Greek and Latin Biography

The ancient Greek and Roman civilizations spawned and recycled many stories about heroes, tyrants, sages, and other (predominantly male) celebrities. Yet, a holistic reading of Greco-Roman biography is tricky. The common denominator of Greek and Latin texts that must or may be considered biographical is narrative focused on the life of a noteworthy historical or quasi-historical individual. So the boundaries of the evidence base are blurred and negotiable, even around the core of the best-known mainstream authors such as Plutarch and Suetonius. Alongside the extant or attested works that present full-scale accounts of lives of statesmen and intellectuals, the ancient biographical outlook can be gauged from historiography, apophthegmatic anecdotes, encomia and lampoons, novelized history, and so on. Since no theory of life writing was developed in Greco-Roman criticism as far as we can tell, it is fair to think of ancient biography as an “inductive genre”: that is, a pattern suggested by the available material itself but also generating further interpretative configurations. Biography is thus a heuristic concept for unlocking a layered meshwork of political, sociocultural, and ethical values through a significant—or, better, a significantly “emplotted” and potentially paradigmatic—life story that acts out those values before the insiders of the Greek, Roman, and Greco-Roman ideological and literary landscapes. Scholarship is now used to appreciating ancient biography on its own, however fuzzy, terms rather than treating it as a lighter and implicitly inferior form of historiography. While the questions of source criticism and historicity continue to be vital, there is an ever-growing flow of studies focusing on the specific writerly and readerly aspects of ancient biography, with its propensity toward ethopoetic moralism and anecdotal montage. Similarly, autobiographical texts should be regarded both as historical documents and as textual artifacts of self-legitimization and authority.