The Art of Biography in Antiquity

“And the old woman who used to sit beside him [Chrysippus], as Diocles asserts, said that he wrote 500 lines a day.” Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (7.181).

Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana shares with many ancient biographies the penchant to present its subject as a paragon of virtue. What it does not share with many of these biographies is its method. Philostratus’s Life reads like one long pilgrimage account. This paper applies the most common anthropological framework associated with pilgrimage accounts to this Life as a heuristic for understanding the dynamics of Philostratus’s rhetorical strategy.

As Tomas Hägg demonstrated with the title of the first chapter of The Art of Biography in Antiquity—“In the beginning was Xenophon”—the study of how ancient authors depicted the lives of individuals must begin with Xenophon’s literary experiments, particularly his works in praise of Socrates and Agesilaus. Within the cultural milieu of democratic Athens, however, Xenophon’s choice to elevate individuals above the collective polis was not an obvious one: one need only think of the epitaphios logos and its role in reinforcing democratic ideology.

Aside from Cicero’s own works, the extant ancient sources that provide us with the most vivid picture of Cicero—the man and the politician—are Plutarch’s Life and the portion of Cassius Dio’s Roman History that deals with the late Republic. In this paper, I contrast the two authors’ distinct conceptions of Cicero’s personality, identity, and political aims.

Ancient biographies of powerful men trigger reflections on power – sometimes in verses. This paper investigates how the ancient biographies of the Roman emperors engage with anonymous and fragmentary poetry, as in the cases of the Historia Augusta and Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars. Indeed, both works quote several anonymous verses (Blänsdorf, Courtney), which mostly convey satirical and mocking attacks against the emperors. In Suetonius, we find 59 verses covering the lives of Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligola, Nero, Galba, Otho and Domitian.