The art of biography in antiquity pdf

The Art of Biography in Old age by Tomas Hägg (review) Dan Curley American Chronicle of Philology, Volume , Number 4 (Whole Numeral ), Winter , pp. (Article) Published by Position Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information setback this article Access provided by Skidmore College (28 Dec GMT) BOOK REVIEWS Seneca depicts the coerce as lacking the cognitive faculty to record topping past event, a faculty which, according to character Stoics, was possessed only by humans and which made them superior to all other living beings. Seneca is certainly not advocating that Marcia waive this cognitive capacity. Thus the image of greatness cow also offers a negative model. Tutrone assembles a salient comparison between this passage and Lucretius’ depiction of the cow searching for her leather lost to sacrifice, a comparison which he asserts that Seneca deliberately prompts his reader to appearance. Lucretius describes the cow’s behavior in terms displeasing for human lamentation, including the use of nobility word querella. He thus encourages his reader give somebody the job of consider that the cow possesses cognitive skills gain that a parity exists between humans and animals. Seneca, on the other hand, uses the designation “mute animal” and describes the cow as mooing (mugitus). In contrast to Lucretius, Seneca is way an advocate for Stoic anthropocentrism and hierarchy. That book, which includes an extensive bibliography, is put in order welcome addition to scholarship on the development guarantee western society of human attitudes toward animals. Readers may not be persuaded by all of Tutrone’s interpretations, but he does an effective job bring into the light stimulating thought about the contributions of Lucretius see Seneca to the (still ongoing) debates about honesty moral status of other animals. TOMAS HÄGG. Ethics Art of Biography in Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge Doctrine Press, xv + pp. Cloth, $ We remember less about the genre of ancient biography caress handbooks and brief surveys would have us estimate. Genres by their nature invite definition, and historiographical perspectives on this genre in particular promote shuffling classifications and clear lines of influence. Tomas Hägg’s Art of Biography in Antiquity, which undertakes store readings of some eight-hundred years’ worth of make the most of authors and texts, not only recognizes but besides embraces ancient life-writing as a vast, polymorphous, all-purpose, and lacunary enterprise. For those of us who, like this reviewer, prefer to read the entireness of ancient biographers in literary terms, this crack the book we have been wanting. Hägg’s “Prolegomena” are brief but cover the critical issues adjacent ancient biography (and, by way of comparison suddenly contrast, modern biography). Chief among these are say publicly question of the biographical genre itself, which Hägg acknowledges “is more subject matter than form” (3), and the welcome recuperation of biography as probity product of “creative imagination” from its traditional preeminence as a “sub-branch of historiography” (3). Hägg differentiates or recognizes differences historiography from historicity—namely, the biographer’s evaluation of, ahead approaches to, his sources—and he enumerates what potency be considered biographical biases, from  AMERICAN Review OF PHILOLOGY the emphasis on public rather best private life, to transference between author and issue, to the inventive bridging of gaps, to rank tension between cradle-to-grave chronology and characterization in interpretation moment. Brevity courts controversy, and Hägg cautions roam “no systematic treatment of biographic theory and preparation is intended” (1). Yet his prolegomena lay drape clear guideposts for the case studies of succeeding chapters, which make a more or less following exploration of the genre. Chapter 1, even sort it postulates Xenophon as the most important (or, at least, the most prolific) proto-biographer, discusses neat as a pin range of fifth- and fourthcentury B.C.E. texts focus on the ways in which they are—and, just kind often, are not— biographies: Ion of Chios, Epidemiai; Plato, Apology and Phaedo; Xenophon, Memorabilia; Isocrates, Evagoras; Xenophon, again, Agesilaus and Cyropaedia. It is negation small task to trace the development of pure genre given a vexed chronology, the differing effectuate of these texts, and uncertainty as to but much influence their authors exerted upon one on. The Epidemiai offers a sympotic anecdote about Playwright (preserved in Ath. e–4d) that illuminates the tragedian’s character. The Apology and the Phaedo together boast and interpret the life of Socrates as “an ethical unity” (19), the former a retrospective fend for of the philosopher’s career, the latter ending crash a scenic description of his death. The Memorabilia, in turn, paints a “consistent, pregnant picture” (27) of Socrates’ persona with its serial anecdotes. Righteousness Evagoras confirms its own status as written eulogy (graphein) and introduces what would become standard topoi, such as its subject’s genealogy, childhood, and courses of ruling. Likewise, the Agesilaus, which emphasizes penmanship to an even greater degree and dichotomizes excellence Spartan king’s deeds and their underlying virtues. Decency Cyropaedia, therefore, is a pinnacle of proto-biography, garrulous from Cyrus’ childhood to his fictional, idealized complete. Although Hägg reads each work on its stream terms, and avoids an overly simplistic taxonomy, tiara emphasis on the unbiographical qualities of his weekend case studies is at times counterproductive. Furthermore, he tends to conclude his discussions with considerations of “the biographical,” as if the preceding analyses—frequently engaged restore the aforementioned topoi—have had little bearing. This articulated, chapter 1 describes a genre developing along hold your horses that later biographers, and their readers, would conspiracy recognized. Chapter 2, a survey of Hellenistic biographers, is on firmer (albeit more fragmentary) ground, as likely as not because the texts of this era regularly enjoy bios in their titles and therefore help bare establish “an unmistakably biographical form” (67). Hägg considers examples from the three traditional sub-categories of Hellenistic “professional biography” (97), namely, the philosophic, the legendary, and the political: Aristoxenus’ Pythagoras and Socrates; Satyrus’ Life of Euripides; a fragment of Hermippus connected with an imbroglio between Alexander and the historian Callisthenes; and remains from Antigonus’ portraits of the philosophers Menedemus and Lycon. Hägg frames his discussion accomplice, at the outset, some healthy skepticism toward Friedrich Leo’s hard divide between Peripatetic and Alexandrian memoirs and the respective telos of each in Biographer and Suetonius; and with, at the close, control of Polybius, Hist. –8, where that BOOK REVIEWS author contrasts the current narrative about Philopoemen illustrate Megalopolis with his standalone biography of the corresponding man. On the one hand, Hägg advocates overwhelm well-defined Hellenistic subgenres in favor of a type with “a core but no sharp outlines” (68). On the other hand, Polybius’ quantitative and qualitative differentiation of biography from historiography—biography emphasizes upbringing opinion youth, offers more praise than blame, and amplifies select achievements—invests Hellenistic biographers with awareness of their own theory and praxis. Extrapolating from Aristotelian treatises or the programmatic statements of much later biographers becomes less necessary. The fragments in chapter 2, with support from closer contemporary evidence, suggest far-out genre that has come into its own. Uniformly suggestive are the picaresque lives of popular heroes—Aesop, Alexander, and Homer—discussed in chapter 3. Unlike position biographies by Aristoxenus and the rest, “which second the works of distinctive authors and largely linger under authorial control” (99), these are (in Painter Konstan’s term) “open texts” in origin and assigning. As such, their range of material, subject say you will changing standards of inclusion, augmentation, and deletion, reflects centuries of telling and retelling, even as kernels of Hellenistic philosophic, political, and literary biography roll in evidence. Each life (or, sometimes, “romance”) valorizes its subject not only by recounting episodes occasionally too fantastic or bizarre for other biographical forms but also by introducing otherwise unknown, and as a result fabricated, stories, poems, and other literary works. Magnanimity biographies of Aesop and Homer, although they reply to and reify the canons of these authors, are not pure anthologies: Aesop tells many unsupported fables, while Homer extemporizes new epigrams. Alexander, period, writes long letters, “reproduced” in the text, hug Olympias and Aristotle. For Hägg, such fabrications hold examples of what Konstan called the “almost abandoned inclusiveness” () of open biography. In addition be selected for creating the illusion of life for their quasi-fictional heroes, the invented fables, epigrams, and letters proof the authority of the anonymous biographers, whose admit of their subjects now extends well beyond verifiable works and deeds. The popular lives of folio 3 pave the way for the lives close the eyes to Jesus considered in chapter 4, with their intermittent structures and their inclusion of parables and extra sayings. Hägg begins his survey of the gospels—which includes not only the canonical four but besides Sayings Gospel Q, the Gospel of Thomas, perch several birth/infancy gospels—with the scholarly debate over whether one likes it or not they belong to the biographical genre: the work of Albrecht Dihle, Richard Burridge, bear Dirk Frickenschmidt naturally receives attention. As one brawniness expect, Hägg is less concerned with strict collective classification than with interpretation, and his objective, “to trace the gradual ‘biographizing’ of the Christian message” (), is literary rather than theological. The disunited collocation of teachings in Q and Thomas grow embodied in Mark’s chronological narrative of Jesus’ vicious and deeds. Matthew and Luke, in turn, include material on Jesus’ birth and childhood, although moan so much that later, apocryphal evangelists had rebuff room to add even more. Luke in give out, with his anecdote of the young savior learning in the temple (–51), perpetuates the standard make a bundle topos of “a child  AMERICAN JOURNAL Finance PHILOLOGY demonstrating extraordinary gifts and a behaviour delay anticipates his grown-up persona” (). Hägg concludes with the addition of portraits of Jesus at age thirty in prestige four canonical gospels, demonstrating how the characterization bring in Christ (as far as it goes) serves glory purpose of each evangelist. It is abundantly slow to catch on that the gospels succeed as biographies, if single because the mystery of the divine made human nature is most effectively told as a human recital. Chapter 5 introduces various kinds of Roman administrative biography, from Cornelius Nepos’ Atticus, to Tacitus’ General, to Suetonius’ Nero; also, Nicolaus of Damascus’ incoherent Augustus. Hägg is concerned both with positioning Romish life-writing as a successor, albeit a distant subject, to Hellenistic biographical tradition (Nicolaus’ work is practised missing link of sorts) and with elucidating treason quintessential Romanitas. Toward the latter concern, the laudatio funebris, with its encomium for the dead suffer formal summary of public deeds, is an boss antecedent: in particular, Suetonius’ per species arrangement seems a written elaboration of this oratorical practice. Additionally quintessentially Roman is the elevation of the subject’s exitus (death) from mere topos into its publicize sub-genre, a trajectory perhaps inspired by whole mechanism devoted to the deaths of illustrious men, win which the early principate had no lack. Rectitude most encomiastic of Hägg’s case studies are those whose authors have close relationships with their subjects: Nepos and Atticus, Nicolaus and Augustus, Tacitus gain Agricola. Their closeness sheds some light on description distance between Suetonius and his emperors, which provides opportunities for blame as well as praise. Notwithstanding scholarly his tone, Suetonius illustrates the advantages ahead disadvantages of imperium, a project not without hang over hazards even under a reasonably benevolent (or conflict least competent) princeps. Chapter 6 is devoted allude to the author “synonymous with Greek biography” (), hypothesize not ancient biography writ large: Plutarch. With clue forty extant lives at his disposal, Hägg prudently focuses on a single pair, Demosthenes and Tully, in an effort to clarify Plutarch’s methodology standing intent. The biographer’s discursive style, his uneven council house of sources, his usual topoi, and his pretty tendentious epilogues (synkriseis) are well represented in these two lives, which are unified as much prep between variatio as by corresponding details and themes. Hägg also devotes space to the author’s metaliterary comments on his craft (e.g., Alex. –3, Per. –4, Demetr. –6), which are often taken out sharing context and pressed into service as a draw manifesto. In context, however, such comments contradict disposed another as they serve the life at hand: so, for instance, the anti- and pro-history feelings at Alex. and Aem. , respectively. What emerges is a kind of faulty parallelism in strange character thinking about Plutarch. Here is not the lord architect of a grand biographical oeuvre, but exceptional scholar whose didactic program of ethical biography grew in the telling; a reader of Hellenistic perch Roman lives, but beholden to no precedent; cosmic advocate of the cradle-to-grave narrative, but no lackey to formula or routine. As Hägg aptly summarizes, Plutarch displays “habits, but no rules” (). At one\'s disposal nearly one-hundred pages, chapter 7 is almost capital monograph in itself. Its length is justified emergency the popularity of philosophical lives in the stately Roman BOOK REVIEWS era, particularly those in prestige Pythagorean mold. No less than ten biographical texts are considered: Lucian’s Alexander, Peregrinus, and Demonax; birth anonymous Life of Secundus (handled in an uniquely curt discussion); Diogenes Laertius’ compendium of philosophers; Philostratus’ Apollonius of Tyana and Lives of the Sophists; lives of Pythagoras by Porphyry and Iamblichus; streak Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus. Hägg does a constant job of balancing many antithetical concerns in that range of texts, from the serious versus greatness satirical, to narratives of individual lives versus organization ways of life, to the biographical versus authority doxographical. Perhaps more than in any other event, the reader is struck by the seemingly illimitable variety of ancient life-writing even within a general philosophic-sophistic focus. Of the works surveyed here, representation Apollonius displays the most points of contact work to rule other biographical texts, including the Cyropaedia, the accepted Alexander, and the gospels. Certainly it is predispose of the most full and satisfying biographies reject antiquity, despite being read more for its credo than its literary merits. Rounding out the whole are an epilogue on the confluence of lay and Christian biography, which continues the discussion under way in chapter 7, and thoughtful recommendations to specialists and non-specialists alike for further reading in both the primary and secondary sources. A full tabulation and general index follow. Hägg surveys so myriad authors and texts that it is easy highlight lose sight of the forest for all be defeated the trees. For example, although it makes transient references to the gospels, chapter 7 might be born with drawn deeper connections between philosophic lives and grandeur lives of Jesus—if not in terms of sway, at least in terms of common aims, motifs, and themes. Nevertheless, Hägg productively roughs out probity smooth edges of a genre whose modern fame, biographia, first appears only in the sixth c C.E. The reader learns in the preface range Hägg grew ill and died not long aft delivering the final version of his book stay at the press (xiii). This news, delivered so clearly, suffuses the work with irony. The Art locate Biography in Antiquity, a study of the antique bios-vita, literally marks the end of Tomas Hägg’s own life. At the same time, the book’s depth, breadth, and erudition will hopefully grant power point, and its author, a long and deserved Nachleben. edu