, Ancient Greeks developed the biographical tradition which we have inherited, although until the 5th century AD, when the word 'biographia' first appears, in Damascius' Life of Isodorus, biographical pieces were called simply "lives" (????: "bioi"). It is quite likely that the Greeks were drawing on a pre-existing eastern tradition; certainly
Herodotus' Histories contains more detailed biographical information on Persian kings and subjects than on anyone else, implying he had a Persian source for it.
The earliest surviving pieces which we would identify as biographical are Isocrates' Life of Evagoras and
Xenophon's Life of
Agesilaos, both from the fifth century BC. Both identified themselves as encomia, or works of praise, and that biography was regarded as a discrete entity from historiography is evidenced by the fact that Xenophon treated King Agesilaos of Sparta twice in his works, once in the above-mentioned encomium and once in his Greek History; evidently the two genres were conceived as making different demands of authors who enrolled in them. Xenophon could present his Cyropaedia, an account of the childhood of the Persian King
Cyrus the Great now regarded as so fabulous that it falls rather into a novelistic tradition than a biographical one, as a serious work, without any disclaimers or caveats.
Whereas
Thucydides set the benchmark for a historiographical tradition comprising 'conclusions ... drawn from proofs quoted ... [which] may safely be relied upon' (Thuc. 1.21), and offering little explicit judgement on the men with whom he dealt, biographers were quite often more concerned with drawing a moral point from their investigations of their subjects.
Parallel Lives by
Plutarch, a Greek writing under the Roman empire, is a series of short biographies of eminent men, ancient and contemporary, arranged in pairs comprising one Greek, one Roman, in order that a broad educative point might be extraced from the comparison (for example
Mark Anthony and
Demetrius were paradigms of tyranny,
Lysander and
Sulla examples of great men degenerating into blood-thirsty corruption).
However, although their moralising approach is not in fashion in the current intellectual climate, Greek biographies still have much to offer the modern reader, and for the most part it is reasonable to assume that while authors may have suppressed details which did not fall in with the general theme which they wished to convey, they are unlikely to have fabricated much. Not least, they were instrumental in developing the modern idea of the person. The traditional Greek attitude to individuals was to 'reduce them to types'; the Peripatetic tradition records various categories into which men might fall: the flatterer, the superstitious man and so on. Greek rhetorical handbooks give advice on 'ethopoia', that is creating a character, one of a recognised type, to win favour in the law courts.
The biographical tradition does draw on these types, but it also gives explicit recognition to the importance of individual ideosyncrasies in defining a man, and places the emphasis firmly on a man's personality rather than merely listing his accomplishments. As Plutarch says in the introduction to his Life of
Alexander the Great, 'in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue and vice, but a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation than battles where thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities'. Thus the individual is recognised as having some value and interest irrespective of the impact of his actions on the broader sweep of history.
Under the
Roman Empire, the biographical and historiographical traditions converged somewhat, likely due to the nature of government, whereby the state was dominated by a single emperor with totalitarian power and whose character and actions set the tone for the period;
Tacitus's History and his Annals, as well as
Dio's History contain much of the same material as the biographer
Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars. However, although Tacitus in particular was extremely critical of the regime, his disapproval emerges in subtle characterisation and arrangement of his material, in contrast with Suetonius' vicious authorial comment.
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