Abstract
This one of those rare and magnificent books that manages to combine a significant (perhaps even classic) contribution to scholarship with the modest touch that would befit a learned literary amateur. Its intended audience is everyone interested in biography, not just classicists, and as Hägg points out, biography is probably the most-read literary form today after the novel. Hägg’s perspective is global: his account spans life-writing from 400 BC to AD 300, and he approaches the texts with modern comparanda in mind. He sits lightly toward scholarly debates about genre, asserting at the outset that he finds this an unhelpful way of approaching ancient biography: all the rules can be broken. Rather than engage in theoretically challenging analysis, he offers prolegomena comprising ‘just a series of statements or comments under various catchwords’, then dives into discussion of the texts. With winning candour, he observes that it is a ‘pious illusion’ to think that the texts will all be well known to his audience, therefore he seeks to offer enough description and quotation to engage readers in his analysis, while limiting himself to samples of each text in the hope of whetting the readers’ appetite for more. His objective is not merely to share with others texts that he treasures (though it is that), but also to offer new scholarly insights into the history of life-writing. For those chiefly interested in modern biography, he seeks to show that biography is not a modern creation, contrary to the way it has often been portrayed; for those chiefly engaged in study of the Classics, he seeks to show that a wide range of texts often studied under other headings can be usefully and interestingly appreciated as life-writing. Thus, for example, not only Plutarch and Suetonius, but also Isocrates and Diogenes Laertius are explored. Although he expressly abjures the project of tracing historical lines of ‘development’, his chapters are arranged in loosely chronological sequence, tempered by attentiveness to thematic and cultural unities, and they do allow a sense of development and change to emerge. In other ways too he delivers more than he promises: he says that he will write only about works that survive, but his discussion is enriched by contextualisation of his chosen sources in relation to lost works, as well as engagement with fragmentary and obscure texts. Nor does he self-consciously draw attention to the feature of his work that may particularly interest readers of this journal, which is its incorporation of Christian texts into analysis of the art of ancient biography. Here the Christian gospels (both canonical and apocryphal) are nestled between Hellenistic Lives of Aesop, Alexander and Homer on the one hand, and the appearance of distinctively Roman biographies from Nepos to Suetonius on the other. The closing chapter on philosophers and holy men points forward to a Christian continuation. This is a book written with deep love and learning, warmly familiar with the ancient biographers and using the secondary literature to enrich a reading of their art, without weighing it down with detailed debate or too-lengthy footnotes. His closing chapter offers a helpful compendium of notes on ‘further reading’; this stands in lieu of any ponderous history of scholarship at the start. It is a book that combines gravitas with sparkle, and geniality with spoudaiotēs. It is an unpretentious but thoroughly scholarly work that should interest a wide audience, and become a well-appreciated, standard item of bibliography for those studying biography in any of its forms.