The Art of Biography in Antiquity : A Review *

Tomas Hägg was Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Bergen, Norway, and is probably best known for his important account of The Novel in Antiquity (1983), which developed his own doctoral research on the ancient Greek novel. While he published various articles on a range of topics from ancient Greek fiction to Photius and aspects of early Christianity during his career, this comprehensive treatment of biography in antiquity is a worthy successor to his earlier book. He completed the manuscript in the sadly all too few years after his retirement in 2008, only to be diagnosed with an aggressive cancer in March 2011, which led to his death in the following August, a couple of months before his seventy-third birthday. This beautifully produced volume is a delight to read and will stand as a fitting legacy. Naturally, there are several issues to debate arising from it, which unfortunately will now lack the opportunity for the author to respond.

Hägg begins with an explanatory Preface introducing his project, ‘the art of biography as it was practised by a number of Greek and Roman creative writers from about 400 bc to about ad 300’, and his intended audience of ‘both students of classical antiquity and people more generally interested in biography’, before acknowledging several general issues (pp. ix-xi). These are then elucidated further in his ‘Prolegomena on biography modern and ancient’ (pp. 1-9), in which he considers the relatively little serious research on biography, and the question of its literary genre (though he made it clear in the Preface [p. xi] that his heart is not in generic classification or theory), before discussing various questions concerning truth, imagination, fiction, historicity, narrative, gaps, titles and names. His main purpose is to describe and illustrate the range of ancient biography, but the brevity of his treatment of these issues will lead to some of the more debatable aspects of the main account which follows.

Chapter 1 considers biography’s origins in memoir, encomium and romance, with ‘glimpses of a prehistory’ (Ion and Stesimbrotus) and works featuring Socrates (Apology, Phaedo and Memorabilia) leading into Isocrates’ Evagoras and Xenophon’s Agesilaus and Education of Cyrus (pp. 10-66). This takes us next into ‘Hellenistic theory and practice’, recognizing the fragmentary nature of many examples, as he considers the four examples of Aristoxenus, Satyrus, Hermippus and Antigonus out of the 39 Hellenistic biographers whose names we know. Chapter 3 moves to ‘popular heroes’, the more textually ‘open biography’ with accounts of Aesop, Alexander and Homer. The final chapter on Greek writings in the study (Chapter 4) may come as a surprise to some as Hägg turns to ‘the gospels: from sayings to a full Life’. After some discussion of what the gospels actually are, including the debate about genre, he first considers sayings (Q and Thomas) and then the four canonical gospels, followed by a discussion of birth and infancy gospels (Protevangelium of James, and that of Thomas, and others). Curiously, there is no consideration of any passion gospels, or the more Gnostic accounts of the risen Jesus; instead he returns to the four canonical gospels to ‘consider their characterization of Jesus the adult’, aged 30.

Chapter 5 gives us ‘a new start’ with political biography at Rome, Nepos’s Life of Atticus, Nicolaus’s Life of Augustus, Tacitus’s Agricola and Suetonius, concluding with some observations on the ‘Romanness of Roman biography’. Chapter 6 considers the ‘ethical biography’ of Plutarch, illustrated by the Demosthenes and Cicero, followed by discussion of Plutarch’s aims and methods (including the famous distinction of biography and history in Alexander 1.1) and his place in the biographical tradition. The last chapter considers philosophers and holy men, from accounts of Pythagoras, through Lucian, Secundus and Diogenes Laertius to Philostratus, Porphyry and Iamblichus. The opening ‘Prolegomena on biography modern and ancient’ is then balanced by an interesting concluding ‘Epilogue on ancient and Christian biography’ (pp. 380-89), as biography in the fourth century ce is ‘invigorated’ by Eusebius’s Constantine, Athanasius’s Anthony and Gregory’s Macrina. This leads to Hägg’s conclusion that ‘philosophical, spiritual and ethical Lives are the main artery of ancient biography’ (p. 387) and how its legacy and influence continues through Charlemagne and Shakespeare to modern films and TV.

The book concludes with an extremely helpful set of paragraphs giving guidance for Further Reading (pp. 390-416), arranged according to the various topics or authors discussed chapter by chapter, and an enormous bibliography (pp. 417-475). Sadly, however, its use is undermined by the Index which is devoted mostly to ancient authors, subjects or topics; while recognizing the labour of love which went into getting the book ready for publication after the author’s untimely death, it remains a pity that no Index of modern authors or scholars was prepared, nor an Index of all the ancient texts and passages cited other than the general index.

Hägg writes in an easy style which sweeps the reader along through the various examples he describes, but it raises the question of what is the intended purpose of his book. He disavows any desire to compete with or replace ‘the standard works of a Leo or Dihle or Momigliano’, nor does he want to ‘trace historical interrelationships or lines of “development”’ or ‘generic classification’ (p. xi). Instead, he wants ‘to look at the various ancient forms of biography with modern biography in mind, in order to show what the constants are’ (p. x). This would be a most interesting venture, especially given the current debate about the state of modern biography, where sales have dropped from 7.3m in 2006 to 2.7m in 2012 (according to Nielsen BookScan). In February 2013, a major international conference on biography in the University of East Anglia noted the shift from traditional coverage of the whole life year by year to approaches which are more focused on a particular event, object or period of the subject’s life, skipping over less interesting aspects like schooling.

Yet this is precisely what we find in ancient biography, where, for instance, Tacitus can spend only an eighth of his account on Agricola’s first 38 years of life and less than a tenth on the last 9 (12.6% on chapters 4–9, and 9.3% on 40–43, giving 21.9% devoted to 47 years), while the climactic battle of Mons Graupius against the British under Calgacus in 84 ce occupies over a quarter of the book (chapters 29–39, 26.1%) as the best example of Agricola’s character. Unfortunately, this imbalance is scarcely noted in Hägg’s coverage of the whole of Agricola’s life (pp. 201-14). Indeed, after the opening auspicious comments about modern biography, the relationship of Graeco-Roman biography to modern counterparts is sadly never mentioned again.

Hägg’s ‘heart’ may not be ‘in generic classification’, but this lack of ‘a theoretically more challenging angle’ (p. xi) returns to haunt him throughout the book. He seems to have various subgenres in mind when he talks of ‘professional Hellenistic biography’ as opposed to ‘Roman political biography’ (p. 187), or in his conclusion that ‘philosophical, spiritual, and ethical Lives are the main artery of ancient biography’ (p. 387) – but the definitions of these subcategories are never made clear. Nor is he consistent: ‘formally, the Evagoras is an epideictic speech’ (p. 30), while the Cyropaedia could be a ‘historical … novel … mirror of princes … [and] its main topic is leadership and government’, yet both are treated as what he calls ‘a landmark text in Greek biography’ (p. 59); Aesop is described as a ‘novel’ on p. 116, and ‘first and foremost a Life’ (with a capital ‘L’) on p. 117! Why the geographic and ethnographical description of Britain in Tacitus’s Agricola 10-17 is seen as a ‘digression … from a biographical point of view’ is not explained (p. 208); other understandings of biography would demonstrate how this ‘second subject’ merely increases the hero’s greatness in overcoming Britain (see Burridge 2004: 167).

Furthermore, both the claims of the title, The Art of Biography in Antiquity, and the publisher’s blurb at the front (p. i and repeated on the back cover), ‘the whole range and diversity of ancient biography’, are sadly not fulfilled by the text within. Hägg’s opening sentence states that ‘this book is not a history of the “biographical genre” in antiquity’ – which is rather a clash with the title – and instead he limits it to ‘a number of Greek and Roman creative writers’ (p. ix). This makes the inclusion of the gospels a little odd, particularly when Philo’s Life of Moses (which is directly modelled on Xenophon’s Agesilaus) is only mentioned when quoting my list of biographical examples (p. 154), apart from a recognition of ‘Jewish biographical discourse’ at the end, including Philo and Josephus, leading to the odd comment that ‘these specifically Jewish-Christian literary forms of biography have been kept outside my presentation’ (p. 381). There is a similar confusion over lost or fragmentary texts, which are dismissed (p. x) but then discussed in Chapter 2, only to be deferred again at the start of Chapter 5 (p. 187), followed by a discussion of excerpts of Nicolaus’s Augustus (pp. 197-204).

All of these points follow from Hägg’s decision not to include a proper discussion of literary genre and of how biography is defined and recognized. I am grateful for his discussion and critique of my attempt, and also that of Dirk Frickenschmidt (1997), to do this (pp. 154-55), especially for his assessment that ‘Burridge’s study is systematic and innovative’ (p. 155); however, his subsequent comment that it is ‘based on a rather limited selection of texts’ seems curious. Nine of the ten examples chosen (five earlier and five later than the gospels) play an important part in Hägg’s own account, while the other (Philo) shows that his decision to ignore Jewish-Hellenistic work is itself ‘limited’. In fact, by focusing on those ten key examples, I was able to analyse them in much more detail than Hägg’s more broad-brush and wider treatment could allow.

Also limited is Hägg’s avoidance of later passion or resurrection discourse gospels, preferring instead, at the end of Chapter 4, to discuss the ‘characterization of Jesus the adult’ in the four canonical gospels (pp. 180-86). Here also he picks up my work on the four portraits of Jesus in Four Gospels, One Jesus? (2013/2014) and provides some critique of it (p. 181). Hägg notes ‘the indirect manner’ of characterization in the gospels, but his critique fails to appreciate how true this is of most ancient writing; closer discussion of the overall development of the genre of biography suggests that this is another key difference between ancient and modern examples over the last century or so. The modern concern for a psychological understanding of the individual personality follows from the work of Freud and Jung, and is in contrast with the ancients’ interest in the character of the subject, often as a typical, even stereotypical, example. Similarly the sociological, political or ideological concerns of modern biography owe more to Marx, Weber and Durkheim than can be the case in ancient Lives, which helps to explain their often more limited focus on a particular aspect or period of their subject’s life.

In conclusion, I want to return to the question of Hägg’s purpose and intended audience, even to the very genre of the book itself. It is a work of art, beautifully presented and elegantly written as an Introduction to ‘The Art of Biography in the Ancient World’. As he warns at the beginning, there is no dominating theory of the genre of biography, or overall thread linking its development. Instead, Hägg gives us seven rooms in his picture gallery, where various examples of ancient biography are presented for our delight and instruction. Therefore this book is likely to be of most benefit to those who would like a clear, general guide to all the exhibits that he so helpfully displays. However, more experienced readers interested in debating literary theory or the overall development of biography may come away a little disappointed. I am sorry that we cannot continue this debate (in this life at least), but in line with the ancient biographical motif to ‘call no man blessed until he has died’, this book may stand as a fitting tribute to his wide-ranging interests and enormous scholarship, for which many people will bless him.