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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 present paper focusses on the oldest version of the Alexander Romance (the so-called alpha recension). It is a composite work, made of heterogeneous elements whose combination generates tensions in the portrayal of the protagonist, Alexander. His presentation is multifocal: making use of letters, speeches, and dialogues, and multiplying the points of view, the narrator constructs a kaleidoscopic image of Alexander which is that of an actant rather than a character. Nevertheless, the emphasis put on Alexander’s singularity and exceptional destiny gives the Romance its consistency. The prevalence of an entertaining prospect implies a redirection of biographical tools for the benefit of fictitiousness.

This chapter discusses ancient biographies of statesmen. What is the nature of ancient political biography? It is the description of the life and deeds of a significant political player of the recent or far past, individually told or in a series, with the intent of edifying the readers. This means that such a work often has an encomiastic, or at any rate evaluative cast, and may even employ certain acknowledged untruths in order to bring out the characteristic significance of a given politician. This too is the aim with which intimate details or gossip are told: so as to convey a clear image of what kind of man Solon, Demosthenes, Augustus, or Nero was, and how this influenced his career and his deeds.

This chapter discusses ancient biography in the Italian Renaissance. One way to reveal some of the major trends and developments of ancient biography in the Renaissance is to examine the models chosen by Renaissance biographers. This approach not only illuminates the legacy of ancient biography, but also sheds some light on modern suppositions about ancient biography. Some of the models chosen will hardly be a surprise. Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars and the Augustan History provided a model for biography as a history of civic and military leaders. Jerome’s Illustrious Men remained a blueprint for biography as bibliography and as literary history. Yet humanists also found models in Cicero, Varro, and Pliny, all of whom are today rarely thought of as biographers. Moreover, Renaissance authors did not always take up what one might think of as their model’s characteristic features. The chapter considers how some of the major authors of Renaissance biography worked and reworked their models to suit new needs. It also addresses five sub-types of biography: collective biographies of historical figures; collective biographies of literary figures; individual and comparative biographies; collective biographies in dialogue form; and collective biographies with portraits.

This chapter examines presences of ancient biography in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The popularity of biography in seventeenth-century Europe was mainly due to the numerous translations of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. Conversely, Suetonius, whose Lives of the Caesars were extremely influential in the early modern period, was less read in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Meanwhile, Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers contributed to the rise of literary and philosophical biography. However, the more life-writing is considered as a literary practice, the less its historical reliability is valued. If, in the seventeenth century, Lives were generally regarded as a historical genre, eighteenth-century philosophers criticized the historical interest of biography, at a time in which history began to be studied as a science more than as a pedagogical device.

The importance and influence of anthologies during the Tang dynasty is evident in their increasing numbers and broad variety. The names of over a hundred Tang anthologies are known, and over a score have been preserved in whole or part. These include general anthologies of verse and prose, some conceived of as sequels to pre-Tang anthologies, as well as anthologies devoted only to verse, to choice extracts, or to particular periods or occasions, particular groups of writers, particular topics, or even particular areas from which writers hailed. They range in size from those with barely two dozen compositions to those containing a thousand or more.

This chapter considers the biography, literary career, and literary output of the second-century Platonizing Latin writer Apuleius, born in Roman North Africa in the 120s ce and recorded as active in Carthage and Africa Proconsularis in the late 150s and 160s. In particular, it examines the key features of his two most important surviving works, the Apologia or Pro Se De Magia, a forensic oration of self-defense against charges of magic and other offences, delivered in the late 150s in court at Sabathra, and the Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, a spectacular picaresque fiction concerning the adventures of the young Greek Lucius, who is metamorphosed into a donkey but later becomes an official in the cults of Isis and Osiris. It is shown overall that Apuleius’s literary profile matches those of contemporary Greek sophists and can be usefully described as sophistic.

The chapter surveys Christian Arabic literature translated into Greek as well as “Eastern” storytelling that was mediated through Arabic and reached the Byzantine Greek tradition through translation. It thus discusses (a) texts written in the context of so-called Melkite communities in the wake of the Islamic conquests as well as, later, in the Byzantine environment of Antioch from 969 to 1084 (e.g., the Life of Ioannes Damaskenos [BHG 884]); and (b) the transmission and translation history of Barlaam and Ioasaph (the life of Buddha), Stephanites and Ichnelates (Kalīla wa Dimna), and Syntipas (The Book of Sindbad), as well as the possible links with Arabic storytelling of Digenis Akrites. It also draws attention to translations made in the courtly environment of the late Byzantine empire of Trebizond.

After the Muslim conquest of the Middle East in the seventh century, indigenous Christian populations translated thousands of Christian texts from their ancestral languages (Greek, Syriac, and Coptic) into Arabic. The present contribution surveys Arabic translations of Greek (primarily early Byzantine) Christian literature, discusses important translation centers (especially, Palestine and Antioch) and individual translators, and reviews the translated texts by genre, with special attention to biblical texts, hagiography, homiletics, theological and ascetic literature, and liturgy and hymnography. The vast majority of the texts discussed have not been edited or studied, and still await their researchers.

This chapter examines the Arabic biographical tradition. The genre of biographical writing is a celebrated, multifaceted, and widely practised field of Arabic literature. Basic forms of biographical compilation can be shown from the first century of Islam (seventh century), initially orally transmitted and later in writing. The Arabic biographical tradition was mainly developed from within Islam, to which it owes its noticeable character. It probably originated from the earnest aspiration of generations following the initial period to preserve knowledge about the central figures of that era. For that reason, biographical transmission, initially, was a highly religion-orientated discipline. Nevertheless, or perhaps even due to this stimulus, there developed a huge field of different biographical genres and specialized life-writing.

Evidence for the use of Greek by Armenians dates from the Hellenistic period, when Greek and Aramaic were court languages. The first written translations from Greek into Armenian were made much later, from the fifth century ce onward, when an alphabet for the Armenian language was devised (c. 405), following the adoption of Christianity in probably c. 314. The Bible and patristic texts were translated from Syriac and Greek, followed by liturgical and philosophical texts, as well as ecclesiastical documents, such as council canons and correspondence with church dignitaries. Education in the Eastern Mediterranean schools provided a matrix for the inculturation of religious and secular texts written in Greek. Some of the texts preserved in Armenian reflect either a more ancient redaction than the oldest preserved Greek manuscripts, or represent witnesses to texts no longer extant in Greek. Attention is given in this sub-chapter to translation techniques and their potential correlation to Antiochene and Alexandrian exegesis, as well as Christological disputes. In assessing the justification for the often-used term “Hellenizing School”, it is emphasized that the heightened or lesser levels of Grecisms deployed in translations and original works varied over time and location. The sub-chapter discusses further types of texts translated from Greek, such as pseudepigrapha, apocrypha, texts related to the trivium and quadrivium, and legal texts. It pays attention also to translation through intermediary languages such as Syriac and Georgian, and to Armenian texts into Greek. Suggestions for further reading and a bibliography complete the sub-chapter.

This chapter discusses the diverse Armenian biographical material, which was transmitted directly or indirectly in written form and hence dependent on the existence of a writing system. Particular historical forces converged to realize this project as part of a process to diffuse literacy in Southern Caucasia in the early fifth century. Initiated primarily as a means of advancing the cause of Christian proclamation and solidarity in the region, the movement to inaugurate a literate tradition inspired the participation of pluralist trends in Armenian society to employ the medium to engage in dialogue on issues of collective identity and values. By the end of the Umayyad era, that process of exchange resulted in the construction of a relatively connected master narrative of Armenian origins and the course of secular and sacred history that included a gallery of variegated portraits of the pre-eminent figures who shaped these developments, a selection of which will form the focus of the chapter’s discussion. The criteria for selection include literary significance, the prominence of the individuals portrayed, and the texts’ rhetorical impact on Armenian society, in both the religious and cultural spheres.

This chapter explores the Confessions of Augustine of Hippo. Almost every author who writes on Augustine’s Confessions feels an obligation to insist that this difficult and complex work is not an autobiography. If the purpose of the Confessions as a whole is to turn the reader towards God, as it would appear from Augustine’s account, it seems no less clear that the means is through narrating Augustine’s own life in all its aspects, both good and bad. With this in mind, it has always been difficult to deny that the Confessions possesses, at the very least, a profoundly autobiographical character. Augustine offers an extended meditation of his life in more-or-less chronological order. If this is not the whole story of the Confessions, it is enough all the same to suggest that there may be value in approaching it as autobiography. Such an approach must begin by acknowledging that ‘autobiography’ is an elusive category, no less than is its parent ‘biography’.

The chapter introduces two sets of questions pertaining to (a) the social profile of Byzantine authors, and (b) the conception and value of authorship in Byzantium. It thus first surveys the prevalent patterns in the biographies of the c. 1600 eponymous known Greek authors from Byzantium. It then discusses the cultural as well as spiritual capital of authorship in Byzantium: notions such as those of divine inspiration and author-saints, and “practices” such pseudonymity (the false ascription of texts) and anonymity (the loss or absence of authorial signatures). The chapter concludes with an exploration of the reception of Symeon Metaphrastes (perhaps the most important author of the middle Byzantine period) as an author by later generations of readers.

This chapter presents a survey of biblical interpretation in the Byzantine world from late antiquity through the late Byzantine period. Literary genres, schools of thought, historical periods, as well as major writers, theologians, and exegetes are covered. Consideration is given to the historical antecedents of Byzantine biblical hermeneutics in Jewish and Greek interpretive practices. Significant emphasis is given to hermeneutical questions, with special attention to allegory. Many of the texts that are surveyed are either unpublished, unavailable in modern translations, or only poorly known by scholars, opening up avenues for new research and study.

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.

This chapter surveys the genre normally referred to by Egyptologists as ‘biography’ or ‘autobiography’, comprising texts, often inscribed on stone monuments, which recount, in various forms, events in a non-royal person’s life and/or aspects of their moral character. Such biographies are attested from the third millennium bc to Roman times, making them one of the longest-lived and most characteristic textual genres known from ancient Egypt. The chapter begins by briefly summarizing issues surrounding the genre’s definition, as well as the range of approaches taken by Egyptologists to its analysis. An overview of the display contexts for biography is then given, ranging across the walls of tomb-chapels to the bodies of stone statues set up in temples. The discussion deploys a broadly chronological structure in order to give a sense of development and scope. Some potential analytical implications of these contexts are highlighted, for example around performance and audience. The final discussion centres on features of content; these texts were products of a predominantly elite male world so, unsurprisingly, are usually highly idealizing presentations of character and action. The genre’s richness and diversity in terms of themes and expression within this framework is highlighted.

This chapter addresses Tacitus’ Agricola and Pliny the Younger’s Panegyricus. At first glance, they have little in common. Both written early in Trajan’s principate, one is a short biography of Tacitus’ father-in-law, the other a long speech of thanks addressed to the emperor. However, they are also a complementary, contemporary, and directly connected pair of literary artworks. Tacitus marshals the resources of a long biographical tradition in his brilliant apology for the career of a quietist. Pliny for his part produces a striking account, at once humanizing and mythologizing, of an emperor whose scripted life finds significant origins in the pages of Tacitus. Between privatus and princeps, across biography and encomium, Agricola and Panegyricus together offer striking illumination of the possibilities for textualizing lives in Trajanic Rome.