Greek Biographical Writing

This paper gives an overview of the papyrological evidence for Pythagoras and (much less) the Pythagoreans, which is collected in "Corpus dei Papiri Filosofici" and in Christian Vassallo’s  “Catalogue of the Evidence for Presocratics in the Herculaneum Papyri”, no. 161-173, p. 52-53. Some of this scattered evidence can be coherently brought together and provide clues for the history of Pythagoreanism, whereas other is worthy of fresh consideration. Practically all the testimonia of the Herculaneum papyri come from the writings of Philodemus; they concern Pythagoras, not the Pythagoreans, and are of a biographical, not doxographical character. Philodemus’ evidence reflects the early Hellenistic stage of the Pythagorean tradition, before rise of Neopythagoreanism and the pseudo-Pythagorean literature related to it. Later evidence reveals new view on Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans as the philosophical precursors of Plato.

This paper aims to critically analyse the testimonies concerning Athenian impiety trials of the classical period. First, it reaffirms the arguments that some of them must have been an invention of Hellenistic and later authors. Second, it presents a likely political background behind the historical cases. Third, it discusses a number of legal issues, along with new arguments concerning the procedures employed. Finally, it examines some less well-known material from the fourth century BCE. Overall, it seeks to provide a possibly coherent and comprehensive framework of Athenian impiety trials based on their shared characteristics.

""Recent scholarship in Classics and related fields has shown great interest in letters and epistolary literature of all forms (e.g. Morello and Morrison 2007; Trapp 2003; Rosenmeyer 2001).  The use of embedded letters to advance the narrative in genres such as historiography and the novel, and the potential for real or pseudonymous letters to function as biography (real or fictionalized), autobiography, or historical fiction, mean that letters in antiquity play a crucial role in the development of narrative literature of many kinds.  The apparent popularity of letters as reading matter rather than merely tools for communication, especially in the Imperial period, makes it essential that we pay attention to this genre, as we assess the reading practices and literary preferences of antiquity. The literary qualities of Greek letters are often overlooked, despite the fact that they display the same kind of awareness of generic conventions and self-consciousness of their literary nature as other narrative genres. 
Letters are always about narrative, among other things, whether directly – narrating events to absent correspondents - or indirectly – presenting fragments of an underlying narrative that the reader attempts to reconstruct.  This collection of essays explores the inherent narrative quality of letters and its use by Greek authors in a variety of genres and time periods, as well as the limited and sometimes even willfully obscure nature of epistolary narratives that omit vital information in the name of verisimilitude.  A series of case studies, with topics ranging from Classical poetry and historiography through to Philostratus and Christian martyrs, asks why particular authors choose the letter form; how an embedded letter relates to its narrative environment, and, conversely, the effect of the epistolary form on the narrative it contains; and how each author manipulates the epistolary tradition.  It explores various types of epistolary forms:  individual letters (embedded or free-standing); collections of continuous epistolary narrative; and letters presenting fragmented or discontinuous narrative.  It pays close attention to the self-consciously literary or fictional qualities in Greek letters, including intertextuality with other literary texts and particularly allusions to earlier letters as literature.  A chronological organization of the volume encourages the reader to consider epistolary narrative as a kind of literature that develops over time, growing in popularity and in the variety of forms it takes.  ""

By focusing on a rhetorical and literary approach, this paper aims to study the discursive representation of
superstition in Plutarch’s Niciasand Dión. We will analyze in particular the lunar eclipse episode included in
Nicias 23 and Dion 24, in order to prove that the repetition of the episode in different contexts functions as an
invitation to think further about superstition through an original and more attractive perspective than philosophical theorization.

In this paper we will investigate the function of mythical accounts in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. First, we will study the different meanings of μῦθος and its derivatives; then we will analyze Plutarch’s reflections about the problem of sources in historical narrative, in order to prove that the author, far from disdaining mythical tales, capitalizes their use as a vehicle of topics and ideologies which give cohesion to the discourse of history in a community.

RESUMEN
En el presente trabajo nos dedicaremos a investigar de qué modo operan los relatos míticos en el entramado discursivo de las Vidas paralelas de Plutarco. Analizaremos primero los sentidos del término μῦθος y afines en la obra, y luego abordaremos la problemática del uso de fuentes en la narración historiográfica a partir de las reflexiones planteadas en la obra, con el fin de demostrar que Plutarco, lejos de desdeñar el discurso mítico, capitaliza su funcionalidad, en tanto reproductor de contenidos e ideologías que sirven para dar cohesión al discurso sobre la historia de un pueblo.

This chapter examines the genre of epistolography, which flourished and proliferated in the variety of its forms and uses in the Empire. The epistolary genre in the Second Sophistic is first briefly situated within rhetorical theory and practice, then contextualized within both earlier Greek literature and developments in Latin letters. The variety of Greek literary uses of the letter form in the Second Sophistic is then illustrated with a series of subgenres and examples. Surveyed are collections of fictional and pseudonymous letters (including Aelian, Alciphron, Philostratus, Apollonius of Tyana), epistolary novels (Chion of Heraclea, Themistocles), shorter narratives in letter form, and letters embedded in longer narratives (including the Greek novels and Lucian’s Verae Historiae).

In modern fictional biography as in other fictional forms, one of the clearest markers of deliberate fictionality is the unrealistic, ‘psychic’ omniscience of the narrator; this enables him to persistently represent the internal world of his subjects to a level which (even when logically possible) would be highly implausible were it found in an historical biography. Indeed as Cohn argues (following Hamburger) this is one of the distinguishing features of fictionality: far from being merely a narrative device (‘internal focalisation’, ‘zero focalisation’), it is constitutive of a narrative’s fictional status, since it is logically ruled out by non-fictional narratives. This is found in abundance in Greek fiction (e.g. epics, novels), but the earliest fictional(ised) biographies are concerned with verisimilitude and self-authentication: therefore they usually employ direct speech or quoted letters where more overtly fictional forms employ internal focalisation (leading to difficulties scholars have had in deciding authorial intentions with regard to fictionality or historicity in ancient biographies). This chapter investigates the use made of ‘psychically’ omniscient narration, and the question of its usefulness in determining fictionality, in ancient Greek biographical narratives. At this early stage in the development of fiction itself and of fictional biography, however, other markers of (intentional) fictionality need to be sought, namely: the lack of realism in portraying characters as saying or writing certain things (either tout court, or to or in the presence of certain other characters); the lack of realism in conceiving how the narrator came to know (especially private) utterances and letters by their biographical subjects. The chapter therefore also investigates these features and the information they can yield regarding ancient Greek biographical texts’ fictional status. Examples are taken from Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, the Alexander Romance, the Life of Aesop or Aesop Romance, and Philostratus’ Vita Apollonii, and comparisons made with Plutarch’s more historical bioi and the ancient novel. It concludes that the use of psychically omniscient narration does indeed distinguish fictionalising from more historical forms of Greek biographical narrative, as in much modern biographical writing.

Cohn, D. 1999 The Distinction of Fiction Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
Hamburger, K 1973 Die Logik der Dichtung Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta