Ancient Biography: Identity through Lives by ed. by Francis Cairns and Trevor Luke

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ancient Biography: Identity through Lives by ed. by Francis Cairns and Trevor Luke Øivind Andersen (bio) Ancient Biography: Identity through Lives Francis Cairns and Trevor Luke, editors Papers of the Langford Latin Seminar 17, ARCA Classical and Medieval Texts, Papers and Monographs 55, Francis Cairns, 2018, xiv + 310 pp. ISBN 9780995461215, $75.00 hardcover. The volume's title might lead potential readers to expect the book to provide a general introduction to or overview of biographical literature from classical antiquity, especially the genre of Lives, the Greek bios and the Latin vita. For that, however, [End Page 464] non-classicists (and classicists as well) should turn to Tomas Hägg's magisterial The Art of Biography in Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2012), to which the editors of this volume duly refer in the very first sentence of their preface. Under the umbrella of the book's title, the editors offer a rich collection of widely different contributions on various topics and with varying focus. They may all, however, lay claim to dealing somehow with the broader issue of "biographical writing and identity," or "the use of lives in the literary construction of both group and individual identities" (vii, viii), which is the stated overall theme of the volume. The book originates in the 2015 Langford International Colloquium at Florida State University, Narrating Lives: Biography and Identity in Antiquity. The original papers have been revised and expanded, and the collection has been fortified with further contributions from invited scholars. The thirteen papers range all over antiquity from Pindar and the Lives of the Greek poets to the Alexander Romance and late Platonists. They are neatly distributed across the book's four sections: "Biography and Cultural Identity," "Biography and Power," "Biography, Identity and Religion," and—in a shift from thematic to chronological criteria—"Greek Lives under Roman Rule." It is not always obvious why a paper is placed in the section where we find it, naturally enough perhaps given the shared focus on identity. I will make brief mention of each contribution, highlighting some. Right at the outset, Flore Kimmel-Clauzet, in "Pindar, 'Lover of Athens': Dithyramb fr. 76 and the Biographical Tradition," discusses in an exemplary manner how the Theban poet's famous praise of Athens—"O gleaming and violet-crowned and celebrated in song, / Bulwark of Greece, glorious Athens, divine city"—places Pindar in the middle between the two rival cities: Thebes, his birthplace, and Athens, which, so the story goes, paid the fine imposed on him by the Thebans and more or less appropriated the poet by honoring him in other ways as well. Both the several ancient Lives of Pindar and the biographical tradition apart from the lives embellish and negotiate this conflict in various ways, thus forging Pindar's poetic identity. One could, I presume, also say "political" identity. Kimmel-Clauzet already made her mark with her 2013 book (in French) of the lives and especially the deaths of Greek poets. The following paper, by Rex Stem, may be seen as an offshoot of his 2012 book on The Political Biographies of Cornelius Nepos. In his contribution to this volume, he demonstrates convincingly how the Roman biographer Nepos in his Lives of the Foreign Generals counteracts Roman cultural bias by displaying exemplary non-Romans. David Rohrbacher, whose The Play of Allusion in the Historia Augusta appeared in 2016, comes to grips with ethnographic and religious aspects of the late Roman biographical collection Historia Augusta. He makes the case for the work's allusive and playful character when it comes to ethnography and religion. We note that this "bizarre and untrustworthy" work is "not really a biographical collection at all" (53, 56). The section "Biography and Power" opens with an attempt by Marcaline Boyd to vindicate the second-century CE military writer Polyaenus's version of the Greek tyrant Polycrates's rise to power against the account of the much older Herodotus. [End Page 465] Alexander Skufca illuminates how Nepos in his chapters on the lives of the tyrants Dion and Timoleon explicitly and implicitly evaluates tyranny, and shows how Timoleon is able to learn by (bad) example and do better than his somewhat older colleague. The...