Between Fact and Fiction in Ancient Biographical Writing

When the fictional aspects of a biographical text begin to accumulate, that text is in danger of moving to the “fringe” of the ancient novel. This has happened to works such as Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and The Alexander Romance (Holzberg 2003 and 1995). These works exhibit too fictional an approach to narrating the life of a historical individual to be neatly classified as biography, but what happens when a novel starts to take on too many biographical features? How many affinities to life-writing must such a text possess before it moves to the fringe of biography?

It is well-established that Plutarch presents different perspectives on historical events in his Parallel Lives depending on what suits his purposes for the given biographical subject (e.g., Pelling 1980; Stadter 2007; Hägg 2012). Suetonius employs a similar technique in his Caesares. His treatment of Nero across multiple Lives illustrates how he refocuses material, even with contradictory results, to underscore the character traits of the subject and highlight certain themes.

For Plutarch, as indeed for other Greek imperial writers, Xenophon was one of the classical authors, whose works were familiar enough to serve as background against which new accounts were to be written or assessed by readers. While mentioning him throughout his works (in both the Lives and the Moralia), Plutarch never treats Xenophon as a historical agent, but rather as a text or a source. This paper attempts to reconsider Plutarch’s use of Xenophon within the context of the issue of genre.

The death of great characters in Livy’s AUC is typically accompanied by a narrative fragmentation into a multiplicity of sources. Perhaps the most spectacular of these instances is the confusion surrounding the death of Scipio Africanus in 38.53.8, but the phenomenon recurs with some regularity from Romulus onwards.