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This Handbook presents the first wide-ranging survey on biography in Antiquity from its earliest representations to Late Antiquity. It offers in-depth readings of key texts and diachronic studies, examines biographical depictions in different textual and visual media, and deals with the reception of ancient biography across multiple eras.
List of contents
- Part I. Introduction
- 1: Koen De Temmerman: Writing (About) Ancient Lives: Scholarship, Definitions and Concepts
- 2: Sean A. Adams: What are Bioi/Vitae? Generic Self-Consciousness in Ancient Biography
- 3: Jeffrey Beneker: Individual and Collected Lives in Antiquity
- 4: Ioannis M. Konstantakos: Popular Biography
- 5: Joseph Geiger: Jewish Biography
- 6: Scott Fitzgerald Johnson: Christian Biography
- Part II. Reading Biographies
- 7: Christopher Pelling: Fifth-Century Preliminaries
- 8: Takis Poulakos: Isocrates' Evagoras: The Educational Ends of the 'First' Biography in Classical Greece
- 9: Noreen Humble: Xenophon of Athens
- 10: Tiziano Dorandi: Ex uno fonte multi rivuli? Unity and Multiplicity in Hellenistic Biography
- 11: Rex Stem: Nepos' Life of Atticus, Nicolaus' Life of Caesar and the Genre of Political Biography in the Age of Augustus
- 12: Christopher Whitton: Biography and Praise in Trajanic Rome: Tacitus' Agricola and Pliny's Panegyricus
- 13: Aristoula Georgiadou and Michele A. Lucchesi: Plutarch's Parallel Lives
- 14: Luc Van der Stockt: Plutarch: Lives of the Caesars (Galba, Otho) and Lives of Aratus and Artaxerxes
- 15: Dennis Pausch: Types of Life-Writing in Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars and Illustrious Men
- 16: Corinne Jouanno: The Alexander Romance
- 17: Graham Anderson: Lucian: Satirical and Idealising Lives (Peregrinus, Alexander, Demonax)
- 18: Adam Kemezis: The Biographer as Literary Artist: Form and Content in Philostratus' Apollonius
- 19: Stephen White: Diogenes Laertius and Philosophical Lives
- 20: James Corke-Webster: A Bishop's Biography: Eusebius of Caesarea and The Life of Constantine
- 21: Michael Stuart Williams: Augustine's Confessions as Autobiography
- 22: Jason König: Solitude and Biography in Jerome's Life of Hilarion
- Part III. Tracing Biographees
- 23: Suzanne Saïd: : Lives of Homer
- 24: Jacqueline Klooster: Ancient Biographies of Statesmen
- 25: Kendra Eshleman: Sophists
- 26: Graeme Miles: Philosophers and their Neoplatonic Lives: Problemsand Paradigms
- 27: Danny Praet: Holy Men: Lives of Miracle Workers, Apostles, and Saints
- 28: Koen De Temmerman and Danny Praet: Martyrs and Life-Writing in Late Antiquity
- 29: Mark Edwards: Monastic Lives
- Part IV. Cultures
- 30: Muriel Debié: Syriac Biography
- 31: Arietta Papaconstantinou: Coptic Life Stories
- 32: S. Peter Cowe: Armenian Biography in Late Antiquity
- 33: Faustina Doufikar-Aerts: Arabic Biography
- Part V. Media
- 34: Elizabeth Frood: Biographical Monuments: Displaying Selves and Lives in Ancient Egypt
- 35: Christof Schuler and Florian R. Forster: Engraved Lives: Biographical Material in Epigraphical Sources
- 36: Zahra Newby: Depicted Lives: The Role of The Visual Arts in Sophistic Self-Representation
- 37: Eric Varner: Triumphant Lives: Portraits, Statues and Triumphal Arches in Imperial Rome
- Part VI. Reception
- 38: Martin Hinterberger: Byzantine Biography
- 39: Lars Boje Mortensen: Roman Biography in the Medieval West: Did Classical Texts Facilitate Complex Literary Portraits in the Middle Ages?
- 40: Thomas Hendrickson: Ancient Biography and the Italian Renaissance: Old Models and New Developments
- 41: Enrica Zanin: Ancient Biography in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
- 42: Nora Goldschmidt: After-Lives: Biographical Receptions of Greek and Roman Poets in the Twentieth Century
About the author
Koen De Temmerman is a Professor of Classics and European Literature at Ghent University, Belgium. He is the author of Crafting Characters: Heroes and Heroines in the Ancient Greek Novel (OUP 2014) and the co-editor of Writing Biography in Greece and Rome: Narrative Technique and Fictionalization (Cambridge 2016, with K. Demoen) and Characterization in Ancient Greek Literature (Leiden 2018, with E. van Emde Boas).
Summary
This Handbook presents the first wide-ranging survey on biography in Antiquity from its earliest representations to Late Antiquity. It offers in-depth readings of key texts and diachronic studies, examines biographical depictions in different textual and visual media, and deals with the reception of ancient biography across multiple eras.
