The art of biography in antiquity

  • Greek and Roman biography embraces much more than Plutarch, Suetonius and their lost Hellenistic antecedents.
  • Applying a consistent biographical reading to a representative set of surviving texts, this book opens up the manifold but often neglected art of biography in.
  • Greek and Roman biography embraces much more than Plutarch, Suetonius and their lost Hellenistic antecedents.

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    Index Theologicus

    Summary:"Greek and Roman biography embraces much more than Plutarch, Suetonius and their lost Hellenistic antecedents. In this book Professor Hägg explores the whole range and diversity of ancient biography, from its Socratic beginnings to the Christian acquisition of the form in late antiquity. He shows how creative writers developed the lives of popular heroes like Homer, Aesop and Alexander and how the Christian gospels grew from bare sayings to full lives. In imperial Rome biography flourished in the works of Greek writers: Lucian&#;s satire, Philostratus&#; full sophistic orchestration, Porphyry&#;s intellectual portrait of Plotinus. Perhaps surprisingly, it is not political biography or the lives of poets that provide the main artery of ancient biography, but various kinds of philosophical, spiritual and ethical lives. Applying a consistent biographical reading to a representative set of surviving texts, this book opens up the manifold but often n

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    The Art of Biography in Antiquity. By Tomas Hägg. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, Pp. xv + Hardcover, £/$ ISBN

    Reviewed bygd Joseph Geiger, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

    This book is neither an enquiry into the evolution of the genre of ancient biography (if such it was) nor a step-by-step analysis of the remnants of lost works that may throw some light on surviving ones. Hägg does not intend to emulate the works of Leo or Momigliano, but is offering instead a very different book: it consists of detailed discussions of all extant works[[1]] (or well chosen examples of them in cases of lengthy series) that have as their subject the life of a person, and only sporadisk examinations of works known only from fragments; the emphasis fryst vatten on literary analysis and criticism. “The primary purpose of the present study is to interpret the surviving texts” (68–9). Art, for some reason appearing in a smaller font on the dust-jacket, is written l

  • the art of biography in antiquity

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    Preview

    The great Swedish scholar Tomas Hägg died in August The various tributes to him after his death would no doubt have gladdened him, but not only that: their literary form would surely have fascinated him too, with the modern obituary’s inevitable balancing act between curriculum vitae, telling anecdote, and personal testament.1 Certainly this book, which was completed before his final illness and which was seen through the press by his friend and colleague Stephen Harrison, provides ample evidence of his capacious interests, combined with a talent for careful, thorough and generous consideration of all aspects of a phenomenon and the observations made of it by others. More than once throughout the text we are reminded that biographies are often self-portraits, and perhaps it is permissible to read something of Hägg into his version of Plutarch in particular: “his obsession with human nature” matched by “a keen historical curiosity” and “that marvellous gift of becoming int