The Biographer as Literary Artist

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Philostratus’ Apollonius. It begins by examining Philostratus’ explicit rhetorical claims and his curiously ambiguous narrative stance, before moving on to the anecdotal and doxographical material, and the overall characterization of the hero. The chapter then considers some key thematic strands of the work that seem to stretch normal generic parameters, these being its focus on foreign exoticism, Greek antiquarianism, and Roman political history. In all of these cases, the interplay between Philostratus’ stated aims and his grandiose means reveals much about the kinds of cultural work that biography could do in Antiquity. The Apollonius announces itself as a self-contained sort of work, neatly defined by the scope and extent of a single human life, and that rhetorical position is never fully abandoned. Much of the rest of the text, however, will sorely test the limits of biographical form as its author strives to display his own consummate skill by piling the largest conceivable variety of Hellenic cultural topics into the life story of one man and creating an outrageously over-sized literary hero whose story is capable of bearing such a weight.