Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquit (review)

This collection of essays on the interrelationship of Greek biographical writing and panegyrical oratory from the third to the fifth centuries C.E. complements two other recent publications. In Portraits: Biographical Representation in the Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire, edited by M. J. Edwards and Simon Swain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), except for one essay on Eusebius' Life of Constantine, the focus was on a different set of texts and mostly from an earlier period; in The Propaganda of Power: The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity, edited by Mary Whitby (Leiden: Brill, 1998), the focus was primarily on Latin texts and overlaps with the volume being reviewed only in the case of essays on Themistius.

It has become the custom for editors of collected studies to give a brief summary of each paper; Hägg and Rousseau do this in a more constructive way than is often found by integrating their comments into discussion of important topics. Thus, they divide their introduction into sections on "Definitions and Distinctions," "Origins" (i.e., of biography and panegyric), "The Texts Discussed," "The Issue of Realism," "The Relation between Audience and Subject," "The Relation between Audience and Text," "Taste and Expectation," "Enduring Models and Virtues," "New Champions of 'Holiness,'" "Language and Its Public," and "The Living and the Dead." Happily, both the editors and the authors of the chapters that follow avoid falling into the abyss of seeking rigid definitions for the genres under discussion; as Hägg and Rousseau sensibly remind us, "Christian literary endeavor, perhaps more than anything, enabled ancient genres to transcend their original confines" (13).

Encomiasts, they note, advertise their aims, whereas biographers tend to have a hidden agenda (5), and much of this volume can be read as an exploration of what these aims and agendas were: in various ways the writers sought to challenge, shame, excite, and interest their audiences. In descriptions of philosophers, on the one hand, or saints on the other, both Neoplatonists and Christians sought to canonize manifestations of the holy or divine as they understood it. Panegyric had traditional topoi, listed, for example, in the handbooks of Menander Rhetor. One clue to authorial intent noted by the editors and used by the authors of the chapters is the omission of certain traditional topics and the heightening of others. The editors also distinguish the situation in panegyric, where the subject is "outside" the speech or text, from biography, where the hero was "interior" to the text: "Biographies created their subjects. It scarcely mattered whether they had ever existed" (15). The recounting of miracles is "less a symptom of superstition and more a measure of the lengths to which people would go in order to ratify patterns of leadership and authority which they found acceptable on other grounds" (19).

The first two chapters of the collection discuss the three best examples of Neoplatonic biography: Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras, originally part of a history of philosophy; his Life of Plotinus, an introduction to his edition of Plotinus' Enneads; and Iamblichus' On the Pythagorean Life, an introduction to his edition of Pythagorean texts. Gillian Clark's contribution, "Philosophical Lives and the Philosophic Life," compares and contrasts these three works. Although Pythagoras was an obvious pagan rival to Christ (son of a god, miracle-worker, divine teacher), Porphyry does not show any special commitment to him, whereas Iamblichus regards him as an unrivaled model of the philosophical life. Iamblichus' understanding of that life style is somewhat more worldly than the very austere standards recommended by Porphyry in his Life of Plotinus. Although Iamblichus emphasized the bonds of philia, and Plotinus would have a philosopher strip himself of worldly possessions, neither philosopher ever recommends distributing resources to the poor in an act resembling...