Fifth-Century Preliminaries
This chapter studies the fifth-century antecedents of biography, focusing on two writers: Stesimbrotus of Thasos and Ion of Chios. These ‘preliminaries’ are not the roots of a single tree thrusting upwards, shortly to blossom into something called ‘biography’. Stesimbrotus and Ion represent several different seeds, and some will be productive in quite different ways: the anecdotal, the focus on self, the miscellaneity, and 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. Eastern influences may operate directly on, particularly, Cyropaedia, even if the impact of that eastern material on Herodotus had already prepared that particular path.