Introduction

‘‘There is properly no history, only biography,’’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, slicing with a stroke the Gordian knot entangling the two genres. Aristotle explains that history is ‘‘what Alcibiades did and suffered’’ (Poet. 9.4, 1451b), but that definition encompasses not only Thucydides and Xenophon but also Nepos and Plutarch. In fact, it is often quite difficult to distinguish history from biography, even with the most careful analysis, nor did the ancients do so consistently. Historiography itself is protean, and biography no less so: not surprisingly, they frequently overlap, and especially in treating political-military persons and events.

Biography has many divisions, according to the nature of the person being studied. That which especially concerns us here treats statesmen and commanders, political and military leaders such as Alcibiades. They describe not just their achievements and failures but what kind of person they were, how they lived their lives, and whether they should be imitated. Nevertheless they use the same sources and many of the same techniques as historians. We can only speak of separate genres of history and biography if we remain aware of the fluidity of the boundary between them, and the difficulty of drawing any neat demarcation. The notion of a genre of biography separate from history is useful only insofar as it helps the reader to understand the nature of the work, but depends upon a pact between author and reader which is renegotiated in every work. Our four major surviving authors provide ample evidence.

First, however, it is necessary to distinguish biography from biographical interest or material. Ancient readers, like modern, found famous people fascinating. Homer had asked how a man’s desires and actions related to his achievements and his end. Phoenix tells Achilles the story of Meleager (Il. 9.528-599) as a negative model of heroic behavior, while Nestor offers Odysseus as a noble paradigm for Telemachus. In the fifth-century theater, Athenians saw tragic kings make fateful decisions; in the same years historians recounted how the weaknesses and strengths ofleaders, whether the insecurity of Xerxes or the integrity of Pericles, affected the fates of nations. Anecdotes about the special behavior or witty sayings of notable men were recorded by Ion of Chios or Stesimbrotus, later to be repeated by Plutarch. These are not biography. Biography I tentatively define as a self-sufficient account of the kind of life led by a historical person that also evaluates the subject’s character, goals, and achievements.

An admirer of Socrates, Xenophon laid the basis for biography as a genre by combining in his own work the competing claims of history and biography (on the influence of the Socratics on biography, see Dihle 1970). In his Anabasis, itself an autobiographical memoir, he sketches the lives of the younger Cyrus ( Anab. 1.9) and of three Greek leaders of differing backgrounds and temperaments, Clearchus, Menon, and Proxenus (2.6), in an effort to explain their style and achievements as leaders. More ambitiously, his Education of Cyrus (Cyropaedia) narrates the birth, early life, conquests, and death of Cyrus the Great, and thus figures as the first extant freestanding biography of a political figure. Despite historical touches, the work is fiction, a philosophical novel, but by its representation of Cyrus’ personal virtue as essential to his military and political leadership it established moral virtue as a fundamental aspect of biography. A similar treatment of virtue and leadership is found in Xenophon’s History of Greece (Hellenica), from which he derived his encomium of the Spartan king Agesilaus. Although not the first prose encomium (Isocrates claimed this honor for his Evagoras), the Agesilaus combines two ordering structures which would continue to be used in biography: the first half goes through the king’s actions chronologically; the second works by topics, reviewing his virtues one by one, giving examples of each in action.

In Xenophon especially one sees the antecedents of biography as a genre: treatment (when possible) of the whole life from birth to death, practical and moral evaluation of character and achievements and their interrelation, assignment of praise and blame, use of illustrative anecdote, and a willingness to flesh out the portrait with verisimilar detail.