biography, Greek
biography, Greek1. Biography in antiquity was not a rigidly defined genre. Bios, ‘life’, or bioi, ‘lives’, could span a range of types of writing, from Plutarch's cradle-to-grave accounts of statesmen to Chamaeleon (c.350–after 281 BC)'s extravagant stories about literary figures, and even to Dicaearchus (fl. c.320–300 BC)'s ambitious Life of Greece. Consequently the boundaries with neighbouring genres—the encomium, the biographical novel on the model of Xenophon's Cyropaedia, the historical monograph on the deeds of a great man like Alexander the Great—are blurred and sometimes artificial. One should not think of a single ‘biographical genre’ with acknowledged conventions, but rather of a complicated picture of overlapping traditions, embracing works of varying form, style, length, and truthfulness.
2. The impulse...
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