Pub Date : 2020-12-10DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198703013.013.32
M. Edwards
This chapter focuses on biographies of monks. The works commemorating the deeds of monks lack many features which are typical of a bios; if they nonetheless approximate more closely to the pagan model, the reason may be that—in contrast to the martyrs of old, the apostles, the prince of theologians, and the first Christian emperor—the ascetic of current or recent times was sufficiently like the reader to be taken as an exemplar. Indeed, it would appear that the Life of Antony and the works that it inspired were always intended to excite not only wonder but also emulation. Antony is depicted in the Life as an eloquent mouthpiece of the Nicene faith, unmoved by the sophistries of its opponents. The chapter also considers Pachomius, the founder of the cenobitic life. The ancient Lives of Pachomius concede the historical precedence of Antony, but only to add authority to his confession that the younger saint has chosen the better way.
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Pub Date : 2020-12-10DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198703013.013.40
Z. Newby
This chapter investigates the types of biographies which could be written through material objects, and the dynamic uses to which prominent figures could put the visual arts in their efforts at self-representation, using the Imperial Greek sophists as a case study. To what extent can one conceptualize these sorts of representation and self-representation as biography? From the perspective of the historian, physical monuments along with the texts inscribed upon them often allow one to write the life-histories of individuals who would otherwise remain unknown, omitted from the literary tradition. Yet the analogy also goes deeper. Monuments often work within the same sorts of categories and agenda which can also be seen in literary biographies. As with Favorinus’ statue, statues and their inscriptions could present individuals as exempla of particular sorts of values, designed to have a didactic function for their wider audience. The imagery chosen for portrait statues also situates these individuals within particular categories—as scholar, philosopher, or powerful civic notable.
{"title":"Depicted Lives","authors":"Z. Newby","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198703013.013.40","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198703013.013.40","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter investigates the types of biographies which could be written through material objects, and the dynamic uses to which prominent figures could put the visual arts in their efforts at self-representation, using the Imperial Greek sophists as a case study. To what extent can one conceptualize these sorts of representation and self-representation as biography? From the perspective of the historian, physical monuments along with the texts inscribed upon them often allow one to write the life-histories of individuals who would otherwise remain unknown, omitted from the literary tradition. Yet the analogy also goes deeper. Monuments often work within the same sorts of categories and agenda which can also be seen in literary biographies. As with Favorinus’ statue, statues and their inscriptions could present individuals as exempla of particular sorts of values, designed to have a didactic function for their wider audience. The imagery chosen for portrait statues also situates these individuals within particular categories—as scholar, philosopher, or powerful civic notable.","PeriodicalId":103728,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Biography","volume":"4668 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126071061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-10DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198703013.013.33
M. Debié
This chapter studies Syriac biographical writing. Biography is a Greek word and concept for which there is no Syriac equivalent. Yet authors wrote Lives in Syriac as in any other Christian tradition and were aware of the specific features of the genre. The chapter assesses if that makes a difference to the matter of understanding and construing biographical literature, that is, if there is a Syriac specificity in writing Lives compared to other Christian literature. Syriac, moreover, is a language in which Lives were both translated and composed, and circulated widely from one language to another, crossing cultural and ecclesiastical boundaries. Indeed, life-writing is an exceptionally rich field of Syriac literature, attested in an extraordinarily broad geographical scope, well beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire. Beyond translations, the issue is one of adaptation and reception of these texts in different cultural and religious milieus.
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Pub Date : 2020-12-10DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198703013.013.6
S. Johnson
This chapter addresses Christian biography. The Christian biographical tradition is simultaneously fundamental to the early Church and also fundamentally different from Graeco-Roman biographical traditions. This difference emerges from the distinctive discourse of the canonical gospels. These foundational texts were not sui generis across the board in terms of form and genre, but their distinctive discourse and their devotion to narrative as a standard of orthodoxy, combined with their role as historical and theological authorities in the Church, gave them a paradigmatic status never held by Graeco-Roman—or even most Jewish—biographies in their own reception histories. The chapter traces this influence by means of comparison with various genres that arose subsequent to the canonical gospels and with direct reference to them: apocryphal literature, saints’ Lives, and miracle collections, among others.
{"title":"Christian Biography","authors":"S. Johnson","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198703013.013.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198703013.013.6","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter addresses Christian biography. The Christian biographical tradition is simultaneously fundamental to the early Church and also fundamentally different from Graeco-Roman biographical traditions. This difference emerges from the distinctive discourse of the canonical gospels. These foundational texts were not sui generis across the board in terms of form and genre, but their distinctive discourse and their devotion to narrative as a standard of orthodoxy, combined with their role as historical and theological authorities in the Church, gave them a paradigmatic status never held by Graeco-Roman—or even most Jewish—biographies in their own reception histories. The chapter traces this influence by means of comparison with various genres that arose subsequent to the canonical gospels and with direct reference to them: apocryphal literature, saints’ Lives, and miracle collections, among others.","PeriodicalId":103728,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Biography","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129544142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-10DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198703013.013.47
Takis Poulakos
This chapter discusses Isocrates’ Evagoras. One of many ancients to explore the genre of biography, the Athenian rhetorician Isocrates is reputed to be the first to have written a detailed account of a person’s life, in a form still recognizable today as biographical. By today’s standards, Isocrates’ biography of Evagoras—a lengthy exaltation of the recently deceased king of Cyprus—comes across as a verbose chronicle laden with exaggerated praise and magnified significance. However, to those interested in the origins of biography, this work provides a rare opportunity to witness this genre in the early process of its formation. In addition to being a rhetorician experimenting with a new genre, Isocrates was an educator, a teacher of rhetoric, who used his works as textbooks for his students’ learning. More than borrowing from his predecessors their practices of infusing biography into established forms of praise, he appropriated these practices for educational purposes and aligned them to his own pedagogical ends. The chapter then discusses the link between biography and education by exploring the process through which Isocrates developed this genre out of the rhetorical and poetic traditions of praise.
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Pub Date : 2020-12-10DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198703013.013.27
Kendra Eshleman
This chapter examines two collective biographies of Imperial sophists: Philostratus’ Lives of Sophists (VS) and Eunapius’ Lives of Philosophers and Sophists (VPS). The VS records the careers of ten classical and forty-one Imperial figures ‘properly called sophists’, along with eight ‘philosophers with a reputation as sophists’. Eunapius improves on Philostratus, as he sees it, by combining Neoplatonist philosophers, sophists, and rhetorically skilled physicians in a single work. As these summaries suggest, sophists made an awkward subject for collective biography. The term is notoriously protean, and the proper relationship of sophistic to other forms of paideia was hotly disputed; disagreement between Philostratus and Eunapius surfaces already in their titles. Unlike rhetoric and philosophy, sophistic had never had a discrete history, and it is unlikely that Philostratus’ subjects thought they belonged to a coherent ‘Second Sophistic’ movement. For both authors, writing biographies of sophists is a charged intervention in the cultural politics of their day. The chapter considers how the cultural histories of sophistic—and, by implication, sophists—produced by each collection work to position sophistic within and against the political history of the Roman Empire; map its outer limits, especially vis-à-vis philosophy; and authorize the author himself.
{"title":"Sophists","authors":"Kendra Eshleman","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198703013.013.27","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198703013.013.27","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines two collective biographies of Imperial sophists: Philostratus’ Lives of Sophists (VS) and Eunapius’ Lives of Philosophers and Sophists (VPS). The VS records the careers of ten classical and forty-one Imperial figures ‘properly called sophists’, along with eight ‘philosophers with a reputation as sophists’. Eunapius improves on Philostratus, as he sees it, by combining Neoplatonist philosophers, sophists, and rhetorically skilled physicians in a single work. As these summaries suggest, sophists made an awkward subject for collective biography. The term is notoriously protean, and the proper relationship of sophistic to other forms of paideia was hotly disputed; disagreement between Philostratus and Eunapius surfaces already in their titles. Unlike rhetoric and philosophy, sophistic had never had a discrete history, and it is unlikely that Philostratus’ subjects thought they belonged to a coherent ‘Second Sophistic’ movement. For both authors, writing biographies of sophists is a charged intervention in the cultural politics of their day. The chapter considers how the cultural histories of sophistic—and, by implication, sophists—produced by each collection work to position sophistic within and against the political history of the Roman Empire; map its outer limits, especially vis-à-vis philosophy; and authorize the author himself.","PeriodicalId":103728,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Biography","volume":"109 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124066090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-10DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198703013.013.34
F. Doufikar-Aerts
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.
{"title":"Arabic Biography","authors":"F. Doufikar-Aerts","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198703013.013.34","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198703013.013.34","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":103728,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Biography","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125667785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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