The art of biography in antiquity Greek and Roman biography embraces much more than Plutarch Suetonius and their lost Hellenistic antecedents. In this book Professor Hägg explores the whole range and diversity of ancient biography from its Socratic beginnings to the Christian acquisition of the form in late antiquity. He shows how creative writers developed the lives of popular heroes like Homer Aesop and Alexander and how the Christian gospels grew from bare sayings to full lives. In imperial Rome biography flourished in the works of Greek writers: Lucians satire Philostratus full sophistic orchestration Porphyrys intellectual portrait of Plotinus. Perhaps surprisingly it is not political biography or the lives of poets that provide the main artery of ancient biography but various kinds of philosophical spiritual and ethical lives. Applying a consistent biographical reading to a representative set of surviving texts this book opens up the manifold but often neglected art of biography in classical antiquity Memoir encomium romance In diesem Sinne ist der ideale ja der postexistente Sokrates der reale und der Sokrates samt seiner Xanthippe den etwa die photographische Kleinkunst zeigen konnte ist bedeutungslos ja im höheren Sinne unwirklich. Adolf von Harnack 1.1 glimpses of a prehistory The single most important force for the emergence of Greek biography in the fourth century BC it has been convincingly argued was the personal and historical impact of the figure of Socrates as reconstructed or invented by the Socratic writers.1 But the one individual writer the creative mind to whom Greek biography owes most is no doubt Xenophon of Athens (ca. 430 ca. 354 bc) who wrote not only a memoir of Socrates but also a prose encomium of the Spartan king Agesilaus and a romantic Life of the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great.2 Each of his three works displays a distinct biographical strategy: the privileged viewpoint at work in the Memorabilia the novel literary structure of the Agesilaus and the imaginative mixture of fact and fiction in the Cyropaedia. Xenophon accordingly provides three different literary models for future life writers to merge and develop. Now interest in the character acts and lifespan of an important individual was of course not unknown in Greek society before the fourth century. Speculation about the identity of Homer his birthplace travels and death began early as the many references show that we find scattered in poetry drama and early prose. The corresponding legends of Hesiods life had a starting point in first person statements in his own poems those of Archilochus perhaps also in local tradition on his native island of Paros. Solon and Simonides are further not so distant figures who attracted early