments Greece Hellenistic period historiography , honorific decrees , , , ideological tendencies image and text, combination of , individual detail, inclusion of individuality intentionality internal cross referencing keywords language Late Antiquity laudatio funebris , layout, letter size and position materiality military victory dedications monument quality morality , , name , narrative structure and style non elite persons objects or architecture organization personal data poetic form positive images Priene (city) regional peculiarities religious dedications representation names and principal achievements res gestae , res publica rhetoric ring composition Rome sarcophagi scope and density of descriptions selectiveness and one sidedness of inscriptions
self representation , stages of a person’s life statues size and material stereotypical information in stone style temples , thematic organization of accounts of accomplishments as structural concept tombs furnishings virtue , , , , Instruction of ‘Onchsheshonqy intellectual biography , , , intention of the work intertextuality and metabiography intertextuality with other genres Ion of Chios Foundation of Chios and Heraclea and the Lives of Antigonus of Carystus Odyssey as an influence and Oedipodea periegetic biography proto biography and historiography and Theseids Triagmos (‘Doing things in/with threes’) Visits (Abroad)/Epidēmiai , , , Irene (Byzantine empress) irrecoverability of biographical subject outside texts Isaac of Antinoe: Encomium of Colluthus Isaac of Niniveh: Sergius and Bacchus memre Isaac (patriarch) Isaeus Isho‘dnah of Bas: ra Book of Chastity Isho‘yahb III: Isho‘sabran, Life of Isidore of Seville Etymologiae al Iskandar (Alexander the Great) Isocrates Antidosis on biographical tradition n Evagoras , , , , , , ,
Isocrates (cont.) Byzantine biographies, influence on , character as most important factor in persuasion chronology , education and biography encomium/praise , poetic tradition of rhetorical tradition of , , in Trajanic Rome , episodic structure of events everlasting aretē exaggeration and delineation of character honorific decree narration, act of pedagogy , solitude n story telling structural and thematic correspondences thematic unity genre and inclusivity Gryllus encomium Panegyricus praise in Trajanic Rome sophists To Nicoles unity and multiplicity Issa, M. n Italian Renaissance achievements, extolling artists , biblical and mythological heroes bibliography, biography as chronology civic leaders coin portraiture collective biographies of historical figures , of literary figures , and portraiture , content eloquence epigrams , fortuna of texts
galleries Hellenistic biography herms historians humanism , , imperial biographies individual and comparative biographies , inscriptions literary biography in dialogue form literary figures , literary history, biography as marble portraiture military figures , , noble women orators , philosophers , , poets/poetry , , popes , printing press , reworking Roman political figures Roman republican heroes slaves and freedmen statues teachers of grammar and rhetoric vernacular villains woodcuts , Iuvencus Iyyub
J
Jacob Burd‘aya/Baradeus Jacob of Edessa Jacob (martyr) n Jacob of Nisibis Jacob (biblical Patriarch) , Jacob of Serugh , Gurya and Shmona memra Habib memra : Metrical Homily on the Holy Mar Ephrem, A Sergius and Bacchus memra Jacoby, F. (and FGrHist) n, , , n, , , Jaeger, W.
Jalāl al Dīn al Suyūt:ī: Tārīkh al Khulafā’ (History of the Caliphs) James the Just n Jason of Cyrene Deeds of Judas the Maccabee, The Jason of Nysa Bios Hellados Jebb, R.C. Jeremiah, Life of Jerome biographical tradition Epitaphium Sanctae Paulae genre overlap and differentiation n Hilarion, Life of , , early life flight hagiography , landscape preface and the History of the Monks in Egypt Illustrious Men , , , , , , Malchus, Life of , , , , Paul (of Thebes), Life of , n, , , , Jesus Christ , , , , , , , , , , , , , Jewish biography , , , , , , , , allegory apocrypha (Septuagint) Herod, King autobiography Jason of Cyrene , Jewish Hellenistic literature , , , , Josephus Maccabees , Pentateuch , , personality of hero Philo of Alexandria , pseudepigrapha , n rabbinic literature , , , Septuagint , , Tobit Jewish Hellenistic literature , , Joan, Pope (mythical) Jodelle, Etienne: Cléopâtre captive Johanna, Queen of Sicily
Johannes Trithemius John (priest) John Argyropulus: invective against Katablattas John the Baptist , John bar Aphtonia John (VI) Cantacuzenus History John of Damascus: Edifying Story of Barlaam and Joasaph (or Barlaam Romance) (attributed to) John of Ephesus Ecclesiastical History Jacob Burd‘aya/Baradeus, Life of Lives of the Eastern Saints John Malalas Chronicle John Moschus: Spiritual Meadow John Philoponus De opificio mundi n John Rufus: Peter the Iberian, Life of John of Salisbury John of Shmun: Encomium of Antony John the Stylite of Bet Mar Qanun: Select Narratives of Holy Women John of Tella John Tzetzes , , John Zonaras History hypomnēmata on the Life of Mary of Egypt John III Batatzes (vita of) Johnson, Ben: Devil is an Ass, The Johnson, Samuel Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets Jonas (memra) Jones, C.P. , , Joseph (monk) Joseph (biblical Patriarch) Josephus, Titus Flavius , , , Against Apion Jewish Antiquities Jewish War Life of Joseph (or Vita) , Josipovici, Gabriel: Virgil Dying Joyce, James: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A
Juba II of Mauretania Judith Julian the Apostate , Julian Saba , , Julianus (Prohaeresius' teacher) Julius Caesar Civil War , Gallic War , portraiture, statues and arches Julius Marathus: on Augustus n Julius Secundus: Julius Africanus Julius Valerius n Res gestae Alexandri Macedonis Jung, C.G. Justin Martyr: Apology Justus of Tiberias
K
Kār Nāmag ī Ardašīr ī Pābagān Kaster, R. n, n Kazhdan, A. n, n Keaney, J.J. Kelber, W.H. , Khālid ibn Haqq al Shaybānī : al Kindī: The Classes of Magistrates Kinney, D. Kleiner, F.S. Knopf, R. Köhnken, A. Kolouthos, Life of König, J. Konstan, D. n, Koriwn , Life of Maštoc‘ , Koskenniemi, E. n, n Koutloumous mēnologion Kraus, C.S. , n Krischer, T. n, n Kristeva, J. Kroll, W. n Krüger, G. Kutub al Sittah
L
La Harpe, Jean François de: Timoléon Laertius see Diogenes Laertius Lamberton, R.
Lampert of Hersfeld Landolfus Sagax n Landriani, Gerardo Lapidge, M. n Late Antiquity , n, , , , , , , apostles and apocryphal literature Armenian (Lives in) Christian biography Coptic (Lives in) holy men , inscriptions and epigraphic sources Jewish martyrs Plutarch: Parallel Lives saints’ Lives , sophists Suetonius Syriac (Lives in) , laudatio Murdiae n laudatio Turiae Laus Pisonis (Encomium of Piso) n Lavan, M. n Ƚazar P‘arpec‘i: History and its three biographical sketches , Lazarus of Galesion Lazzati, G. n Le Blant, E.F. Le Moyne, P. Lee, H. Lefkowitz, M. n Lives of the Greek Poets, The Legenda aurea Lehmann Hartleben, K. n Lejeune, P. , Lenglet du Fresnoy, N. length of the work Leo, F. , , , , , n, , Leo the Deacon History of Nicephorus Phocas and John Tzimisces Leo VI the Wise (emperor) Lepidus of Amastris Leucus Charinus: ‘Circuits of the Apostles’ Lévy, I. Lewis, B. n Li Fets de Romains Libanius ,
Funerary Speech (Or. ) Lament over Julian (Or. ) On Natural Talent Liber Pontificalis (or Book of the Lives of the Patriarchs) Libertinus Licona, M. n life details Linus literary biography in dialogue form literary figures in Italian Renaissance , literary history, biography as literary topoi Liturgy of the Infamous Beardless Livy , n, , , Ab urbe condita: preface Ljubarskij, J.N. logos basilikos (imperial speech) , , , Lollianus Longinus n On the Sublime (Pseudo Longinus) n love romances/novels in Byzantium Lubomirski, N. n Lucan: Pharsalia n Lucian of Samosata n, Alexander of Abonotichus Alexander or the False Prophet anecdotes anti encomium or psogos anti gospel artifice asteismoi bon mots , brevity of chreia caricature chronology , counter falsehoods embellishment, exaggeration and distortion encomium epitaphs falsehood , fraudulence of oracles historicity, doubts of
historiography invective invention versus authenticity literary texture narrative, urgent and racy one liners parody , philosophical issues polemical tract puns put downs , quackery quips random but associative order rhetoric theatrical metaphors trickery , urban rivalries ventriloquistic (autophone) pronouncements verbal vanity witticisms Anacharsis Demonax, Life of , n, , , , , Eunuchus genre and inclusivity n genre overlap and differentiation n, and the History of Apollonius, King of Tyre holy men n In Praise of Demosthenes (Pseudo Lucian) Nigrinus , , On the Death of Peregrinus , , , , , , On the Hall On Salaried Posts Portraits , Pseudologista speeches Syrian Goddess Teacher of Rhetoric Toxaris True History (or True Histories) , , Twice Accused
Lucilius n Lucius the Ass Lucius Aemilius Paullus Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus (epigram) Lucius (martyr) n Lucius Munatius Plancus (epigram) Lucius Stertinius Lucius Verus , , Lucius Volusius Saturninus Lucus Feroniae Luke of Steiris Lycurgus (honorific decree) Lysias Lysippus (Alexander statue) Lysistratus (portraiture, statues and arches)
M
Ma, J. n Macarius the Younger Maccabees Maccabees , Maccabees McCarthy, Mary: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood McGing, B. , , Macrina, Life of , Mahdukht (sultan) Mahmūd of Ghāzna : Malouf, David: Imaginary Life, An Ma‘mar ibn Rashīd: Book of Expeditions, The Man of God, Life of the Manasse, Life of , n Manetti, Giannozzo Against the Jews and Gentiles comparative Lives of Seneca and Socrates Illustrious Men of Great Age Nicolaus V n, Three Illustrious Florentine Poets, Lives of Manolaraki, E. n Mantel, Hilary: Wolf Hall Manuel Chrysoloras Manuel Palaeologus: Theodore Palaeologus (funeral oration on)
Mar Aba, Life of , Mar Qardagh, Life of Mar Yahballaha III Mar Yonan, Life of , Maraval, P. , n Marcellus of Ancyra Marcus Aemilius Scaurus: On His Own Life Marcus Aurelius , , , , portraiture, statues and arches , , , Marianus (martyr) n Marina, Life of Marinus , Proclus, or On Happiness , chronology , eulogy structuring idealizing portrait Neo Pythagorean strand Neoplatonic scale of virtues post Plotinian Neoplatonism rhetoric spiritual ascent systematizing and elaboration virtues Marius (epigram) Marivaux: Vie de Marianne, La Maron Marrou, H. I. Marshall, P.K. n Martial: Epigrams n Martin, R.H. Martyrdom of Maximian and Isaac Martyrdom of Paese and Thecla Martyrdom of Peter Martyrdom of Shenoufe and his Brethren martyrs (Lives of) apostles and apocryphal acts , Arabic (Lives in) , aretalogy Armenian (Lives in) , , , authenticity , biblical stylization biographical markers bishops Christian biography , , chronology Common Era
Coptic (Lives in) , , Counter Reformation , dramatic representations (acta or praxeis) edification elaborate narratives encomium/praise , epic martyr accounts erotic love, desire, marriage and preservation of chastity exempla exitus illustrium virorum (teleutai literature) gospels hagiography , , historic inaccuracy, unreliability or invention holy men , , , Jewish tradition letter form Lives loci a persona miracle collections monks (Lives of) , , multiple narratorial voices narrative forms (symbolic, apocalyptic visions, dialogue and third person narrative) narrative qualities non narrative or less narrative forms pagan martyrs passiones , , philosophical dialogue reliability saints and scholarship Syriac (Lives in) , , , topoi , vitae Maruta of Tagrit Mary of Egypt, Life of Maryam, Abbess Massie, Allan: Tiberius Mathewes, C. Matidia (portraiture, statues and arches) Matthias (apocrypha) Mawhūb ibn Mans: ūr ibn Mufarrij n
History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria Maximianus (emperor) Maximus of Aegae , Maximus, Life of Maximus Planudes Life of Aesop (classicizing version) Maximus of Tyre: Dialexeis (Discourses) Mazzocchi, Jacopo: Portraits medieval life writing abbots, bishops, princes and kings ambiguous portraits facilitated by ancient models ancient Roman biographical heritage anthropological vocabulary n, biblical inspiration charismatic figures , chronicles , commemorative and mobilizing function of life writing concepts critical portraits Einhard’s use of Suetonius in Charlemagne biography exemplarity , fictional narratives focalization, shifting hagiography historiography humanism idealizing biography implied audience Latin letters literary motifs main character descriptions medieval inspiration narrative character of choices elements technique output and diversity of writing phraseology polyphonic technique portraiture , praise
medieval life writing (cont.) pre Christian Roman biographies professionalization, increasing proverbs Roman antagonists/protagonists Roman literary portraiture sacred biography saintly biography Sallust , , Catiline and Jugurtha , t secular biography social framework structuring and abstracting effect of Latin stylistic choices Suetonius , texts vernacular virtue , , , n, widening horizon of writing William of Tyre’s Chronicle (Latin) contrasted with Éracles translation (French vernacular) , b Megarics Meleager of Gadara , Meletius Melissus Memnon memoirs , , , , , , , Memorabilia see Xenophon of Athens Menander Rhetor , , On Epideictic n, Menas (honorific decree) Menedemus of Eretria Ménestrier, C. F. Menippus , , , mēnologion Mesarites, Nicholas: John Mesarites (funeral oration) metaphors Metaphrastic mēnologion Methodius (patriarch) Metjen (tomb of) metre Metrodorus of Lampascus: Of Epicurus’ Weak Health Metullus Macedonicus, Q.
Michael Choniates Michael Critobulus: Historiai and the presentation of Mehmed Fatih Michael Palaeologus , Michael Psellus see Psellus Michael the Syrian Michael III Michelet, J.: Histoire de France Mihrmahgushnasp/George, Life of , military figures in Italian Renaissance , , military victory dedications Millar, F. Milton, John: Lycidas mini biographies , miracles n Arabic (Lives in) Byzantium , Christian biography , Coptic (Lives in) of deities and semi divine characters holy men , , , , , , monks (Lives of) , , Syriac (Lives in) , , Miracles of Thecla miscellaneity Misch, G. , mixed discourse modern criticism modernist novel Moennig, U. Moeragenes , n, Momigliano, A. , , , , , , , , n, Mommsen, T. monks (Lives of) , , anecdotes apostles and apocryphal acts , Arabic (Lives in) Armenian (Lives in) Athanasius of Alexandria: Antony, Life (and Regimen) of , Byzantium , Christianity , Coptic (Lives in) , desert monks ,
Egyptian monks , gospels , Gregory the Great: Dialogues hagiography , , hermit monks , martyrs (Lives of) , , miracles , , Pachomius , , pagan florilegia pagan models , philosophical biographies saints , , sermons Syriac (Lives in) , , Theodoret of Cyrrhus: Religious History of the Monks of Syria , virtues , monographical Lives Montaigne, Michel de Montanus (martyr) n Montesquieu (Charles Louis de Secondat): Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et leur décadence monuments in ancient Egypt aesthetics of composition Ahmose (inscription of) , f, , , , , , , Amenemhab tomb association of one text with others carved on quarry wall autobiography , chronology of Dynastic Egypt t coffins commissioned works composition compositional milieu of audiences content , ideals and subjectivities context , implications of (from body to landscape) continuity and change, analysis of definition display , education including writing skills elite audience ,
epithets, biographical ethical and moral values event, significant first person compositions funerary wishes general model, adaptation and transformation of hymns and songs idealizing image individual identity individual character inner worlds of thought and feeling intertextual relationships of biographies with other genres intimacy with kings or gods landscape , letters life course location of text within tomb locations, potential material qualities mediation texts moral and ideal behaviour mortuary settings Nespaqashuty statue , f, non royal persons , , oral performances outer areas patterning ‘perfect speech’ phraseology , physical context , poems protagonist’s privileged proximity to the king quarries, inscriptions in relationship of text to other images and texts religious texts royal inscriptions sarcophagi scholarly approaches second person narrative selection self fashioning self presentation, reflexive
monuments in ancient Egypt (cont.) self regulation self reliance social responsibility themes statements, biographical statues , , , , position in temple stelae , syntax , temples , , , , text themes third person narrative , title strings , tombs , , , , building location in necropolis space visibility and proximity of to other tombs walls transformation texts visual potential of script and aesthetic impact walls women and biographies , word plays Morales, E.M. n, Morales, H. n morals see ethics and morals Moréri, Louis: Grand dictionnaire historique, Le Moretti, F. Moritz, Karl Philipp: Anton Reiser Moschion (honorific decree) Moschus see John Moschus Moses , , , , , , Moses of Abydos, Life of Mossman, J. Movsēs Xorenac‘i , Muhammad al Bustī : Muhammad, Prophet , , : multiplicity of previous biographical writing Munk Olsen, B. , n Münscher, K. Musaeus
Mušeł Mamikonian Musonius , n Musurillo, H.A. , n
N Nabokov, Vladimir Real Life of Sebastian Knight, The Speak, Memory , , Nagy, G. narrative devices inscriptions and epigraphic sources (biographical material in) martyrs (Lives of) philosophers (Lives of) , , Plutarch: Parallel Lives seventeenth and eighteenth centuries , , , Syriac (Lives in) , Neanthes of Cyzicus , , , , , Illustrious Men, Lives of , Nehamas, A. Nehemiah, Book of Neophytus the Recluse , Neoplatonic biography , n, , Neoplatonic scale of virtues , , Neoplatonism , , , , , , , Plotinian Proclan Nepos, Cornelius Agesilaus Atticus , , , , , , , activities as historical writer anecdotal narrative of political survival anecdotal structure betrothal of Atticus’ daughter categories vs. chronology filial piety friendships illness leading to his death introductory overview Italian Renaissance biographies, influence on , , narrative structure
political attitudes and connections political biographies political context relationship with Augustus and (Mark) Antony in final years of life serialization and exemplariness thematic structure virtues (sincerity, humanitas, and pietas) , youth and early life biographical tradition bishop biographies, influence on Cato the Elder , , Cato the Younger Chronica Cicero Conon Eumenes Exempla genre overlap and differentiation n, Illustrious Men n, , , , , , n, Miltiades monks (Lives in), influence on On Foreign Generals , , , , , audience character courage cunning honour Italian Renaissance biographies, influence on , loyalty political biographies , relativism in cultural values serialization and exemplariness On Latin Historians , , parallelism and comparison Pausanias Pelopidas , , , , , political biography in Augustan period , Thrasybulus translated by Leopold Finch unity and multiplicity see also Atticus (Nepos) and Caesar
(Augustus) (Nicolaus of Damascus) as specimens of shared genre Nero (portraiture, statues and arches) , Nerva Nestorius Nestorius, Life of New Academy New Oxford Dictionary of English New Testament , , n, , n, , Nicander of Colophon Niccoli, Niccolò Nicephorus Basilaces , Muzalon, Nicholas (encomium) Nicephorus Blemmydes Nicephorus Gregoras , Nicephorus Phocas (emperor) Nicetas of Amnia: Life of Philaretus Nicetas Choniates: Manuel I and Andronicus I Nicetas David Paphlagon: Life of Ignatius Nicetas Stethatus: Life of Symeon the New Theologian Nicetes Nicias of Nicaea Nicolaus of Damascus n, , , autobiography , n Caesar (Augustus), Life of , , , , , , , , , account of Julius Caesar’s assassination and Atticus as specimens of shared genre anecdotal structure biography vs. history chronology Constantinian Excerpts , , , decision to accept adoption and name of Caesar family, character and education filial piety friendships interactions with (Mark) Antony after Julius Caesar’s assassination introduction motive and significance narrative
Nicolaus of Damascus (cont.) political context prudence and virtue response to Julius Caesar’s assassination , rhetoric vice virtue , History , Nicomachus Flavianus n, Nicomachus of Gerasa n Nicon Metanoeite , Nightingale, A.W. n Nikiou Mena: Life of Isaac of Alexandria Nineveh: memra Noël, M.P. n non Christian biography n, non Christian writers , , , , , , Nonnosus of Soracte Nonnus of Panopolis: Dionysiaca North, Roger: Lives of the Norths North, Thomas novels , , , , adventurous biographical epistolary romantic seventeenth and eighteenth centuries , , Nymphidianus
O
objectivity Octavia (statue) Octavius (arch) O’Donnell, J. n, Odyssey see Homer Oedipodea Oenomaus of Gadara: Exposure of Frauds Old Testament , , , , Olympiodorus O’Meara, D.J. , On Epicurus’ Friends (anonymous) On Foreign Generals see Nepos, Cornelius On the Kings in Judaea On the Pythagorean Life see Iamblichus
On Women (anonymous) n open approach , oral traditions Armenian (Lives in) , , Hellenistic biography , , , Plutarch: Parallel Lives Origen of Alexandria n, , , , Origin of the Roman Nation (Origo gentis romanae) ‘origins’ of ancient biography , Orlandi, T. Orosius: Historiae n Orpheus Orsini, Fulvio: Portraits and Inscriptions of Illustrious and Learned Men Otto, E. Otto, R. Ovid n, Epistulae ex Ponto Fasti n, Metamorphoses Tristia Oxford English Dictionary
P Pachomius Rules Letters Pachomius, Lives of , , anecdotes (Paralipomena) Arabic translation Bohairic version , , Coptic (Lives), influence on Greek Lives First Second Sahidic version Pade, M. n paideia Palaeologus see Manuel Palaeologus; Michael Palaeologus Palamon (anchorite) Palatine Anthology Palladius (Dialogue Concerning the) Life of John Chrysostom ,
Lausiac History , , , On the Brahmans and the Indian Peoples (attributed to) Pamphilus of Caesarea Pancrates Panegyric on Abraham of Farshut Panegyric to Messalla panegyrical tone n Panegyrici latini n panegyrics , , , , , , , , , , , Panegyricus see Pliny the Younger Panvinio, Onofrio Panyassis: epic about Heracles Paolucci, F. Pappus of Alexandria Paradise of the Fathers Parallel Lives see Plutarch Parmentier, E. n, n Pascal, Blaise: Pensées Pasquali, G. Passio of Agatha Passio of Barbara Passio of Gordianus Passio of Gregory the Illuminator Passio of Hadrian and Natalia Passio of Indes and Domna Passio of Iuliana , Passio of Marculus Passio of Nereus and Achilleus Passio of Nicephorus Passio of Pancratius of Rome Passio of Panteleemon Passio of Perpetua and Felicitas Passio of Photina Passio of Polycarp of Smyrna Passio of Ptolemaeus and Lucius Passio of Saba the Goth Passio of Salsa Passio of Sergius and Bacchus Passio of Theodosia Passio of Theodotus of Ancyra passiones , , , , Pastrengo, Guglielmo da , Illustrious Men On Origins (De originibus) n
Paterculus see Velleius Paterculus patriarchs (church leaders) , Patriarchs (biblical) , , , Patrologia orientalis n Paul the Deacon n Paul of Qentos Paul Tagaris: Confession Paulinus of Périgueux n, Pausanias P‘awstos Buzand , , pedagogic purpose of biographies see educational value/pedagogic purpose of biographies Pelling, C. , n, n, n, , , , , Penella, R.J. Peregrinus of Parium (or Peregrinus Proteus) , , , see also Lucian: On the Death of Peregrinus Pergamius Pericles , Ion of Chios , periegetic biography: Neanthes of Cyzicus vs. Antigonus of Carystus Peripatetics , , , , , , , Peripatos , Perkins, J. Perpetua (martyr) n Perrault, Charles: Hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle, Les personal details, inclusion in political biography of Pervo, R. Pessoa, Fernando Pesynthius, bishop of Keft/Koptos Peter the Iberian, Life of Petersen, E. Petrarch , Illustrious Men , Julius Caesar , Scipio Africanus , Petronius Phaedrus of Sphettus (honorific decree) Pherecydes of Syros ,
Phib, Life of (anonymous) Philagrus , Philip the Arab Philip II (of Macedon) , Philip V Philippides of Cephale (honorific decree) Philippides of Paenia (honorific decree) Philippus of Opus On Plato Philiscus of Aegina Philistus: on Nicias Philo of Alexandria Abraham, Life of , title (Life of the Wise Man Made Perfect Through Teaching, or (The First Book) on Unwritten Laws, that is On Abraham) biographical works achievements discussed by categories allegorical interpretation , chronology , , ethnic and geographical designations adapted to current concepts narrative, fluent narrative interpretation personal names, sparing use of speeches , two book division De opificio mundi Exposition In Flaccum Joseph, Life of , Legatio ad Gaium Moses, Life of , , , , Philoctetes Philodemus of Gadara , , , and Carneïscus: Philistas Catalogue of the Academics (or Academicorum index) , Collection of the Philosophers , , , On Epicurus , , On Philonides , , Pragmateiai , Stoa Philogelōs (Laughter lover) Philoponus see John Philoponus
philosophers (Lives of ) , , , , , , biographical dictionaries characterizations chronology Damascius: Philosophical History or Life of Isidore , depicting specific individuals diachronic developments Eunapius: Lives of (the) Philosophers and Sophists funerary eulogy Iamblichus: On the Pythagorean Life , , , , iatromantis idealizing subjects imitability interpretation Italian Renaissance , , late antique education late antique Platonic school literature, role of monks (Lives of), influence on narrative strategies , , Neoplatonic biography , , Neoplatonic scale of virtues , , ostensible purposes Porphyry History of Philosophy Pythagoras, Life of , , , rhetoric , sequence of testimonia serial or collective biography , , seventeenth and eighteenth centuries spiritual ascent structural choices , syncretism teachings theurgy transcendental prosopography virtues , see also Marinus: Proclus, or On Happiness; Porphyry: Life of Plotinus Philosophers and Sophists, Lives of (the) see Eunapius philosophical history , philosophy n, , ,
Philostratus, L. Flavius Apollonius, Life of , , , n, , , , n ambiguous narrative stance anecdotes , authorial virtuosity bizarre, fantastic or irrelevant passages characterization , content cult propaganda direct discourse , doxographical material , eastern exoticism , elegant lectures encomium epigrams exempla fictionality and fantasy , , frame narrative , , friendly conversations Greek culture hero’s engagement with Hellenic past , historic inaccuracy historiography n holy men, influence on , intertextual layer Late Antiquity laudatory biography length master’s teachings narrative authority narrative material narrative persona narrative setting: Greek antiquarianism narrative structure, many layered narrative techniques narratological back and forth narratorial self presentation pedagogy n philosophers philosophical apologetics playful quality presentation of relationship of past to present pseudo documentary n rhetoric , , ,
Roman political history , romance sanctioned paradoxography scale scope Second Sophistic speech testimony of Damis thematic strands travel narrative verisimilitude , biographical tradition genre hierarchy and relationships genre and inclusivity genre overlap and differentiation n, n, n Gymnasticus hagiographic biography , Heroicus , , Imagines , authorship interpretatio graeca Nero , Nicetes sophistic self representation , , , , , sophists , , Sophists, Lives of (the) n, , , , , , , , , , , , , stylization Philotheus Coccinus: Life of Gregory Palamas Philoxenus of Mabbug Photius , Bibliotheca , , , phraseology medieval life writing monuments in ancient Egypt , , Phryne Phylarchus as source for Plutarch Pietri, L. n Pindar , , , , Pittacus of Mytilene (sage) , , Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini): Illustrious Men n Pizarro y Orellana, Fernando: Varones ilustres del Nuevo Mundo
Platina, Bartolomeo Life of Pius II n Lives of the Popes Plato , Alcibiades Apology n, , , , Crito Euthyphro genre and inclusivity hagiographical discourse Laws ‘On Ideas’ periegetic biography Phaedo , , , , Phaedrus political biographies Protagoras , Republic , Seven Sages Socrates, influence of Socratic works sophists , stylization Symposium , Platonists , , , , , , see also Neoplatonism Plato’s Academy Plinius Maior (or Pliny the Elder) Historia naturalis Pomponius Secundus portraiture, statues and arches , , , , , source for Plutarch’s Lives of the Caesars Plinius Minor (or Pliny the Younger) , , , Cottius Domitian Epistles/Letters on Isaeus n Panegyricus , chronology cursus experienced narrative n origins, family, and youth , , praise , syncrisis , ,
virtue (courage and justice) Pompeius Quintianus Titinius Capito , Trajan Plotinus , n, , , , Enneads , Plotinus, Life of see Porphyry Plutarch , , , , , Aemilius Paullus Timoleon , , , n, , Aesop Agesilaus , , , Agis and Cleomenes Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus , , Alcibiades see Coriolanus Alcibiades below Alexander , , , , , n, , , characterizing strategies , Alexander Caesar n, , , Antony see Demetrius Antony below Aratus: composition, subject and style , achievements capture of Acrocorinth character chronology concord among the Achaean cities contrast in character criticism of Aratus defeat of tyrants digressions epilogue hatred of tyranny last years laudatory purpose literary culture pedagogic aim praise and blame, mixture of relation to king of Macedonia sources, handling of syncrisis thematic considerations virtues and qualities war against Cleomenes youth and capture of Sicyon Aristides and Cato the Elder , Artaxerxes: composition, subject and style , n
anecdotes , characterization , chronology , composition diction ‘echoing’ intention invention literary embellishment moral character negativity towards Artaxerxes’ behaviour pedagogy philological method rhetoric style syncrisis, internal Banquet of the Seven Sages n biographical tradition , Brutus , Caesars, Lives of the (Galba and Otho) , , , , , , composition, subject and style , chronology , circumstantial narration epilogue, informal focus on deeds and fates of the Caesars Galba , , n historical narratives history and biography mix Otho , , n parallelism retrospective evaluation of protagonist selection of incidents syncrisis, internal tragedy, allusions to Cato the Younger Phocion , n, , , chronology Cimon , Coriolanus Alcibiades , n, , , , Crassus see Nicias Crassus below Demetrius Antony n, , , , , n, Demosthenes Cicero , , , Epaminondas Scipio ,
genre overlap and differentiation n, n, Gracchi compared with Agis and Cleomenes n Ion of Chios n, Italian Renaissance biographies, influence on , Lucullus , Lycurgus , Lysander , , , as model for Eusebius of Caesarea n Moralia n, , n, , Nicias Crassus , , , , n, Numa , On the Delay of the Divine Vengeance On the Life and Poetry of Homer (Pseudo Plutarch) On the Malice of Herodotus n Parallel Lives n, n, , , , , , , , , , , n abridged and compressed account actualizing formulas aide mémoire amplifying embellishments anecdotes n authorial comment Byzantine biographies, influence on , characterization , , chronology , cohesiveness comparison , composition conflation of similar historical details cradle to grave account cross references death scenes , definitive form of biographies displacement and grouping of episodes double role/treble role drafts (hypomnēmata) Dryden’s introduction to his translation epilogues ethical and philosophical views , , ,
Plutarch (cont.) fabrication of circumstantial details or context first person narrative focalization of narrative historiography individual Lives inner motivation for actions and behaviour integrated characters intermediate phase Italian Renaissance biographies, influence on limited biographies literary contests literary intentions medieval life writing, influence on moral status , , motivation of protagonists’ conduct multiple perspectives narrative , narrative organization narrative strategies narrative viewpoint, shifting non linear narrative structure notes and drafts oral traditions, myths and legends parallelism , , pattern and variation technique philosophical debate philosophical intentions political biographies , political biographies in Augustan period political biographies and fiction posthumous events prologue , purpose and methods of work stated readership reading materials, diversity of refining process reinterpretation through transpositions research stage rhetoric, argumentative secondary characters (onlookers) n selection, exclusion and deployment of source material ,
self improvement, using biography for serialization and exemplariness seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, influence during , , , , source material speculative expansions successional system (diadochē) syncrisis (concluding comparison) , , , , , theatricality/dramatization thematic development transfer of items between characters vices , , , virtues , , , Pelopidas Pericles Fabius Maximus , , n, Persian Kings, Lives of (hypothetical) Philopoemen Phocion see Cato the Younger Phocion above political biography in Augustan period , Political Precepts Pompey , , , , portraiture, statues and arches praise in Trajanic Rome n Publicola Pyrrhus Marius n, , serialization and exemplariness Sertorius Eumenes n Solon n, , Spartan aphorisms Stesimbrotus of Thasos syncrisis , Themistocles Camillus , , , n, , Theseus Romulus , Virtues of Women n Vitellius (lost) poets/poetry/verse , , , n, , , , , Arabic (Lives in) , Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers elegies , , epic
Euripides fable or madrasha fictional fifth century BC folk Hellenistic biography Homer , , , individual and collected Lives in Antiquity , , inscriptions and epigraphic sources (biographical material in) , Ion of Chios Isocrates: Evagoras , , Italian Renaissance , , Jewish biography lyric , monuments in ancient Egypt political biography Probus seventeenth and eighteenth centuries , , sophists Suetonius: Illustrious Men and Caesars Syriac (Lives in) , , , , , twentieth century , Virgil , see also receptions of Greek and Roman poets in twentieth century Polemaeus (honorific decree) polemical tone n Polemo of Athens , Physiognomics (or Physiognomy) , , sophistic self representation , , f sophists , , Polenton, Sicco , Argumenta Catinia Lives of Illustrious Writers of the Latin Language political biography , , , , in the age of Augustus apologetic tone encomiastic tone historical writing overlap with political history ,
virtues vita and historia (distinction) see also Nepos, Cornelius: Life of Atticus; Nicolaus of Damascus: Life of Caesar (Augustus) anecdotes chronology defining ancient biographies of statesmen development encomia , , , , , ethics and morals , exemplariness facts habits Hellenistic period Herodotus: Lives of Croesus and Cyrus historiography , , Italian Renaissance myth or fiction (plasmata) Nepos: On Foreign Generals parallelism Peripatetic biography personal details, inclusion of personal experiences Plutarch: Parallel Lives Plutarchan strand of biography political or military actions psogos (blame) rubrics , as separate genre serialization substance Suetonian strand of biography syncrises untruths vices virtues , , , political structures, large scale Pollux Polybius , , , as source for Plutarch , Histories Philopoemen (lost) Polycarp (martyr) Polycritus of Erythrai (honorific decree) Polydeuces polygenesis
Pompey see Plutarch Pompey: epigrams Pontius popular biography , , alternative, parallel forms anecdotes , anonymity characterization circulation, continuous content , descriptive approach diction folk tradition form fusion of biographical framework with wisdom literature humour, sexual or scatological invented characters Life of Aesop Life of Secundus the (Silent) Philosopher manner of reception mass audience narrative, straightforward , open text or open tradition with recensions oral tradition organization of material in triads particulars of the action patchwork like composition pattern repetition physiognomy plain language , poetic quotations primacy of content over form Ps. Callisthenes: Alexander Romance , repetition of stereotypes and familiar patterns rhetoric ‘riddles of the superlative’ (so called) sensational effects/incidents , Seven Sages space conception, undeveloped structure symmetrical contrast tales of wonder or horror temporality, vague
texts and their characteristics textual transmission of multiple recensions, fluid translation into multiple languages transmission fluidity wisdom compositions Porphyry biographical tradition death of genre overlap and differentiation n, n, n History of Philosophy philosophers , , Plotinus, Life of , , , , , , biographical prose hagiography hexameter verse monks oracular verse perspectives on primary, limited narrator shift to omniscient, secondary narrator testimonia, series of verbal portrait Pythagoras, Life of , , , , Sentences Leading to the Intelligible sophists portraits, statues and triumphal arches in Imperial Rome augural statues chariots civic and religious accomplishments compositional type (Ares Borghese) Constantine (arch) , , cuirassed images communicating military achievements divine associations elite funerals emended and expurgated Lives emperors depicted as Jupiter encomia , equestrian statues , , exempla formal features fornices (arch) Germanicus (arch) Hadrian (arch)
head and facial features, individual likeness confined to heroic formats , imagines (wax masks) marble veristic portraits mass production Nero (arch) nodus coiffure nudity orating type panegyrics political capital and achievements pose, costume and attribute, adjustments of public portraits realistic portraiture, rise of refashioned/reworked statues , seated statues , , , sella curulis , Septimius Severus (arch) , standing statues , , , statues: types and tropes stool or chair used theomorphic images Titus (arch) , togate statues triumphal arches virtues women’s biographies portraiture medieval life writing , in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries see also portraits, statues and triumphal arches in Imperial Rome; sophistic self representation and portraiture Possidius of Calama: Life of Augustine , , postmodernism , Praet, D. praise see encomium/praise Praxiphanes De poetis n pre Christian biography n Roman pre Constantinian biography n
predecessors or precursors of biographies Price, Joann F.: Barack Obama: A Biography Prieur, J. M. printing press privati (individuals outside the imperial family), biographies of Proba Probus, Aemilius Proclus (Eutychius Proclus) Chrestomathy , Proclus (of Athens) Commentary on Plato’s Republic n, n Parmenides interpretation studying Orpheus under Syrianus Proclus, Life of Prohaeresius , , n, Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy (anonymous) prologues , , , Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers Isocrates: Evagoras Plutarch: Alexander Plutarch: Nicias Tacitus: Agricola Propertius n proto biographies protocols Protoevangelium of James , Protogenes of Olbia (honorific decree) Prudentius: Peristephanon (Passion of Cyprian) Psellus, Michael n Auxentius, Life of Cerullarius, Michael (funeral oration) , Chronographia , , Constantine Monomachus (emperor) (encomium) Mauropus, John (encomium) Short History (Historia syntomos) Xiphilinus, John (epitaph) Pseudo Aristotle: Rhetoric to Alexander n, pseudo autobiography
Pseudo Callisthenes: Alexander Romance , , , n, , , , n, , anachronisms anecdotes , birth narrative building materials Byzantine biographies, influence on characterizing strategies chronological setting, imprecise composite and multifaceted aspects compositional method consistency/constancy Cynic diatribe dialogue , doublets encomium , entertainment of reader epistolary novel fabula material factual inaccuracies fictional considerations , first person narrative folktales , geographical inconsistencies al Iskandar (Arabic Work) kosmokratōr motif letters logic mimetic work narrative tempo variations Nectanebo novella , outstanding deeds patchwork quality personality, depiction of physical description of Alexander playful aspect political biography and fiction political pamphlet of Hellenistic origin popular biography, example of , presages and prophetic announcements puns and witticism recensions , , representational strategy rhetorical exercises
seriality Seven Sages signs, prophetic dreams or divine utterances story of an outstanding hero storytelling predilection stylistic irregularities temporality thematic coherence topographical data travelogues in epistolary form trickster , unevenness in narrative texture variegated origin Pseudo Clementines Pseudo Demetrius Pseudo Dionysius presenting himself as St Dionysius the Areopagite Pseudo Dorotheus Pseudo Herodotus: Vita Homeri (Life of Homer) see Vita Herodotea Pseudo Epiphanius Pseudo Longinus: On the Sublime n, n Pseudo Lucian: In Praise of Demosthenes Pseudo Plutarch On the Life and Poetry of Homer Pseudo Sophronius , psychoanalysis , psychobiography Ptolemaeus (martyr) Ptolemy (monk) Publius Rutilius Rufus: On His Own Life Puech, B. Pyrrho Pyrrhonian Sceptics n, , Pythagoras , , Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers , monks (Lives of), influence on Philostratus: Apollonius in Pseudologista (Lucian) stylization
Q
al Qādī, W. Qis: as: al Anbiyā’ (Tales of the Prophets) quality of biography
Quasten, J. n Quevedo, Francisco de El Buscón San Pablo, Vida de Santo Tomás de Villanueva, Vida de Quincey, Thomas De: Confessions of an English Opium Eater Quinta, Claudia Quintianus Quintilian , n, Institutio oratoria Quintus Aemilius Secundus Quintus Fabius Maximus Allobrogicus Quintus Marcus Tremulus Quintus Veranius
R
Rabau, S. Rabban Sauma , Rabbi Shim’on bar Yohai n Rabbula, Life of Racine, Jean Rankov, B. Ransmayr, Christoph Die letzte Welt (The Last World) , , ‘Ovidian Repertoire’ (appendix) Raphael: Heliodorus Rapin, R. Rapp, C. Rebillard, E. n receptions of Greek and Roman poets in twentieth century autobiography , , death and rebirth of the author fictional life writing , , heteronyms, fictional and semi fictional intertextuality and metabiography , irrecoverability of biographical subject outside texts literary biography modernist novel multiplicity of previous biographical writing poems/poets , postmodernism ,
psychoanalysis , psychobiography Renaissance biography textuality Reichel, M. Reitzenstein, R. , Renaissance biography see also Italian Renaissance Res Gestae Divi Augusti see Augustus reworking biographies , , , , , , , , Reymond, E.A.E. Reynolds, L.D. n, n rhetoric , Armenian (Lives in) , , Byzantium Coptic (Lives in) holy men inscriptions and epigraphic sources (biographical material in) Lucian: Alexander or the False Prophet Marinus: Proclus, or On Happiness philosophers (Lives of) , Philostratus: Apollonius , , , Plutarch: Parallel Lives popular biography Ps. Callisthenes: Alexander Romance sophists Syriac (Lives in) Ribadeneira, Pedro de: Life of Loyola Richards, J. Richardson, Samuel: Pamela Ricoeur, P. , Rohde, E. , n Roland, Madame: Mémoires Rollin, Charles: Histoire ancienne Romanillos, Antonio Ranz romantic writing , , , , , Romilly, J. de Romulus (statue) Rosweyde, H. Rousseau, Jean Jacques: Confessions , , , rubrics , , , Ruck, B. Rufinus Ruhbach, G.
Ruinart, T.: Acta primorum martyrum sincera et selecta Ruiz Bueno, D. n, n Rupke, N.A. Russell, D.A. , Rutilianus ,
S Sabellico, Marcantonio: Restoration of the Latin Language, The Sacerdos sacred biography see aretalogy/sacred biography al Safadī: Al Wāfī bi ’l Wafayāt (Completion : of the Obituaries) sages , , , , Sahak Part‘ew , Sa : h: (‘Trustworthy’) : hī Sailor, D. n saints (Lives of) , , apocryphal literature apologetics Arabic (Lives in) , birth to death storyline Byzantium , centrality of movement and travel Christian biography , , Coptic (Lives in) epistolography fictionalized and holy men , , , homiletics Jerusalem liturgy literary setting of narrative martyrs (Lives of) mēnologion miracles monks (Lives of) , , narrative synaxarion , , , , Syriac (Lives in) , , , , , see also hagiography Salāh: al Din Sallust , , , , , Catiline (or Catilinarian War) and Jugurtha , , , t, medieval life writing, influence on
monks, Lives of, influence on Salvatore, M. Samuel of Qalamūn, Life of Sand, George: Histoire d’une vie Santra Sappho If not, winter (translation by Anne Carson) satire , Satyrus of Callatis , , , n Euripides, Life of n, , , , , , , , , Saul, King Sawīrus (Severus) Ibn al Muqaffa‘ n Saxer, V. n Sayings of the Fathers (Apophthegmata Patrum) Schalit, A. Schiller, Friedrich: Die Räuber Schirren, T. n Schmitz, T. n, Schorn, S. , Schuler, C. n Schwob, Marcel: ‘Lucrèce’ in Vies imaginaires Scopelian , Scott, Walter: Napoleon, Life of Scurr, Ruth: John Aubrey: My Own Life , Scylax of Caryanda: Life of Heraclides of Mylasa Searby, D. Second Sophistic , , , n, , , , , second person narrative Secousse, D.F.: criticism of Plutarch secular biography , , see also hagiography Secundus the (Silent) Philosopher, Life of (anonymous) , , n, , , , , Seeliger, H.R. , n Segonds, A. n, n Seleucus n self presentation , self representation , , , see also sophistic self representation and portraiture
Semiramis Seneca, L. Annaeus , Apocolocyntosis On Clemency Seneca, M. Annaeus (‘the Elder’) Controversiae: praefationes Sentences, Divisions, and Colours of the Orators and Rhetoricians Septuagint , , , Sergius of Reshaina n serial biographies , , , Series Apocryphorum of the Corpus Christianorum Servius Aeneid commentary Seven Sages , , seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ancient Lives in literary and moral writings anecdotes , annals artists autobiography , , chronicles concrete models of action dramatic heroes elegies epitaphs ethical qualities and relevance eulogies exemplary biography negative fictionalized biographies , , , financial and social autonomy of authors first person narratives hagiography , , , picaresque historiography , ideals illustrious action inaccuracies introspective approach literary form , , , Lives memoirs , , memorable person moral exempla
narrative strategies , , , noblemen novels , epistolary patrons pedagogical aid , , philosophical biography poetics of tragedy poets portion of time portraits , praise realistic narratives romantic turn , sensibility, rise of subject matter virtue , wit women’s biographies Severianus , Severus (presbyter) Severus Alexander Severus of Antioch , , Homily Lives of (by Zacharias Rhetor, John bar Aphtonia, and George, bishop of the Arab Tribes) Sextus Empiricus n Sfameni Gasparro, G. n Shammuramat Shams al Dīn ibn Khallikān: Wafayāt al A‘yān wa Anbā’ Abnā’ al Zamān (Obituaries of Eminent Men and Tidings of the Sons of the Epoch) Shams al Dīn al Shāfī‘ī al Dhahabī: Ta’rīkh al Islām (History of Islam) Shapin, S. Sharbel Shelley, Percy Bysshe: Adonias Shemek, D. n Shem’un Shenoute, Life of (attributed to Besa) Sherwin White, A.N. Shihāb al Dīn ibn Hajar al ‘Asqalānī: Al : Durar al Kāmina fi A‘yān al Mi’a al Thāmina (Hidden Pearls about the Eminent Men of the Eighth Century)
Shirin of Karka d bet Slok short biographies in Byzantium Shmona Shu‘ba al Hajjāj Shuckburgh, E.S. Sidonius Apollinaris n Silas Simon Magus Simonides and Homer Sinuhe, Tale of (poem) Sīra: prophetic biography (of Prophet Muhammad) , , , : size of biographies slaves and freedmen, biographies of Smith, M. n Smith, R.R.R. , Socrates , , Aesop death scenes Epicurean biography Ion of Chios Phaedo of Elis (converted to philosophy by) in Plato: Phaedo Xenophon of Athens on importance of , , Sokratikoi logoi , , , solitude and biography Athanasius of Alexandria: Antony, Life (and Regimen) of , , , , autobiography , character diaries early Christian biography first person accounts Graeco Roman biography intellectual and philosophical contemplation psychoanalytical habits of thinking Romantic writing self reflection vice virtue see also Jerome Solomon, King Solon of Athens (sage) , ,
Sonnabend, H. , Sopater sophistic self representation and portraiture appearance, importance of audience benefaction , body and physical appearance buildings , chronology civic euergetism and creation of lasting public image , , clothing, hairstyle and beard , , deportment display judgements, negative monuments , non sophists pepaideumenoi (educated men) , , personal style physical objects self grooming self identity self image , , self representation , looking as an act of statues , , , , stoas, bath gymnasia and theatres temples sophists , ancient sophists chronology collaborative and conflictual interactions cultural history , delivery style displays and performances first sophists Hellenism , , , high culture, material wealth and political leadership historiography Imperial sophists , , , improvisation and extemporization , , in fighting
intellectual historiography and self definition inter school violence intra sophistic relations motifs Neoplatonist philosophers , paideia , performance philosopher sophists , , philosophers (Lives of) Platonizing characterization political history , political value power praise , , professional life, depictions of rhetoric self definition self presentation speech and political power stagecraft theatricality see also Second Sophistic; sophistic self representation and portraiture Sophists, Lives of (the) see Philostratus Sophocles Ion of Chios in Lucian: On the Death of Peregrinus Sophronius (patriarch) Sosicrates of Rhodes Sosipatra Sostratus Sotion , , , Southey, Robert: Life of Nelson speeches , , , Alexander Romance apologetic Armenian (Lives in) Byzantium , Dio and Lucian Eusebius of Caesarea: Life of Constantine fifth century BC holy men , Isocrates: Evagoras Philo of Alexandria: biographical works ,
Philostratus: Apollonius , Plutarch: Parallel Lives sophists , , Suetonius Trajanic Rome Sperner, Philip Jacob: Pia Desideria Speusippus Funeral Banquet of Plato or Encomium of Plato , Speyer, W. spiritual biographies , , , , , Stadter, P.A. n, Stanley, Thomas: History of Philosophy statesmen , see also political biography Statius Silvae n statues inscriptions and epigraphic sources (biographical material in) , monuments in ancient Egypt , , , sophistic self representation and portraiture , , see also under portraiture in Imperial Rome Stein, Gertrude: Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Stem, R. Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle) Henry Brulard, Life of Napoleon, Life of Stephanus of Byzantium Stephen (bishop of Hierapolis) Stephen the Deacon: Life of Stephen the Younger Stephen (martyr) Sterne, Laurence: Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy Stesichorus: Palinode Stesimbrotus of Thasos , , , , On Themistocles, Thucydides, son of Melesius, and Pericles , n and Homer Mysteries, The , Odyssey as an influence Stevens, Wallace Stoics , , , , , ,
Stoneman, R. n Storch, R. Stratocles of Rhodes structure of biographies , , Stuart, D.R. n style of prose language (high, middle and low) stylization n, subject matter , , succession narratives Suda , , , , , , , Suetonius , , , , and/in the Augustan History , , , , Augustus Caesars, Lives of the , , , , , , , , categorical arrangement , comparative readings death scenes ethics Italian Renaissance biographies, influence on , , , , , personal details political biographies , praise in Trajanic Rome structure see also Illustrious Men and Caesars below Caligula , n Claudius n Curtius Nicia Domitian Games and Spectacles Grammarians , , , , , Horace Illustrious Men , , , , , , , n Praefatio see also Illustrious Men and Caesars Illustrious Men and Caesars alternation between per tempora and per species anecdotes , , antiquarian approach , attention to detail
categories or rubrics per species categories vs. chronology: literary technique content , convenience to readers (utilitas) , , , death narratives , diction divisio ekthesis elaborate treatment of more private topics evolutionary models and their limitations (Illustrious Lives) exempla historical reliability historiography , , , intellectuals intratextual structure literary education literary erudition literary technique narrative time non incorporation of sources orientation aids per tempora passages politicians polyphonic perspective pretentious passages prominence of persons portrayed readability reader orientation reference book style refusal of stylistic or narrative embellishment , rubrics , , , ‘sandwich structure’ sayings of portrayed persons shared stylistic and structural characteristics size and proportions social and cultural context of writing , structure , style , subordinate clauses symposium
syntax, simple temporal emphasis thematic structure , third person narrative topics ultima verba unmodified references quoted in direct speech use of author’s own learning and education Nero Poets , , , , political biography in Augustan period portraiture, statues and arches praise in Trajanic Rome n pratum or prata Rhetoricians , , , , , , serialization and exemplariness social and cultural context of writings Tiberius , n Titus Virgil , , Sulla , , Sulpicius Severus Gallus Martin of Tours, Life of , , Svenbro, J. n Swain, S. , Syme, R. Symeon the Metaphrast Symeon of the Olives, Life of Symeon the Stylite, Life of , Symmachus: Life of Abel Symposium (of the sages) n synaxarion , , , , synchronic readings syncrisis , , Pliny the Younger: Panegyricus , , Plutarch: Parallel Lives , , , , Tacitus: Agricola Syriac (Lives in) , , , apostles and apocryphal acts , , , ascetic and monastic Lives , ,
Bible , biblical figures , , , characterization through speech Christianity , , Church Fathers clerics collective biographies and history competitive biographies converts , description ecclesiastics education, emphasis on importance of encomia , entertaining aspect of biography epideictic facts and fiction (distinction) fictional autobiographies fictive epistolography florid style folklore gospels hagiography , , , , , high and low style historiography , holy figures , Jesus Christ Judaism lay people literary devices local heroes madrashe (stanzaic poems) , , martyrs , , , memre (verse homilies) , miracles , , missionaries narrative devices , non religious hero biographies paideia philosophers poems , reading biographies rhetoric romance , saints , , , , , , Septuagint sogyatha (dialogic poems) syncrisis
Syriac (Lives in) (cont.) theological propaganda verse , women in biographies
T
t:abaqāt biographies Tacitus, Publius Cornelius Agricola n, , , , , administrative and military achievements birth to death encomium and political biography epitaphios (funeral speech) ethnography history Italian Renaissance biographies, influence on logos basilikos (‘king speech’) political biographies prologue Annals , biographical tradition Dialogus de oratoribus (or Dialogus) n, genre overlap and differentiation n, n Histories , Marcus Aemilius Scaurus moralism, characterization and readership portraiture, statues and arches praise in Trajanic Rome , Publius Rutilius Rufus Talmud , n Tatian: Oratio ad Graecos temples inscriptions and epigraphic sources (biographical material in) , monuments in ancient Egypt , , , Tennyson, Alfred: Lucretius Tepedino Guerra, A. Testament of Ephrem Tettichus (epigram) textuality , , al Tha‘labī: ‘Arā’is al Majālis fī Qis: as: al Anbiyā’ (The Highlights ‘Brides’
of the Enlightening Sessions on the Tales of the Prophets) Thales of Miletus (sage) , , , Theagenes of Rhegium , , , , , Thecla, Acts of see Acts of Paul and Thecla Thecla, Life and Miracles of , , Thecla, Saint , thematic arrangements, systematic Themistius Themistocles (Athenian politician) , , Themistocles (student in Eunapius’ VPS) Theocritus Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus Idyll Theodora (Palaeologina)(Byzantine empress) , Theodore Abu Qurrah Theodore the Alexandrian Theodore (disciple/successor of Pachomius) , , Theodore Metochites Theodore of Stoudios Theodoret of Cyrrhus Religious History of the Monks of Syria , , , Theodosius (Pyrrhonian philosopher) n Theodosius I Theodosius II Theodotus of Amida, Life of , Theodotus of Laodicea n Theon n Progymnasmata Theophanes Continuatus Theophrastus , Characters Doctrines of the Natural Philosophers Theopistus: on Dioscorus of Alexandria Theopompus of Chios n, Theseids Theseus Thespesion third person narrative , , , Thomais (nun): Life of Febronia (purportedly written by) Thomas, C.M.
Thomas of Marga Book of Governors Thrasyllus Thucydides , , , death scenes genre hierarchy and relationships genre and inclusivity n on Homer moralism, characterization and readership Nicias political biography in Augustan period , proto biography and historiography Stesimbrotus of Thasos Themistocles , , Tibbets, S.J. n Tiberius , , arch Tiede, D.L. Timocrates of Heraclea , , , Timoleon, Life of (by V. Alfieri) Timon of Phlius , Silloi or Lampoons Timotheus (the deacon): on Dioscorus of Alexandria Tisicrates: Cornelia (statue of) Titinius Capito , Titus Tatius (statue) Tobit , Toher, M. n, n Tolstoy, Leo: Ivan Ilyitch tombs , see also under monuments in ancient Egypt tone of writings n Too, Y.L. topic or theme specific tradition of biography from ancient biographers tragedies , , n, Trajan/Trajanic , , portraiture, statues and arches , , , Rome see praise in Trajanic Rome Tranquillus: biographical tradition
Traversari, Ambrogio , Trebonianus Gallus Troy, Tale of Tuplin, C. n twentieth century see receptions of Greek and Roman poets in twentieth century typification n
U
‘Urwa ibn al Zubayr
V
Vahan Mamikonian , , Valens Valerius, Julius see Julius Valerius Valerius Maximus , exempla Van der Stockt, L. n Van Esbroeck, M. n van Henten, J.W. n Van Hook, L. , van Mander, Karel: Schilderboek Van Meirvenne, B. n Van Nuffelen, P. Van Uytfanghe, M. n, , Vardan Mamikonian , Varro, Marcus Terentius , De vita populi romani (On the Life of the Roman People) Portraits (Imagines) or Sevens (Hebdomades) Vasak Siwni Vasari, Giorgio: Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects Vedas Vedii Antonini family , , f, Veilleux, A. Velleius Paterculus Venantius Fortunatus Ventura Villanueva, A. veracity, strategies used to enhance n Verginius Rufus vernacular, use of , , , , European ,
vernacular, use of (cont.) Greek medieval oriental Verus see Lucius Verus Verus Vespasian Vestal Virgin Gaia Taracia (or Fufetia) (statue) Veyne, P. vices , , , , , , , , , , Plutarch: Parallel Lives , , Vico, Giambattista: Scienza nuova Villedieu, Madame de Amours des grands hommes, Les Mémoires de la vie de Henriette Sylvie de Molière Vincent of Beauvais: Speculum historiale Virgil , , Aeneid Virgin Mary , , virtues Arabic (Lives in) Byzantium , epigrams inscriptions and epigraphic sources (biographical material in) , , , Isocrates: Evagoras Marinus: Proclus, or On Happiness medieval life writing , , , n, monks (Lives of) , Neoplatonic scale of , , Nepos: On Foreign Generals , philosophers (Lives of) Pliny the Younger: Panegyricus Plutarch: Parallel Lives , , , political biography , , , , portraiture in Imperial Rome seventeenth and eighteenth centuries , solitude and biography Xenophon of Athens
visual arts , see also sophistic self representation and portraiture Vita Herodotea , , , , , Vita Romana , , , , Vita Scorialensis ( and ) , Voltaire (François Marie Arouet) Charles XII criticism of Plutarch von Gebhardt, O. von Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoph: Simplicius Simplicissimus von Harnack, A. n von Sandrart, Joachim: Teutsche Academie von Wilamowitz, U. n, , n, , n,
W Wahb ibn Munabbih Kitāb al Mubtada’ (‘Book of Beginnings’) Kitāb al Mulūk al Mutawwaja (‘The Book of Crowned Kings’) Life of Ğirğis (transmitters go back to) Walcott, Derek: Omeros Wallace Hadrill, A. , Walton, Izaak Weingarten, S. n Welcker, F.G. Wenders, Wim: Der Himmel über Berlin (or The Wings of Desire) West, M.L. , , Whitmarsh, T. n Whitton, C.L. Wilfong, Terry William of Malmesbury William of Tyre Chronicle (or Chronicon; Latin) contrasted with Éracles translation (French vernacular) , b Williams, M.S. n, , , n wills , , , , Wilson, A.
Wischmeyer, W. , n Wittgenstein theory of family resemblances women in biographies Italian Renaissance monuments in ancient Egypt , portraiture in Imperial Rome seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Syriac (Lives in) woodcuts , Woodman, A.J. , n Wordsworth, William: Prelude, The , ,
X
Xanthus of Lydia: Empedocles Xenocrates On Plato’s Life Polemo of Athens Xenophanes , , , Xenophon of Athens , Agesilaus , , , , , , , , , , Byzantine biographies, influence on , characterizing strategies n encomium , honorific decree political biography , , praise in Trajanic Rome solitude Anabasis , , , n, , , , anachronism apologetic writing , Apology n, autobiography , biographical tradition n birth to death narrative , , character sketches , chronology Clearchus courage Cyropaedia , n, , , , , , , Byzantine biographies, influence on ,
holy men n political biography in Augustan period, influence on n political biography and fiction Cyrus the Great , , , Cyrus the Younger , , delineation of individual encomium , , , fiction intertwined with biography genre and inclusivity genre overlap and differentiation n Hellenica , , Hiero historical narrative inclusivity introspection justice leadership literary invention memoir , Memorabilia , , , , , , , monks rhetorical tradition of praise Seven Sages solitude memorialization of mentor (Socrates) Menon mini biographies moderation Oeconomicus politeia literature , political biographies Proxenus self advertisement self awareness n self portrait , , self presentation , self reflexivity , Socrates, importance of , , Spartan Constitution structural and thematic correspondences Symposium , ,
Xenophon of Athens (cont.) Themistogenes the Syracusan pseudonym third person narrative travel writing truth, flexibility with unity and multiplicity virtue wisdom Xenophon of Ephesus: Ephesiaca Xystus
Y
Yazdgard I , Yazdgard II ,
Z
Zacchaeus Zacharias Rhetor: Severus of Antioch Zanker, P. , Zeno of Elea , , , Ziadé, R. n Zintzen, C. n