Martyrs and Life-Writing in Late Antiquity

This chapter explores martyr accounts. Scholars traditionally divide these texts into two types: narrative representations of the suffering and death of martyrs (the so-called passiones) on the one hand, and dramatic representations of the trial preceding this (the so-called acta or praxeis), on the other. The exact semantic range of both labels is debated, 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. This chapter first addresses some of the intellectual premisses that in traditional scholarship on martyr acts were for a long time conducive of historical questions, much to the detriment of the study of these texts as narratives in their own right. The chapter then observes that many martyr acts recount not only the deaths of their protagonists but also cover (parts of) their preceding lives, and it explores how these texts adopt and adapt narrative and rhetorical protocols from traditional life-writing to shape the lives of their protagonists. Finally, attention is paid briefly to the thematic cluster of erotic love, desire, marriage, and the preservation of chastity that drives many such narrative elaborations. It is concluded that whereas research on these texts has long been driven by historical interests, they are also treasure-troves for scholars interested in narrative in general and life-writing in particular.

Nepos’ Life of Atticus, Nicolaus’ Life of Caesar, and the Genre of Political Biography in the Age of Augustus

This chapter assesses the genre of political biography in the age of Augustus, comparing Cornelius 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. Ultimately, one cannot define political biography in the Augustan period very specifically, nor can one measure Nepos’ originality very decisively. 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. However, it is to admit that one 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.

Holy Men

This chapter assesses the special relationship between the ancient genre of biography and the religious phenomenon of holy men. Spiritual biographies are performative texts: 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, 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, and contain many or few miracles.

Diogenes Laertius and Philosophical Lives

This chapter addresses Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, which 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 bc, with occasional glimpses of its continuing vitality in the centuries beyond. Diogenes’ Lives is an exceptional work on many counts. 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 bc. 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 disciplinary orientation, and its sustained focus on philosophy as a distinctive cultural practice and way to live.

Engraved Lives

Inscriptions—permanently incised texts on stone or bronze—are a characteristic feature of Greek and Roman Antiquity. It applies to all periods of ancient epigraphy that by far the most common genres of inscriptions are those directly related to individual persons: 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. 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. 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. Only very long texts—that on the grounds of their exceptional importance were inscribed irrespective of their length and the effort required—can come close to biographies but account for only an infinitely small percentage of the extant epigraphic material.

A Bishop’s Biography

Eusebius’ Life of Constantine is one of the oddest works of biography to survive from Antiquity. As such, its authenticity and genre have been much studied. But its literary qualities remain undervalued. This chapter reads it not as a stand-alone work, but as the climax of its author’s long history of biographical experimentation. It focuses in particular on the ‘episcopal equivalencies’—the two passages where Constantine is described as being bishop-like. These passages can only be properly understood when read against the backdrop of Eusebius’ construction of bishops in his earlier biographical writings.

Byzantine Biography

This chapter studies direct and indirect influences of classical and late antique biographical forms and contents on Byzantine biographical writing. Both the main characteristics of Byzantine biographical writing and the richness of forms and contents become clear. The influence of the vita/bios on other (even non-biographical) genres and the concomitant biographization are noted. Biography has to be interesting, edifying, and entertaining. ‘Adventures’ are an important element as is the constant movement of the heroes. Indeed, a recurrent topic is the hero’s flight and other people’s pursuit of him. It is remarkable that there are so many biographies of people from the provinces who came to Constantinople for various reasons. 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, however, still remain vague. A lot of further scholarly work needs to be done before the art of biography can be properly understood.

Roman Biography in The Medieval West

This chapter focuses on medieval biography in the Latin world, with a special focus on the period c. 1050–c. 1220. An overwhelmingly large part of the life-writing that survives from the medieval West—whether in chronicles, fictional narratives, letters, or Lives—sets out to display virtues as a source of admiration and inspiration. 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. It is shown, however, that especially the inspiration from Sallust’s Jugurtha and Catilina facilitated more complex portraits, especially in historiography, here exemplified through Adam of Bremen’s portrait of archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg-Bremen (1043–1072). The power and persistance of classical Latin ‘anthropological’ concepts are furthermore demonstrated through a comparison of William of Tyre’s ruler portraits in his Chronicon (c. 1184) and its French translation, Éracles (c. 1220).

After-Lives

This chapter explores biographical receptions of Greek and Roman poets in the twentieth century. Classical scholarship has now begun to recognize ancient biography as a creative mode of reception in Antiquity. In the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, reading the texts of Greek and Roman poetry for the lives of their authors has been 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, though a few full-length literary biographies that still attempt to claim factual status have been produced, 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. Moreover, 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 modern preoccupations 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 Biographer as Literary Artist

This chapter focuses on Philostratus’ Apollonius. It begins 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. The chapter then considers 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 reveals 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 and creating an outrageously over-sized literary hero whose story is capable of bearing such a weight.