Fiction of the biographies of ancient writers

x MIRNETSER, | FICTION IN THE BIOGRAPHIES OF ANCIENT WRITERS It is generally recognized that the ancient Lives of literary men contain much that is of doubtful historicity, and, as anyone who studies Greek and Roman literature feels bound to come to some conclusions about the value of statements in these biographies, there is no shortage of studies examining particular problems in particular authors’ Lives. What is lacking is a comprehensive survey of the types of fiction to be found in ancient biographies of writers. General works on the GrecoRoman biographical tradition have tended to concentrate on the formal aspects of biography. detailed investigation of the sources of individual biographers. or the history of human self-awareness !, The most inspiring introduction to the subject of fiction in the Lives is still a paper by Karl Lehrs which first appeared in 1847, Ueber Wahrheit und Dichtung in der griechischen Litteraturgeschichte ?. A further important contribution to the study of this subject was that of Y. Leo. not so much in his famous work. Die griechisch-rémische Biographie nach threr literarischen Form, as in his discussion of the life of Plautus, in which he made some useful generalizations about Ilellenistic biographical technique while showing that the Latin biographers took over many of the methods used by their Greek predecessors 3. The Englishspeaking world is particularly indebted to D.R. Stuart, who undertook the valuable task of summarizing many of the findings of Lehrs, Leo and other German scholars, and shed new light on a variety of problems. In certain sections of his Sather Lectures, £pochs of Greek and Roman Biography. and in a paper entitled Authors’ Lives as revealed in their Works 4, he touches on many aspects of the question of the fictional element in the biographies of ancient writers. Ilowever, a great deal 1 For a recent, survey of modern scholarship sec A.D. Momicrraro, The Development of Greek Biography, Cambridge (Mass.) 1971, p. 10 ff. 2 Populäre Aufsätze, Leipzig 18762, p. 385 fl. 4 Plautinische Forschungen, Berlin 19122, p. 68 ff. ef. F. Leo, Vergils erste und neunte Eklogen, Hermes 38 (1903) = Ausgewählte kleine Schriften 14, p. 1 ff. In his Die griechischrömische Biographie, Leipzig 1001 (repr. Olms Hildesheim 1965}, Leo is, of course, primarily eoncerned with the structure of ancient biographies. AWW, ARCA ENT Sorry S 4 Sather Classical Lectures IV, Berkeley 1928, p. 143 ff.; p. 172 ff.; Classical Studies in honor of John C. Rolfe, Philadelphia 1931, y. 285 ff. Cf. On Vergit Eclogue IV 60-63, Class. Philol, 16 (1921), p. 209 ff.

233 more remains to be written along the lines suggested by such studies, father had been forced by poverty to leave Aeolian Kyme and had In order to come to an understanding of the way truth and fiction settled at Ascra, One can imagine no reason why the poet should are mingled in the biographies, the question we have to ask is how have made these details up. one went about writing an author’s Life, if one was working in the IL was when deductions were made from passages where poets were Greco-Roman tradition. It should become fairly clear, as we consider employing traditional devices or materials that ancient scholars ran this question, which types of assertion and anecdote we ought to treat into trouble, There seems to have been much over-confidence amongst with scepticism, That is not to say that it is possible to formulate them in the assumption that any type of poctry could be relied on to rigid criteria for the rejecting or accepting of statements. give precise information about the poet's personality and activities 7. Consider, for example, this passage in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists, in which one of the guests presents evidence from Alcaeus' poems that he was extremely fond of wine. The conclusion reached may not necessarily The ancient researcher into the history of literature 5 had at his disposal, if nothing else, the writings by, or attributed to, the men he intended to study. It was his task to search thein for autobiographical be far from the truth, but the passage illustrates well the type of literal interpretation of poetry which might lead to biographical error : «lor this poet, we discover, drinks at all times and in all circumstances; in references and gencral clues about their personality. Now, the technique winter, for instance, as of deriving information about a man from his writings is a perfectly sky comes a mighty storm. and the streams of water are frozen ... Bent down acceptable one —- up to a point, The trouble is that, with a few exthe winter, piling high the fire, and mixing the while aweet wine unsparingly, ceptions, ancient writers do not exactly let their lives stand open to these lines shuw : ‘Zeus sends rain, and from the placing round your brow the soft flock of wool’, And in summer : ‘Moisten your lungs wilh wine, for the Dog Star riseth; the weather is severe, and all things are view as if on a votive tablet, For many ancient poets ib was quite athirst with the heat’. In springtime: ‘I have felt the flowery spring approaching’. unthinkable to let their personality obtrude too clearly into Then he proceeds : ‘Mix ye with all speed a bowl of the honey-sweet’. Again in the their works; orators may sometimes appear to be giving detailed exposés midst of disnsters : ‘Li. is not meet to give over the spirit to misfortune, For we of their past carcers, but of course the principles of ancient rhetoric shall profit nothing through grieving, Byechis; the best cure is to have wine brought did not demand strict historical accuracy from a man who was defending and get drunk’. Or in happy times ‘Now ‘tis meet to get drink, ay, one should drink e’en against his will, since Myrsilus is dead”. And in general ho gives this himself; philosophers may, in their more inspired moments, take to advice : Plant no other tree than the vine”. How theu is it likely that he who was hyperbole and poetic expression and say things they do not expect to so fond of drinking should be given to sobriety, and drink only one or two cups at be taken literally. Anyone, then. who is attempting to derive bioatime?» 4 graphical information from an ancient authors works will ignore at Now. it would be unnatural to assume that Alcaeus was intellectually his peril the factor of the poetic, rhetorical, or philosophical persona. aloof when he sang the praises of the brimming wine-cup, even though Lt seems, unfortunately, that some ancient scholars were not above he was doubtless heir to a long tradition when he incorporated in his ignoring such subtle considerations completely. Of course, even in the case of poets, some inferences may safely be drawn from a man's works. It is legitimate to infer, as the ancient BGM (Biographi Graect Minores cd. A. Westerman, 1845, repr. Hakkert, Amsterdam hiographers did $, from Hosiod's Works and Days (633 fi.) that the poeta 1964) 33.2 ff.; Suda sv, "Holodos = BUM 49,1 F. 7 Of D.R. Sruant, Authors’ Lives. Note particularly the extensive use of Muripides’ tragedies ns evidence of his character in Satyrus, Life of Buripides (P. Ory. 1176), ed. 5 Writers of hietorier of the various literary genres, commentaries and studies on G. Arrighetti (Studi Classici e Orientali 13), Visa 1964, particular works, will have used much the samo resenreh techniques as the biographers, 8 Ath. 430a.c, transl. ©.B. Gulick (Loeb 1927). (The last sentence here is a criticism We need not, for our present purposes, distinguish biography from the so-called repi of Chamaeleon.) Athennens is doubtless quoting somo icarned source, perhaps the same literature (on whieh see A.D, Momianiano, Development, q. 70 ff.) 5 Ig. Certumen Homeri el Hesiodi B 226. 2 ff Allen (Homeri Opera Y, O.C.T. 1912) = work by one Seleueus from which he took a further criticism of Chamaeleon quoted in

FAIRWEATHER 235 drinking songs allusions to the time of year and reflections on good characters and chorus, their own sympathies lie. The ancient biotimes and bad. [The deipnosophist’s account of the evidence at any graphers rushed in, however, where angels would fear to tread, concarries more conviction than tho reasoning of Chamaeleon, the fident that the character of any poct would be evident from his writauthority whom he was aiming to refute. Chamaeleon, a 3rd century ings : Satyrus, the biographer of Euripides (3rd century B.C.) quotes rate B.C. Peripatetic scholar who wrote monographs on early poets and a a saying of Aristophanes in this connection : ofa per mfotfed Aéyefi]v treatise On Drunkenness, had taken five words from a drinking song by roids ¿ori 13, The biographers would have to decide arbitrarily, of Alcaeus, éyyee xépvais out of course, which utterauces and which characters reflected the poct's context, and, by means of an ingenious misinterpretation, had used personality. Their opinions on such issues are not always shared by Eva «at dvo (fr. 346.4 Lobel/Page) them to support a theory that the poet was cwdpovecds, as if a drinking modern critics, Thus, much modern criticism of Sophocles amounts song were any place to look for evidence of a poet's self-control.| to a challenge to the assertion of the ancient biographer (which may The dangers inherent in the method used by our deipnosopbist are obvious, though, if we ask ourselves what the result would be if it be based on nothing more than a selective reading of the tragedies) that Sophocles was on good terms with the gods, PeodiAjs 19. were applied to the works of a later poet whose debt to tradition can be The biographers were not content to make general observations about more accurately assessed, Think, for instance, of all the women Horace their subjects’ supposed virtues and vices. They liked to illustrate each mentions in his Odes : a sophisticated reader may realize that they were with anecdotes. We have seen the case of Horace's hall of mirrors. figures taken from Greek lyric, but we may depend upon it that the We are given as evidence of the gods’ favour towards Sophocles an type of mind which would enjoy searching Alcacus' poems for evidence anecdote in which the tragedian is told by Herakles in a dream where that he drank in spring, summer, autumn, and winter, would assume a gold wreath stolen from the acropolis is hidden, and is able to give unquestioningly that they were real people. One may wonder to what this information to his fellow citizens 14, Whole episodes in the Zives can be based on nothing more than extent the popular view of llorace, recorded in his Life : ad res Venerias intemperantior traditur; nam speeulato cubicula scorta dicitur habuisse disposita, ut quocumque respexisset ¿bi ei imago coitus referretur 1. fanciful deductions from poetry. For instance, in the Lives of Homer the assumption is made that the Odyssey is very much the produet of the poet’s travels around the world. This in itself is not a bad deducowed its origin to an over-literal interpretation of his love poems. Jf inferences about the poct’s character from solo lyric are hazardous, how much more so are deductions froin the more complex forms of poetry. Epic pocts are generally not in the least concerned to impress the stamp of their own personality on their poems. Writers of choral lyric are no more self-assertive. although their poems do include first person singwar utterances by the chorus which can easily mislead a reader who is not thinking aboub the context for which the poem was tion, given that one cannot expect ancient scholars to consider the possibility that much of the poem could consist of traditional material and need not necessarily be the fruit of one particular man's experiences. One cannot help being amazed, though, at the confidence with which the author of the pseudo-Ierodotean Life asserts that Homer was educated by a schoolmaster called Phemius, whom he later honoured by naming a lyre-player in the Odyssey after him 15; that he was taken on his travels around the Mediterranean by a ship’s captain called composed, into thinking that the poet is talking about himself", Tragedians do not always make it clear where, in the interplay between 12 Satyrus, Life of Euripides (ef. note 7), fr. 3Yix. Y Ath. 4300 = Chamaeleon fr. 12 Wehrli (Die Schule des Aristoteles 9); cf. Ath, 4300 Tor Seleucus” criticism. 19 Life of Horace in Suctonius II, ed. and transl. J.C. Rolfe (Loeb 1914), p. 488; but 19 Life of Sophocles 12 in Sophocles, ed. A.C. Pearson (0.C/P, 1924) = BOM 129.44; ef. G.M. Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy, Oxford 1944, p. 4 ff; C.H. Wurrman, Sophoctes, Cambridge (Mass.) 1966, p. 3 ff. ef, Horace, ed. E. Klingner (Teubner 1959) 3.15 ff. for various emendations suggested for 14 Life of Sophocles 12 Pearson = BGM 129.44 ff. this sentence. Mor the reasoning possibly underlying the anecdote ef. Suda s.v. *AAnpdy 15 Ps,-Hdt., Life of Homer 194.36 ff.; 208.354 ff. Allen = BGM 2.34 ff.; 13.339 ff. = BGM 103.4 £. kai dv épurucós mavu esperas yéyove TÓv Euro pedady, Gf W.. Starten, l’indur's House, GRBS 12 (1971), p. 141 ff. Note that the variant of Od. 1.154 quoted by the biographer is to Phemius than the version now standard, more complimentary

Mentes, who also figures in the Odyssey '*; that it was when he was first suffering from the disease of the eyes which was to cause his self-defence may have been recorded independently by less biassed blindness 1? that he was left in the care of one Mentor, in Ithaca, and authorities. Sometimes, however, no evidence apart from that conlearnt of the story of Odysseus '*, This Life presents us with a warning tained in a speech may be available for some aspect of a man’s life. 236 of the exuberance with which some ancient biographers were prone to invent anecdotes on the basis of unwarranted deductions from texts. There were, to be fair, occasional scholars who reacted against this unbridled inventiveness, It is refreshing to find in a work On [Tomer ascribed to Proclus. the theory that the Odyssey was the work of a much-travelled man stripped down to its bare essentials and presented in a manner probably intended to remind the reader of Thucydides’ archacologia : «Jt is evident from Homer’s detailed knowledge of places that he travelled over a great part of the inhabited world. It may further be deduced from this that there was plenty of money at his disposal. For long journeys involve great oxpenditure, all the more so in that period when it was not possible for everyone lo sail withont » 19. risk, and when men could not easily visit just any people they pleased 237 politicians, and that consequently the happenings they recount in {6 is interesting to sec how ancient biographers set Lo work in such a case. Consider, for exemple, the conflicting evidence provided by Aeschines and Demosthenes about Aeschines’ parentage. Aeschines claims in his De Falsa Legatione (78, 147) that his father and mother were both from perfectly respectable families, and that his father, though unfortunate enough to lose his property during the war and to be exiled. by the Thirty, had been an athlete in his youth, and had gone on to distinguish himself as a soldier and restorer of the democracy. Demosthenes (De Cor. 129 f.), on the other hand, alleges that Aeschines' father, far from having always been Atrometus, a respectable Athenian citizen, had once been T'romes, a slave school-master who had been kept in fetters, and that his mother had been a notorious hetaira nicknamed Empousa, who officiated at certain initiation rites. Demosthenes claims to know If all ancient biographers had been as cautious as that in their use of the deductive inethod, even if they had occasionally come to the wrong conclusions, things would be simpler for the student of literary history the exact places where the couple plied their trades. today. biographer, named as Apollonius, is conscientious enough to set the two The tendeney of orators to falsify history when speaking in selfdefence presents difficult problems for any historian, ancient or modern. Faced with the evidence of a pair of rival orators, each defending himself against the allegations of the other, and each assuming What was a biographer to do when faced with this evidence? One accounts side by side, but leaves the render to make up his own mind about the truth of the matter 2°. Pseudo-Plutarch, however, attempts a synthesis of elements from the conflicting accounts 2. He disregards both Demosthenes’ innuendo that his rival's parents were the scum of that verisimilitude, rather than truth, is all that is required of him, one cannot be sure whether there is a grain of truth underlying either account, or determine the precise extent of such truth as there may be. This kind of historical problem would be insoluble if it were the earth, and Aeschines’ heavy emphasis on his family’s extreme not for the fact that the great ancient orators were usually important is an intelligent enough deduction, all the more worth taking note of respectability, and, taking up a position mid-way between the two versions, asserts that Aeschines came from an unremarkable family : oÙre «ara yévos Tv eudavdy odre sarà mepovaiar xpnudrov. This because ancient scholars were more familiar with the conventions of 16 195,61 ff.; 200,361 ff. Allen = BGM 3.68 ff; 13.346 ff. 17 ‘The reason why there was a tradition that Homer was blind was probably that the man from Chios who figures in the Homerie Hymn to Apollo (2.172) was blind. ‘The author of the Miad is identified as a man of Chios in Simonides fr. 8 (dubium) West (umbi et Elegí Graeci, Oxford 1972) = Semonides fr. 29 Diehl. 18 196.73 ff, Allen = BGM 3.70 Tf 19 *Proclus”, On Homer Y 07 ff. Severyns (Recherches sur la Chrestomathie de Proclos 111, Paris 1953) = BGM 26,00 IT, Cf. G. Lirrouo, art. Proklos +, RE 23 (1957), col. 207 f. on the question of authorship. classical invective than we are. However, in the other extant Lives of Aeschines we find Demosthenes’ account simply presented as fact 22, It is worth noticing how the more sensational story here survives the epitomizer's axe, while the more respectable version is disregarded. 20 BOM 205.2 (f. (Demosthenes’ version); 267.36 ff. (Aeschines’ vorsion). 2 Ps.-Plut., Vitae X Orutorwm 840a ff., ed. J. Mau in l'Iuturchi Moralia V 2.1 (‘Teubner 1971) = BGM 262.1 ff. 22 BOM, 288.1 f.; 270.10 ff.

False, or probably false, biographical statements about philosophers derived from their writings are many. but difficult to classify. Any striking saying a philosopher may make can provide his biographers with a springboard for a leap into the realms of fantasy. Particularly popular is the type of anecdote which illustrates ironically what types of surprising conduct and mishap a philosopher would be led to if he were to follow his own precepts strictly. Thus, many stories were told relating how Pythagoras’ unwillingness to harm beans brought about his death : he refuses to cross a field of them, even to escape from some pursuers who are after his blood 2, Diogenes Laertius’ Life of Heraclitus has been shown to consist probably almost entirely of fabrications based on the most famous of bis enigmatic sayings *. For example, the anecdote in which Heraclitus, who is said elsewhere to have renouneed the kingship of his native city (D.L, IX 6), leaves the adult politics of Ephesus in disgust and goes and plays games with children (D.L. IX 3). may well be based on an inference from his saying : alwy mais éore mailwy, mescevow. ruidos y BaciAniy ®. BIOGRAPHIES OF ANCIENT WRITERS 239 him to deduce a family relationship between Thucydides and the Pisistratids simply on the basis of the passage in the History (I 20) about the ‘tyrannicides’, and to present his conjecture as fact 2%. Such were the methods of deduction from a writer’s works which ancient scholars must be suspected of using. We must always be alert to the possibility that such processes may underlie almost any anecdote in ancient biography, even where we do not have the resources to prove it positively. Every time one is confronted with an anecdote that looks suspicious one ought to ask the question : could it possibly have arisen from an illogical deductions from the author's writings? If the answer is ‘Yes’, one has, if nothing else, a justification for assigning the story to the category of possible fiction. If the anecdote is for other reasons somewhat improbable, one has here an argument which may tip the balance in the weighing up of probablities, and allow one to reject it more confidently. One unfortunate outcome of the ancient biographers’ tendency to draw fanciful deductions from texts is that the modern scholar has The works of historians do not provide so rich a quarry of strange to be extremely cautious over applying to ancient literature a technique sayings on which memorable anecdotes may be based. Still, sometimes of literary criticism which can be most fruitful where modern authors the bias, or unusual political views, shown by a historian, may tempt are concerned : the detecting of psychological motivation for aspects ihe reader into making conjectures about his background. We find of a man’s writing in events which are known to have happened to him one such inference quoted in Marcellinus” Life of Thucydides 20. It in the course of his life 22. We would all like to know what Virgil's appears that Hermippus (a scholar of the 3rd century B.C.) declared sources of inspiration were when he wrote the Georgies, but the asserthat Thucydides was descended from the Pisistratid tyrants. He proceeded to maintain that this was the reason why he was so concerned tion of Donatus that Virgil’s father ‘increased his little property by to argue that Harmodius and Aristogeiton were not really tyrannicides, from the Georgies, unsupported by external evidence, that we are having only killed the brother of the tyrant, not the tyrant himself. Uermippus' statement would be very interesting to us, if we could be sure it was true. However, if one considers the dubious quality of the biographical data to be found in other fragments of Hermippus' work 27, one is obliged to conclude that it would not have been beyond buying up woodlands and raising bees’ 2° could so easily be an inference obliged to disregard it. Similarly, speculations as to whether the exile which Juvenal is supposed to have endured was one of the reasons for his famous ¿ndignatio 1, ought to be delayed until someone proves conclusively that the tradition of the exile is not based on flimsy deduc28 For moro destructive criticism of the biographical traditions about T'hucydides see U. von WiLamowrrz - MoBLLENDORFE, Die T'hukydideslegende (1877), reprinted in 23 DL. VIIT 39.40, 24 Cf CS. Kirk, Heraclitus : The Cosmic Fragments, Cambridge 1954, y, 4 f. 25 lleraclitus fr. 93 Marcovich = B52 Diels/Kranz. For further bibliography, see now my article The Death of Heraclitus, GRBS 14 (1973), p. 233 ff. 26 Marcellinus, Life of Thucydides 18 Jones (‘Thucydides 0.0.1. 1898) = BOM 190.85 ff. Zi He is responsible for some of the most improbable anecdotes in Diogenes Laertins' Lives of the Philosophers, Vragments in FHG 11 35-54; Henares, art. Hermippos 6, RE 8 (1912), col. 845 ff. Kleine Schriften YU, Berlin 1969, p. 1 ff. 29 Cf. H.T, Cuenniss, The biographical fashion in literary criticiam, Univ. Cal. Publ. Class. Phil, 12 (1943), p, 279 ff. 30 Donatus, Life of Vergit I, transl. J.C. Rolfe in Suetontus 11 (Loch 1914). 31 Lg. G. Ihrer, Juvenal the Satirist, Oxford 1954, passim, esp. p. 20 ff. For more sceptical discussions of the tradition of exile see : 4, Wight Durr - A.M. Durr, A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age, London 19643, p. 477 ff; M. Coffey in new edition of Duff's Juvenal (Cambridge 1970).

241 tlle (se. Paris) et militiae multis largitus honorem tions from the Satires, postponed, that is, until the Greek Kalends. semenstri digilos valum circumligat auro (1, 88 f.). As itis, the fact that the authorities for Juvenal’s life cannot agree on the place or the date of his exile ought to warn us not to take too much notice of it. In the most important Life of Juvenal 92, to which the Perhaps, the biographer reasons, this Paris took offence at these and others can be seen to he more or less closely related, the exile is placed satirist would be one of those military commands he was able to the subsequent lines. and thought that a fitting punishment for the at the very end of his life. This Life (Vita 1) 33 tells us that some lines in procure — but not one that he would enjoy : a trip to furthest Egypt 3, Satire VII (which had originated, we are to believe, in an early, un- At some stage, however, the biographer or some later scholar notices published work of Juvenal's) where he attacks the excessive influence a chronological problem : there were two influential actors named Paris, of Paris, the pantomime actor, in particular his ability to grant military cominands, were taken as an indirect attact on an actor who happened he learns, during the early Empire, one under Nero, and another under to be a court-favourite at the time the satire appeared: Juvenal, but even he must have been dead hefore Juvenal wrote the seventh suspected of attacking the powers of his own day obliquely through Satire, let alone the last two 8, He elaborates the theory to cope with his tirades against people of the past, was sent, though already eighty this awkward fact : the lines about Paris in Satire VII, he suggests, Domitian 97; it must be the latter to whom Juvenal was referring, years old, to the far end of Egypt, in charge of a cohort. must have originally come from an earlier poem, written at a time Perhaps what lies behind the traditions of exile is this : a biographer (maybe in the th century, when Juvenal seems to have gained sudden when, for fear of retribution, Juvenal had not publicized his work: popularity %) is puzzled by the fact that, of Juvenal’s last two Satires. one is about the far end of Egypt and the other is about soldiers-strange subjects for an old man to choose. Looking for a clue to this mystery he lights on Juvenal’s attack on Paris in Satire VII. The two lines immediately before the three quoted in Vita I 25 are these : and it was not Paris, but another, later, actor who, suspecting that he was being attacked obliquely in these lines, was responsible for the satirist's unpleasant military command. Other biographers found this theory too claborate. They were content to have Juvenal exiled early in his career, presumably through the agency of Paris, under Domitian 2°, or even under Nero 4°! If the mood 32 ‘Text in Persi et Iuvenalis Saturae, ed. W.V. Clausen (0.C.T. 1969), p. 179. so took them, they would vary the place of the exile. loannes Malalas 4! 3 Sce Juvenal ed. O. Jahn (Berlin 1851) for the text of 6 other Lives; Persi Invenalis has him exiled to the Pentapolis in Libya, which is puzzling, until one Sulpiciae Saturae ed, Jahn (Berlin 19104) for other testimonia relating to the exile, These learns that in about 500 A.D. the Libyan Pentapolis was designated a other Lives, though valucless as historical documents, deserve our attention, as they often, by their very naivety, give clues to the thought processes which may undcrlie the main Life, in which a certain amount of artistic concealment of dubious rescarch 38 Compare the wording of Pita I with Sat. VII 88 ff. : ac statim per honorem militiae secms to have been done. l'or instance, whereas the author of the main Life just states (of. I. 88 : militine ... honorem) quamquam octogunariua urbe summotus est missusque ad it as n fact that Juvenal declaimed until middle ago, Vite [I (Jahn) goes into more detail: ad pracfecturam cohortis (cf. l. 92 : praefectos Pelopea facit ...) in extremam partem Aegypti median fereactalem declamavii animi magia causa quam quod scholae se aut foro praepararet, tendentis. deinde ad poetices (sic) se upplicavit, ef posiquam diu tacuit, uberiori vitiorum iam gliscente 37 Cf. E. Wüst, art. Paris 2, 3, RE 18 (1949), col. 1536 ff. contagione ab indignatione incepil : ‘semper ego auditor tantum'. Any suspicions one may 38 This raises the question of how much an understanding of the chronology of have had that tho statement about Juvenal's long apprenticeship in the schools of ‚Juvenal's Satires would be necessary to induce a biographer to elaborate the theory. rhrtorie could have been based simply on the opening of Satire I receive some corrobora- Perhaps all that happened was that he felt it neccesary Lo take into account Juvenal’s tion hero, (N.b. «editor could mean ‘student’ in the schools of rhetoric e.g. Sen. Contr. famous decision to write only about the dead : experiar, quid concedatur in tllos} quorum LX 2,23, as well as ‘hearer’ in general.) A sentence in Vita IV : declamavit non mediocri Flaminia tegitur cinis atque Latina (Sat. 1.170 f.). fam, ut ipse scribit : “el nos consilium dedimus Syllae’, is also significant. 34 Of. J.W. & A.M. Durr, Silver Age, p. 477 f.; G. Hicuer, Juvenal the Satirist, p. 2; 36 Sut. VIT 90 ff. : quod non dant proceres dabit histrio. lu Camerinosfet Bureas, tu Vita 11 gives us (88 as well. 40 Schol. luv, VIL 92; Vita VIL. 4 Chron, X 341 Chilmead. Malalas' account of the end of Paris is worthless (cf. p. 233, nobilium magna atria curas?/praefectos Pelopea 39 Schol, luv, 1 1; 1V 38; Vitae III, IV. facit, Philomela tribunos. But n.b. G. Heiner, Juvenal the Satirist, p. 242 n, 25). Compare Malalas on Paris: ds ricas olxov «al Aourpóv ¿Ew ris néÂcws Exei redeurá with the description of the rich man's batha and house in Sat, VII 178 ff.

limes to be administered in future from Egypt 4, and one notes that one of the manuscripts of Vita T contains a reading according to which Juvenal was sent to the furthest part of Western Egypt : ... missusque ad pracfecturam cohortis in extremam Aegypti partem occidentis (whereas the other manuscripts have : in extremam Aegypli partem tendentis, contemporaries. The evidence he would find in these works would be of or these words in a different order) 43, Other authorities have him sent actually complied by contemporaries of the men in question. Even in 242 243 varying quality. Some of it would be reliable. Sceptical though we may be about data in the ancient lives. we should never forget that the men who wrote them may have had access to biographical miscellanies and the like, contra Scotos, probably on the basis of a number of vivid references to the 5th century B.C. lon of Chios was jotting down gossipy anecdotes Britain in the Satires 44, about the famous tragedians of his day, among other people 4. Later The main point to notice is this : if exile had been the cause of Juvenals indignatio (which is most fierce in the early Satires), it would have been inflicted on him in the early part of his life, before the composition of the Satires we know. The curious fact is, however, that, although there is a persistent tradition that the lines about Paris in Satire VIT came from an earlier poem, the biographers do not say that it was this earlier poem that brought about the exile. (The notices * which maintain that Juvenal was exiled by Domitian, and wrote or revised his Sutires in exile, are too garbled to inspire much confidence, and there is nothing to prevent us from regarding them as degenerate versions of the tradition set out in Vita T.) Instead. the dominant tradition is that the exile took place after the transference of the lines to Satire VII and intimately bound up with this tradition is the improbable assertion that Juvenal was an octogenarian when he was sent on his military expedition to ligypt. an assertion which only becomes intelligible if one regards it as an inference from the subject-matter we find Antigonus of Carystos writing about contemporary philosophers 47, and Seneca the Elder reminiscing about rhetoricians he had known. Such writers might provide a mine of information for the biographer. Antigonus’ writings are quoted extensively by Diogenes Laertius #8; the elder Seneca's pen-portraits of the rhetoricians must have been an important source for Suetonius’ De Rhetoribus, to judge by the extant Life of Albucius Silus 49. The contemporary biographical miscellany is obviously a type of source to be viewed with respect. The existence of the Epidemia? of Ion of Chios means that we must temper our scepticism just a little when examining the biographics of Aeschylus and Sophocles, men whom Ion is known to have referred to 5°, That is not to say that all the evidence provided by contemporary authorities of this kind is totally reliable. They need not have been eye-witnesses of all the amusing and scandalous events they describe. They may be no freer than any other type of biographical writer from the tendency to force history into pre-conceived patterns, The biographer might also have at his disposal letters said to have of Juvenal’s last two Satires. been written by, or about, the author he was interested in. Often they Il would be forgeries, but sometimes genuine letters might be preserved. The letters of Augustus to Maecenas and Ilorace, preserved in the As well as ransacking an authors works for auto-biographical allusions, a biographer would search the writings of the author's Suetonian Life of Horace 51, have an air of authenticity. The friendly 46 FOrHist 3924 ff. 42 Cr. 1. Kegs, art. Pentapalis 3, RE 19 (1937), col. 509-510. ‘43 Cf. apparatus in Clausen’a edition. 4 CE J.W. € AM. Durr, Silver Age, p. 478; p. 480. 47 U. von WiLamowitz-MOELLENDORFF, Antigonos von Karystos, Berlin 1881. 48 D.L. 11 136, 143 (on Menedemus); Y 67 (on Lyeon); 111 66, VII 12 (on Zeno); IX 62 (on l'yrrho) IV 17 (on Polemon). 45 Schol. luv. 1 1; Vita IV. It goes almost without saying that one should not trust 49 Suetonius, De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus 30 Brugnoli (Teubner 1963); cf. Seneca, for one moment the hypothetical identification of the army officer, Juiua Iuvenalir, Contr. 7 Praef. Tt was probably an intermediate source that Suetonius was using, however, mentioned in a (lost) inscription from Aquinum (Dessau, ILS 1 2926), with the poet ef. W.-D. LeBEK, Hermes 94 (1966), p. 360 ff. Juvenal as he was in the prosperous days he is supposed to havo enjoyed before his exile. Even Highet, who dwells on the identification at considerable length (Juvenal the Satirist, p. 32-40), admits that it is far from certain (p. 33). 50 Sehol, Aesch. Pers. 432 = FGrilist 392F7; Ath. 603e-604d = FOrllist 39216. 51 Life of Horace p. 2.2 ff. Klingner (‘Teubner 1959): cf. Imp. Caes. Aug. Operum Fraqmenta4, ed, II. Malcovati (1967), p. 6-50; E. FRAENKEL, Horace, Oxford 1957, p. 17 ff.

245 irony, witticisms, and use of sesquipedalian Greek words set these in a Life of Isocrates one biographer refers to insinuations made by letters apart from the usual products of the spurious letter-writer's art. Serious deviations from the truth may occur, though, when a biographer turns to poetry in search of information. Occasional poems addressed to, or in praise of, famous authors, might sometimes spark off biographical invention, Thus, the fact that Martial writes of Juvenal as a friend, and in one epigram contrasts his own retirement in Spain comic poets about the orator's relations with the prostitute Lagiske, with Juvenal's activities in Rome 52, suggested to one biographer a sentimental twist to the exile story : Juvenal returns to Rome after his exile, but dies of grief at not finding his friend Martial there #. The ambiguity of the word furor #1 in a line of a poem by Statius : et docts furor arduus Lucreti (Silo. 11 7.76) may have been one of the factors which gave rise to the tradition, attested by St. Jerome, that Lucretius wrote the De Rerum Natura in lucid intervals during a madness, induced by a love potion, which eventually drove him to suicide 55. (When assessing this tradition we have also to consider that it was standard practise among critics, pagan and Christian, of the Epicureans, to describe them as ‘mad’ 59; that the ‘love potion’ could have been suggested by the reputation for hedonism which all Epicureans had to live down, or by one particular passage of Lucretius, the description of the sexual instinct in book IV 1030 ff; and that suicide was a type and remarks : «J also maintain that another factor frees him all the more from blame: the jibes of the comie poets are untruo, For it is the custom of comedians to poke fun at great personages to get laughs; for example they bring Socrates on stage as a lover » 58, of youths However, there was too much of a taste for spicy stories in antiquity for the biographers to ignore comedy as a source completely. This is particularly evident in the case of the Lives of Euripides. The biographers seem to have derived from a comedy of Telecleides a story that Euripides had collaborated with Socrates when writing some of his tragedies 5°, I'rom Aristophanes they took the insinuations that Euripides' father was a huckster and his mother a greengrocer 9, aud that Kephisophon had helped to write the tragedies 4, Satyrus and others can be seen to have taken parts of the 7'Resmophoriazusae, the women's campaign to get rid of Euripides, and the poet's oath not to write any more libels against women, as historical fact 5, Satire on literary figures continued to be a possible subject for comedy when political comedy was no longer acceptable, Middle comedy produced a number of burlesques about poets, notably Sappho %, and the of death which, according to popular moralizing in antiquity, was most teachings of philosophers, notably of Pythagoras ‘4, and the biographies appropriate for an enemy of religion 57.) of these people doubtless included traditions first popularized by the In comedy and satirical poetry the biographers found a particularly rich vein of interesting material about great men. The unreliability comic poets #, of comic evidence was recognized occasionally in antiquity. For instance as the comic poets. They would seize upon any hint that a man’s previous career might have included any episode which did not befit 53 Martial VII 24; VII 91; XII 18. 59 Ancient orators had much the same repertoire of invective themes Vita 111 Jahn. 54 Cf. €, Baitey, Lucretius, Oxford 1947, vol. I, p. 8:¢... furor there is more likely to menu ‘divine inspiration’; indeed it might be suggested that a misinterpretation of the 59 Ibid, 133.10 ff. ef. D,L, IT 18, and Meineke's discussion of the textual difficulties in CGF II, p. 371 f. word was the original source of the story ». 56 Hieronymus, Busebit Pamphili Chronici Canones 231 source is quite likely to have been Suetonius; of. R. 58 BGM 255.48 ff. Fotheringham. Jerome's Haim, Hieronymus Zusätze in Pusebius 60 BGA 133.1 ff, 139.1 (€, 141.1 ff., cf. Ar. Thesm. 387, 456; Ach. 478; Kg. 19. Ol BGM 134.14, 138.97 £, of, Ar. Ran, 044, 1452 f. Chronik, Philologus Supp. XX 2 (1929), p. 26, p. 33. For bibliography see Lueretius ed. 62 Satyrus, Life of Euripides fr. 39x; of. Y. Leo, Satyros, Bios Eöpemidov (1912), in W.A, Merrill (New York 1907), p. 15 ff.; Lucretius od. Bailey, p. 8-12; Lucretius ITI ed. Ausgewählte kleine Schriften. 11, p. 382 : 4 Dass Satyros ausser Euripides und den Komikern EJ. Kenney (Cambridge 1971), p. 6£. keine Autoren eitiert, ist merkwürdig ... o 56 F.g. Hor. Carm. L 34.1 ff. : Parcus deorum cultor et infrequens] insanientis dum sapientiae] consultua erro ...; Lactantins, De Opificio Det 0.1 : non possum hoc loco teneri quominus Epicuri stultitiam rursum coarguam.: illius enim sunt omnia quae deliral Lucretius, 57 Cf. W. NrsrLe, Legenden vom Tod der Gotiesverächter, Griechische Studien, Stuttgart 1948, p. 595 f. 63 Comedies on Sappho : Edmonds I 483 (Ameipsias); II 161 (Ephippus), 263 (Anti. phanes), 327 (Amplis), 623 (Timocles); ILL 133 (Diphilus). $4 Comedies on Pythagoreane: Edmonds Il 5 Cratinus, Mudayopilovoa, 469 Alexis, HMvPayopifouaa, 525 Aristophon, /Iudayopıonis. 65 Cf. K. Leurs, Populäre Aufsätze, p. 398 ff.

a gentleman. It was not just scandalously immoral conduct, 247 but We do not have to assume, though, that all the malicious gossip participation in any activity associated with the lower orders, that was we find in the biographies originated in comie or rhetorical sources, subject to the orator's lofty contempt. Thus, Demosthenes reckoned It is clear that biographers sometimes went in for seandal-mongering that a good way to prejudice his hearers against Aeschines was to relate on their own account. One biographer goes a step further than Demosthat he had started his career as an assistant school-master, and had thenes in gone on to work as a clerk and as tritagonist in a troupe of actors 50, had said that people called her Empousa, ¢a nickname she owed Presumably, when an orator was dealing with bis opponent’s recent clearly to the diversity of her acts and experiences» (De Cor, 130). activities, his allegations would have to bear some relation to fact, The biographer makes her a real bogey-woman : but the further he chose to go back the more inventive he could be. his insinuations about Aeschines’ mother. Demosthenes «They say that this woman got the name Empousa from her habit of rushing One useful device was to make fun of one's enemy's parentage, We out of dark places and frightening women and children, since Empousa is a phantom have seen how Demosthenes made out that Aeschines was the son of a of the night» 72, slave and a prostitute. (Aeschines’ father was ninety-four years old, according to his son, at the time of the De Falsa Legatione controversy 57.) Aeschines uses the same tactics when he claims that Demosthenes was the son of a cutler and a Scythian woman 9. (It is clear that both orators and biographers regarded foreign birth as low birth ),59 What relation, if any, such allegations bear to the truth is unclear, though we do get ovcasional clues from ancient writers about the conventions of invective, Por instance, we may deduce from several passages in the Lives that one technique was to attribute to a man the menial occupation in which slaves of his were engaged. In this way, the owner of a sword factory can be described as a cutler 7. The biographies are full of statements about people's ignoble origins and scandalous conduct. Such allegations, as we have seen, survive the epitomizing process very well. One point to notice is the way that, in cases where we know that the biographers’ source is a piece of rhetorical abuse. they tend to introduce the allegations with vague expressions : «People say that ...»; «Some people have written that...» 7 Biographers do not always make it clear when the source they are using is a passage of invective. In the Life of Sophocles we read that the biographer Aristoxenus alleged that Sophocles’ father was a carpenter or bronze worker. and that another authority. Istros, stated that he had been a cutler. None of these allegations, we arc assured by the author of the extant Life. was to be found in any comedy #3. To sum up : when we study ancient biographies we have to be on the look-out for stories reminiscent of the conventional topics of invective. It will be seen that we have to call into question a wide range of assertions : any statements, indeed, imputing to famous writers low birth or disgraceful morals. Rhetorical eulogy also made a contribution to the Lives. In his Life of Plato, Diogenes Laertius cites a work by Speusippus called Plato's Funeral Feast and an Encomium of Plato by Clearchus, as authorities for the story of Plato's miraculous conception 74. In various other Lives we find the use of a particularly characteristic feature of eulogy : the technique of stringing together lists of anecdotes about a man, each one illustrating a different virtue with which he is supposed to have been endowed 7, There remains to be discussed one more type of primary source available to the biographers : the references made by philosophers to their contemporaries and men of earlier years. Aristotle described 56 Dem. De Fals. Leg. 249; De Cor, 258 ff. $7 Aeschin. De Fals. Leg. 147. 68 Aeschin. Zn Ctes. 171 f.; of. Val. Max, TIT 4 Ext. 2; Plut. Dem. 4.1; BGM 293,14 ff, 72 RAM 268.4 11. 69 Note how Anacharsis, a Scythian of royal birth, is included in a 73 Life of Sophocles 1 l'earson = BOA 126.1 ff. who rose to eminence from unpromising beginnings, 70 4 D.L. TI 2. BG Al 46.30 ff. Plut. Dem, 4.1; BOM 293,18 ff. (Libanins on Demosthenes) ef. Life of Sophocles | Pearson = BGM 126.1 ff.; Pa.-Plut. TI list af people litre X Oratorum 836e = RM 246.1 ff. faci : BGM 265.2; 268.2; twés ... yeypapraciv : Ibid. Aloxiins. 270.3 £. = Suda av. 75 1 E.g. parts of Diogenes Laertius’ Life of Socrates: 11 22 Emepeleîro St rai cwpagxing vr kat Wu evéntns ... D 24 LI do # 5 e dat y Ww de wat loxupoyrdieo roi Ónporpuricós ... adrdpens Te Nu Kal oepvós ... 27 hv Sixavos xal tav axwrrórrwv adrov ümepopär ... 29 ixavòs S'auforepa yr, Kai mporpépa kei dnorpépac.

Plato's writings as belonging to a genre intermediate between poetry reject the view of a philosopher promoted by his admiring pupils 248 249 and prose 7, and the ‘ambiguous position between fact and imagina- — Aristoxenus 8!, who launched an attack on Socrates, is a well-known tion’ ?? occupied by the Sceratic writings makes it difficult for anyone example — but this would only mean that eulogy was replaced by to assess their value as historical documents. However, two passages scurrility. Meetings between great men which are historically unlikely in Athenaeus’ Detpnosophists 78, in which a critic of the Socratics or impossible continue to figure in the [aves, and so do gossipy anecinveighs against the untruthfulness of philosophers, sum up very well, dotes of all kinds, includings stories like the one quoted. making one despite occasional silliness, the kinds of unhistorical statements most philosopher the loved-one of another. likely to be found in these writings. It is pointed out how Socrates is glorified at the expense of other great men : 111 « Most. philosophers hnve a natural tendency to be more abusive than the comic poets.... For, in the eyes of this gentry, no statesman is honest, no general is wise, The biographers did not necessarily go to the primary sources for no sophist is worth considering. only Socrates is — he who consorts with Aspasia’s their information, but might rely instead on the material provided flute girls at the workshops, or converses with Piston the cuirass-maker, or instructs the courtesan Theodote how to lure her lovers. as Xenophon represents him in the second book of the Memorabilia» (Ath. 220 a,c). by other types of historical writers. Even before the time when prose became the normal vehicle for history, it appears that tales about the most famous carly poets, It is noted how Plato sometimes perpetrates anachronisms in his dialogues : perhaps virtual biographies of them, were circulating in poetic form. Some of the legends the biographers have preserved in the Lives of «In fact, to make Plato's Socrates converse with Parmenides is scarcely possible Homer are evidently very old. In an early elegiac poem, ascribed in on account of Socrates’ youth, which would have prevented him from making or antiquity to Simonides, the poet of the /liad is identified with the man listening to such a discourse» (505 f). Plato is also accused of introducing unnecessary gossip: « But the most outrageous thing of all is also to say, without any compelling need, that Zeno, Parmenides' fellow citizen, was his darling» (tbid.). 79 This critic has put his finger on the respects in which the Socratic writers are most problematic to the historian. How did the ancient biographers react to the glorification of leading philosophers, anachronisms, and gossip, presented by the philosophical writers? In view of the important part played by the Academy and the Peripatos in the rise of Greek biography and literary research, it is only to be expected that the early biographers were unlikely to reject the approach to history found in Socratic dialogues. Rather, they continue along the same lines ®. A rebellious scholar might of Chios who appears in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo 8; Heraclitus knew the story of the riddle which brought about Homer's death #4; Pindar seems to have known a legend in which Homer gave away the Cypria as his daughter's dowry *, With the advent of prose history, a vast mass ol research, scholarly and unscholarly. started to build up. some of which would be of use to the biographers 8°. Alongside large-scale works of political history there were genealogical studies and local histories, and, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, there came in addition a proliferation of guidebooks describing temples and monuments and the legends connected 81 Fragments : F. Wrnrii, Die Schule des .Iristoteles 2, Basel 1945. 82 Cf. O. Cnusius, Zur Kritik der antiken. Ansichten über die Eehtheit homerischer Dichtung, Vhilologus 54 (1895), p. 710 ff.; W. SenavewaLor, Legende von Homer dem fehrenden Sänger, Zürich 1959; A.D. Momtentano, Development, p. 25 ff. 76 D.L. III 37. 83 Cf. note 17. On the authorship and dating of the elegiac poem, sce J.A. Davison, 77 A.D. MoMIGLIAND, Development, p. 46. Quotations and allusions in early Greek literature, Eranos 53 (1955), p. 126 ff. = From. 78 Ath. 2150 ff.; 5040 ff. Archilochus to Pindar, London 1968, p. 70 If; M.L. West, /ambi et Wlegi Graeci 11 114, 72 Cf. Plato, Parm. 127b. 84 fr. 21 Mareovich = B56 Diels/Kranz. 80 ‘That does not mean that the philosophical schools are alone to blame for the 85 fr. 265 Snell = Aclian PAL 1X 15. glorification of men of genius and the inventing of associations hetween famous men. These are features of popular historical tradition everywhere and in all periods, BS Cf. W. Krona, Studien zum Verständnis der römischen Literatur, Stuttgart 1924 (repr. Darmstadt 1964), chapters 12, 13 : A.D, MomIGLIANO, Development, p. 72.

with them, researches on cults and festivals, studies of inscriptions, available for three main classes of people : members of noble families, holders of hereditary priesthoods, and people who followed a profession 250 monographs on particular virtues and vices, lists of miraculous oceur- 251 these there were books on the history of the various litorary genres, which was regarded as in some sense heriditary. Where such genealogies existed the biographers naturally used them. Andocides, we read in his Life *, came from a noble family whose lineage Hellanicus had and studies and commentaries on the works of important writers, traced back to Hermes: Plato. we learn, could claim descent from rences and of the innovations of famous men, historical miscellanies, and collections of commonplaces for use of students of rhetoric. Besides which, without necessarily being designed to present full accounts Codrus, King of Athens, on his mother’s side %; Lycurgus the orator af the lives of the writers concerned, might include much biographical was provided with divine ancestors by virtue of holding a hereditary speculation. It may be assumed (especially as it was usual for a man who wrote Lives to write historical works of other kinds as well) that priesthood of Poseidon 4. All physicians were regarded as members of the family of Asclepius. Thus Ilippocrates, as well as being supposed the relationship of this mass of scholarship with the biographies must to be a descendant of Herakles. was said to trace his ancestry back to have been extremely complicated. Sometimes the biographers will have Asclepius *5, Another family tree made Homer and Hesiod descendants drawn information from other parts of the historical tradition, at other of the patrons of their art, Orpheus and Apollo 95, times contributed new material to the repertoire. The noble art of Local histories and guide-books were also used, on occasion. by inscription-forging scems to stand in a relationship of mutual aid with historical scholarship. So, presumably, did rhetorical exercises on the biographers. Pseudo-Plutarch, for example, cites a minor work by Ephorus of Kyme for an account of Homer's ancestry and birth, historical themes, and spurious letters. in which he is made out to have come from a Kymaean family *?. The The writers of authors’ Lives might sometimes derive material from Lives are full of references to places and works of art which are ‘pointed the large-scale political histories, especially in cases where an author out’ and said to be associated with famous men : the Kelophonians played an important part in publie life. For instance, Plutarch. cites Theopompus and Marsyas of Pella in bis Life of Demosthenes #7, Nonpoint out the place where Homer worked as a schoolmaster and wrote the Margites ®®: the Prytaneion at ‘Thebes is made out to have been political men mentioned in historical works. Even originally the house of Pindar 9%; draped statues of the Charites on ‘Thucydides (IIL 96) mentions in passing the tradition about the death the Athenian acropolis are claimed to have been the work of Socrates in his early capacity as sculptor 100; pictures are attributed to Euripides, too might be of Hesiod, The biographers were liable, of course, to be infected by any bias or lack of critical approach in their historical sources. Not all ancient scholars were as discriminating as Marcellinus, who. in his Life of Thucydides rejects Timaeus’ patriotic claim that Thucydides, when exiled, went to live (and work) in Italy 88, and dismisses as an example of Herodotean fiction the story of Arion and the musicloving dolphin *, Timacus' story that Thucydides died in Italy was adopted, according to Marcellinus, by ‘others’ %, The legend of Arion's ride on the dolphin remained popular throughout antiquity ». Genenlogital works were obviously of great interest to the biographers. Lengthy pedigrees going back to the gods and heroes were 92 Pa..Plut, Vitae N Orutorum 834b = BGM 237.1 FE. Odysseus was also among his his ancestors, Plut. Aleib. 21.1. 93 BOM 382.8 £. DA Ps,-Plub, Vitae X Oratorum 8436 = BGM 277.146 ff. 95 BOM 449.2 Ff. "6 E.g. Certamen B 227.44 ff. Allen = BGM 36.41 ff. 7 PGrIlist 70 FA, V's.-Plut. Life of Homer JI Allen = BGM 21.7 ff. Contrary to what one might expect, this tradition is probably not the invention of Ephorus: cf. Jacuby’s commentary on PGrilist 701 1,100. 98 Certamen B 226.15 Allen = BOM 34.15 ff. 9% Hustath. Prooem. 28 (in Scholia Velera in Pindari Carmina UL ed. Drachmann, 87 Pint. Dem. 4.1; 13.1; 14,3; 18.4; 21.2; 25.6 (Theapompus); 18.2 (Marsyns). Toubner 1964) = BQM 93.91 ff. cf. Slater, GRBS 197), 141 ff. 88 Marcellinus, Life of Thucydides 26 Jones = BGM 191.127 ff. 89 Ibid. 49 = BGM 196.277 ff. 100 BGA 440.852 f.; ef. D.L. II 18 for Socrates’ career as stonemason ; Pliny NH. XXXVI 32 (a passage where there is no implication that the sculptor Socrates is to be 90 Ibid, 33 = BOM 193.172 f. identified with the philosopher) and, for discussion, K. Jex BLarr - E. SELLERS, The 21 Cf, O. Crusis, art. Arion 5, RE 2 (1896), col. 836 ff. Lider Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, London 1896, Introd., p. 1.

253 who was supposed to have been a painter in his youth 1%. What is one of an imaginative art-gallery guide. to make of these stories? A deduction from the writers’ works may lie behind some. The tradition that the Margites was written in challenged the Muses. Lf any Muse were represented in the same picture Kolophon was clearly derived from a line of that poem, probably the opening line, which went : 7A0e ris eis Kododdiva yépuv rai Belos easily have suggested itself to a later observer who had no more certain dotdds 192, Some of the stories, it must not be denied, may have some truth in them. However, one has only to think of the number of places should give the biographer the benefit of the doubt in this case, but which claimed to have been the birthplace of Homer 13, to realize how any association of one’s home town with a famous man was thought to bring prestige. The origin of the associations in many cases may have been in the patter of naive travellers’ guides 4, or in the seen from a hilarious list of ancient explanations for the fact that hopeful yarn-spinning of local characters. a cloak, either, according to some people, to improve his appearance, because he References to the portraits of great men were sometimes brought into their Lives. Plato’s many portraits were used as evidence hy people who asserted that he was given the name Plato on account of the exceptional breadth of his chest and forehead : Sta ro öVo pdpia Tod owyuaros éxew marÿrara, ré re oréprov Kai TO pérwrov 105 In the Life of Sophocles we are told that it was because of one occasion when the tragedian featured as a lyre-player in the Thamyris that he was represented holding a lyre in a painting in the Stoa Poikile 10, It seems it was unusual for a tragedian, as opposed to a lyric poet, to be shown holding a lyre in classical art, the standard attributes of a dramatist being the scroll and the mask :°7, but even so we ought to ask ourselves whether the T'hamyris anecdote in the Life of Sophocles could not have originated as a piece of impressive bluffing on the part 101 BGM 134.16; 139.22. 102 Margites 1.1. Allen, Similarly, a tradition that Aristophanes was an Egyptian, found in a guido-book by one Heliodorus (F@r/list 373 F4) aud incorporated in the Suda's account of Aristophanes’ life (BOAT 100,1) seems to have arisen from speculation on Ar. Nub. 272 (ef. Jacolıy's commentary). 103 For a long list including the names of authorities (among them ono who showed that Homer was a Roman ¿x wor Ody mapa "Pwpalos póvov yivopénov), 500 Vita VI 250.5 ff. Allen; BGM 31.3 ff. Homer is evidently still sometimes reckoned as a status symbol, At any rate, the Old Spaghetti Factory restaurant in Vancouver (surely the last outpost of the Greck biographical tradition) advertises its Spaghotti with Browned Butter and Mizithra Cheese with the words : ‘legend has it that Homer lived on this while composing the Tliud”. 104 Cf, Lucian, Philopseudes 4. Thamyris was a mythical poet who as the lyre-playing Sophocles, the identification with Thamyris might knowledge of the artists original intentions than we have. Perhaps we how much pseudo-scholarship accumulated around portraiture may be Hippocrates was represented in art with his head covered : «In his numerous portraita he is depicted with his head covered, some say with a felt cap — a sign of nobility, as in the case of Odysseus — or, as others say, with was bald, or, according to others, because of a weakness of the head, or else to point out the necessity of looking after the authoritative part of the soul (i.e. reason), or as a sign of his love of travel, or as a sign of the obscurity of his writings, or to demonstrate that one ought to ward off harmful things even when ono is healthy, or because, when he was operating, in order to have his hands free, he would gather up the part of his cloak which covered them, and would drape it over his head '8 », Notice that the biographer has not done any independent research in this case, He does not know whether it was a felt cap or a cloak that Hippocrates wore. The biographers probably gained their knowledge of inscriptions too in the library rather than in the field. Snooping around overgrown tombstones and getting the nickname Zrmloxoas 10° for one's pains were not the sort of things which appealed to the average literary gentleman in antiquity. Most scholars will have been more inelined to reuse the material to be found in the works of a few pioneer epigraphists, Sometimes, of course, reliable information about famous writers would be preserved in inscriptions, and sometimes it would be a reliable scholar who took on the task of studying such evidence. The achievements of poets, for instance. were to be found recorded in accounts of festivals and victory lists, and it is known that Aristotle wrote treatises based on the records of victories in all the major Greek festivals 10, This means that the data we have on the victories of the 108 BGM 451.59 ff. (Soranus). 109 This was the nickname given to the cpigraphist Polemon, Ath. 234d. Cf. W. Kito1t, 105 BGM 383.28 ff. (Olympiodorus). Studien zum Verständnis der rômischen Literatur, p. SIL 106 Life of Sophocles 5 Pearson = BGM 127.26 ff. 107 Cf. G.M.A. Ricurer, The l’ortraits of the Greeks, London 1965, Vol. 1. references (D.L, V 26) : "Odvgemovinat d Iubiovikar <d nepi> povous d Ilulixos à NO Diogenes Laertius’ catalogue of Aristotle's works includes the following group uf

Athenian tragedians are in all probablity reliable. When a writer was active in political life. he is likely to have been mentioned quite often in publie records, Appended to Pseudo-Plutarch’s biographies of Lycurgus and Demosthenes we find the full text of honorary decrees, 255 lists probably owed more to the biographers than the biographers did to them. However, they may, on occasion, have been tempted to fabricate anecdotes in order to make their books seem more comprehensive, and so contributed to the biographical tradition. We shall sce later how and are able to see the extent of the author’s dependence on them 111, Unfortunately, not all ancient inscriptions, particularly not all of famous men, helped to stereotype literary history. those concerning famous men, contained equally reliable information, Apart from the fact that honorary decrees would give the same kind of inter-dependence with rhetorical exercises aud spurious letters. It is of rose-coloured view of a man’s achievements that we get in passages of rhetorical eulogy and self-justification, downright forgery of inscriptions was not unknown in antiquity, and neither was the engraving in stone of the dubious products of research by third-rate antiquarians 112, A clear case of the use in biography of an inscription giving highly suspect information comes in Pseudo-Plutarch's Life of the orator Lycurgus. This inscription presents the genealogy of the priests of Poseidon, mentioned earlier, which provides Lycurgus with such writers of one type of exempla list, the monograph on the innovations Karlier, it was suggested that biography may stand in a relation àm=en not easy, however, to find any firm evidence that rhetorical exercises influenced the biographers. Ilernippus, known to us as a purveyor of much amazing biographical material, took the speech of Polycrates the sophist against Socrates to be the actual prosecution speech 115, but how far this assumption affected his account of the end of Socrates cannot be known now. The relationship between the startling versions of history presented in controversia and suasoria themes and the sensationalism illustrious ancestors as Erechtheus, Ge and Hephaestus 119, The epitaph is the type of inscription most frequently found in the Lives, To quote an epitaph after one’s account of a man’s death was of the biographers is also unclear. (These themes, though known to us only from the Roman period, were very probably used in some of the carlier Greek schools of rhetoric 16) Did any biographer ever introduce into a Life an anecdote, remembered by a neat way of rounding off a biography and this became standard practice among Greek biographers. There had to be an epitaph for him from his school-days, which owed its origins to the feverish search by an inventor of declamation themes for poignant irony and a difficult everyone, even worthies like Homer and Hesiod "4, and many are, consequently, to be taken with a large pinch of salt. It is not even case to plead? It scems possible, but we cannot prove this ever hapnecessary to suppose that all the extant epitaphs of famous writers were ever inscribed on alleged tombs. Book 7 of the Palatine Anthology is too full of examples of this genre to allow us to believe that likely. Writers of commentaries, histories of literary genres, and the like, will have used techniques so like those of the biographers that one cannot single out ways in which they were responsible for deflecting the biographers from the truth, Writers of the various types of exempla for impiety, pened, and it is probably best to regard the themes — Buripides tried having represented Herakles going mad on stage 117; Cicero faced with a choice of death or the destruction of his writings "*, and so on — a8 direct offshoots of the historiographical tradition, even where we have no extaut parallel in formal history ur biography 1». 115 D.L, II 38 ef. K. Leurs, Populäre Aufsätze, p. 404, 16 For one thing, the remoteness of the ‘laws’ used in conjunction with controversia themes from the Roman legal system makes it difficult to believe that: the themes sprang Tethouxdy Deyxos d Nixat Aiovvorarai d wep! tpaywiiav d Ardaoradlaı d; cf. H. up out of nowhere in Augnatan Rome. Perer, Wahrheit und Kunst, Berlin 1911, p. 185 f. 11 Vitae X Oratorum 860 f. ff. = BGM 278.165 1f.; 290.844 ff, impicly in a part of Satyrus’ Life now lost : sce P, Oxy. 1170 fr. 39x. 117 P, Oxy, 2400 (rd C. A.D.) N.b. Euripides was evidently tried on a charge of 112 Cf, W. Kron, Studien zum Verständnts der römischen Literatur, p. 281 (for the 118 Sen. Suus. 7. Seneca tells us (Sues. 6,14) that this theme was derived from an inscription listing offerings by mythical figures at the temple of Athena at Lindos, see uttack on Cicero in Asinius Pollio's speech, Pro Lamia, now FGrilist 532); IR. Symn, Fraud and Imposture, Fondation Hardt: Entretiens XVIII, 19 Cf S, TrenkNER, Phe Greek Novella, Cambridge 1958, p. 182 ff. for arguments Vandauvres-Genöve 1972, p. 7 f. against the hypothesis that the romanco (a type of writing not unrelated to biography) 113 Vitue X Oratorum 8430 = BGM 277.145 ff. was derived from rhetorical oxercises, But n.b, controversia themes clearly underlic some 114 Homer's epitaph : I’s,-[dt. Life of Homer 216.615 f. Allon = BGM 19.497 f.; Hesiod’s epitaph : BGM 49.107 ff. of the stories in the Gesta Homanorum, ef. L. Annaei Senecac patris scripla quae nutnacrunt ed. H.J. Müller (1887, repr. Olms, Hildesheim 1969), p. vii-viii a. 1,

On the other hand. spurious letters can be seen to have been used by son of a man who made a success of forestry and bee-keeping 122, (Is it a the biographers. Diogenes Laertius includes in his Lives of various early coincidence that both Pindar and Baechylides are said to have been philosophers compositions in letter form, a letter supposed to have been related to athletes?) 124 A writer was also liable to be given bloodwritten by Thales to Vherecydes (I 43 f.), for example, and another ties with anyone at all famous who came from the same city : thus 256 257 (153 f.) from Pisistratus to Solon, which, to judge from their unsophis- Ibyeus of Rhegium was said by some, though not all, authorities to ticated expression, may have originated as school exercices. have been the son of Phytius, a Rhegian law-giver 125, Tt is not surprising, then, that family relationships between exponents of related IV types of writing were sometimes attested by the biographers where It is time now to consider some of the most common ways in which trived showing how Homer was descended from such figures as Orpheus, none are likely to have existed. Complicated genealogies were conthe biographers and their sources tended to stereotype literary history. Musaeus and Eumolpus 125, It was also commonly asserted that Homer We shall be looking at the artificial devices by means of which they and Hesiod! were related, though there was no unanimity as to the stressed affinities between the great writers, the chronological relationprecise relationship : generally they were thought of as cousins of some ships between them, and the place of each man in the development of kind 127, but a rival view was that Hesiod was the great-great uncle his chosen genre. so as to replace the complications of historical reality of ITomer !25, Homer and Hesiod were by no means the last in the line with a semblance of order. It may seem strange that traditions based of this remarkable family of bards, Some accounts made Kreophylus the on the more naive of these devices survived the centuries. We must son-in-law of Homer, and related that Homer presented him with a bear in mind the fact that the biographers’ source for many of the poem, The Capture of Oechalia, as a gift 129: in another story it is the forced associations we shall be considering was probably long-standing popular tradition, and also that there does not seem to have been much Cypria that he gives as his daughter's dowry, and Stasinus is the recipient 1%, Other tales made Stesichorus the son of Hesiod 131, and ofa demand for dry historical exactitude in any period of antiquity 129, Terpander the descendant of either Homer or [Hesiod 192, Lt would only be fair to say that ancient biographers quite often cast This delight in linking together great men in [amily trees obviously doubt on these associations. However, a certain excessive respect causes problems for the historian of ancient literature. for earlier authorities, combined with the desire to appear erudite, was knows of the phenomenon of the literary family, and it existed in usually sufficient to prevent them from going as far as to omit all antiquity : the example of the two Senecas and Lucan comes to mind; mention of an old tradition, however much they might doubt it 121, Literary affinities could be stressed by making out that two writers 123 Donatus, Life of Virgil init. 124 Pindar's twin brother: Hexameter poem quoted in Eustath, Prooem. 30 Drachwere actually kinsmen. Significant family relationships are something mann = we ought to be on the look-out for in ancient biography. We sometimes 106.38 ff. find assertions, for instance, that a writer was related to a person, or a member of some class of people, praised in his works : thus, Homer was sometimes said to be the son of Telemachus !22, and Virgil to be the Everyone BGM 94.18 ff. Bacchylides’ grandfather : Suda sv, 125 Suda s.v. "IBuxos = BGM 106.59 €. CL Tamblichus, de Baxyvhiôm = BGHM Vita Pythagorica 30.172. 126 Damastes FGrilist BIT = BGM 30.2 f.; Certamen $ 227.44 ff. Allen = BOM 36.43 ff; ‘Vroelus’, On Homer TIL 19 41. Severyns = BGM 25,17 ff, 127 Ephorus PGrifist 70F1 cited in Ps.-Plut Life of Homer 240.8 ff. Allen = BGH 21.7 ff.; ‘Proclus', On Homer ILL 19 ff. Severyna = BGM 25.17 ff. 120 Cf 1. Perer, Wahrheit und Kunst, passin; W. Sreyer, Die literarische Fälschung 138 Certamen B 227.51 ff, Allen = BGM 36.47 ff. im Altertum (Ldand buch der Altertumswissenschaft 12), München 1971; R. Syma, Fondation 129 Suda s.v. Kpedpudos = BGM 75,116 ff. Hardt: Entretiens XVII, q. 3 ff. 190 Pindar fr, 265 = Aelinn F.A, TX 15; Tzetzes Chil. 13.638. Stories of this type are 121 We rarcly find a criticism of tradition as scathing as “Proclus'” comment on the supposed relationship of Homer with Hesiod, BGM 26.45 ff, = roaoûror yap Anéxoua Tod yercı mpomjkeiv, door IV.50 ff. Sevoryns: moimms Ödornrev abriv. 122 Certamen B 220,23 ff., 227.39 f. Allen = BGM 34.22 ff., 35.37 f. probably to be regarded as attempts to explain alternative altributions of the poema in question, 131 BGM 48,80 ff. 192 Suda s.v. Tépravôpos = BGM 114.242 ff.

the complex network of evidence for the genealogy of Plato suggests that he actually was, as his biographers assert, related to Solon 133, though the relationship was not so close as some of them made out 131, How much trust, though, are we to put in the tradition that Simonides and Baechylides, both natives of Ceos, were uncle and nephew ? 185 Can we rely on the ancient assertions that Herodotus and the poet Panyassis, both of Ilalicarnassus, were related? 13% In this case there case of Ibycus, who, according to some people, was the son of a certain is a discrepancy over the precise relationship : according to one account they were cousins, the sons of two brothers, Polyarchus and Luxus; another version was that Panyassis was Herodotus’ uncle, the brother of his mother, Rhoio. In spite of this disagreement, the relationship is now generally regarded as fact, the assumption being that it was circumstances attend the lives of different exponents of the same genre, traced by reliable Halicarnassian local historians 137, However, one of salt fish 143, Horace, an imitator of Bion’s satirical manner. was also might expect agreement on the relationship, if this were the case. given a salt-food dealer as a father by some authorities, despite his Besides, according to one view current in antiquity, history was a genre closely related to poetry, proxima poctis, as Quintilian puts it 198, own testimony that his father was some kind of collector of money : 258 259 Polyzelus, a Messenian historian 1%, This association is so bizarre that the most natural explanation for it would seem to be that it resulted from textual corruption in one of the biographies 1%, It is certainly relevant to observe, though, that Choerilus, a later writer of historical epic. was said to be the beloved of Herodotus 142, Another feature to note in ancient biography is the way that similar and different members of the same philosophical school. Bion of Borysthenes, the celebrated writer of Cynic diatribes, was supposed to have said that his father had been a freedman who wiped his nose on his sleeve. Diogenes Laertius takes his to mean that he had been a seller «Q. Horatius Flaccus of Venusia had for a father, as he himself writes, a frecdman Panyassis was. furthermore, a writer of historical poetry : his poem Lonika was about the settlement of Ionia by the Greeks 132, It is surely not impossible that some uncritical historian, noticing that the two eminent Halicarnassians lived around the same time and wrote about in salted provisions, for a certain man in a quarrel taunted Horace, ‘How often have the same kind of subject, could have quite arbitrarily made them cousins, or uncle and nephew. It may not be relevant to compare the authors into the mould of their Greek predecessors were made allows who was a collector of money at auctions; but it is believed that he was a dealer 1 seen your father wiping his nose with his arm’ » 144, The certainty that attempts like this to cast the lives of Roman us to suspect similar processes in cases which are not quite so clear. We 133 CE H. Lersecane, art. Platon, RE 20 (1950), col. 2347; J.K. Davies, Athenian Propertied Families, Oxford 1971, p. 322 ff. can see, for example, one clear occasion when Donatus draws a parallel between Virgil and Ilomer : « Virgil never lacked detractors, which 124 Diegonca Laertius (UT 1) is probably stretching things when he maintains that is not strange, for neither did Homer» 145. This makes it possible to Dropides, Critias” grandfather, was the brother of Salon, cf, Plato, T'imneus 20e; the suggest that one reason why Donatus and other biographers of Virgil 146 biographers who make Plato a direct descendant of Solon (BGA 382.4 ff.; 388.16 f.; are so confident in grouping together and attributing to Virgil the 396.1 ff.) aro certainly over-simplifying the matter. 135 Strabo 486; Suda s.v. BaxyuAlôns = BGM 106.41. poems of the Appendix Vergiliana could be simply that there was what 138 Suda 8.v. ITarvacis = BOM 81.216 ff. 137 On the authority of FP. Jacony, art. Merodotos, RE Suppl. 2 (1913), col. 206 ff, 140 Suda s.v. "IBuxos = BGM 106.59 f, who diemisses earlier suggestions that this was a contrived significant relationship, 141 Polyzelus may have been really one of the authorities for Ibycus” parentage, But he gives too much weight (col. 207 f., col. 217 f.) to the hypothesis that Duris of and only by mistake have been put forward as a candidate for the position of Ibycus’ Samos mentioned Panyassis and Herodotus together as Samians, which rests on an father. emendation by Krausse of Suda s.v. ITaviaaıs init. which is far from certain. Even if Duris did say the two men were Samians, that hardly rules ont the possibility that eartier tradition made them out to be kinsmen because they were both known to be Halicarnassians. 138 Quint. X 1.31. 139 Suda s.v. Iaviacis = BGM 81.224 ff. cf. G.L. IuxLev, Greek Epic Poetry, London 1969, p. 186. 142 Suda s.v. Xorpidos = BGM 38.06 f. 143 D.L, JV 46, of. STUART, Epochs, p. 146 and noto; E, FRAENKEL, Horace, Oxford 1957, p. 6 f. 144 Vita Horati init., trans. J.C. Rolfe in Suetonius IT (Loeb). 145 Donatus, Vita Vergilii 43 transl. Rolfe. 148 For the text of a number of Lives see Vitae Vergilianae Antiquae, ed. C. Hardie (0.C.'T. 1960). On the Appendix, see especially Vita Donati 53 ff, Vita Servii 10 ff.

we may call an Appendix Homerica mentioned in the biographies of that a man could have consciously imitated a famous predecessor 1%, 260 261 Homer. A number of light-weight works, the Muargites, Kerkopes, Much ancient scholarship, some of it very painstaking, was devoted Battle of Frogs and Mice, Battle of the Starlings, the ITeptapaktike, to the establishing of the chronology of literary history. One approach Epikichlidui, and others, were ascribed to the young Homer 447; therewas to find out which authors were contemporaries of cach other, fore Rome's leading epic poet would have to be similarly equipped, and to present literary history in terms of clusters of writers. Such an whether any genuine juvenilia of his were extant or not. approach provided the student of literature with a useful approximate One fairly blatant instance where several members of a philosophical school are given a similar life history is the case of the Cynic moneylenders, In a book ascribed to Diogenes the Cynic there was an admisrelative chronology. We find traces of it in the biographies, in summaries like this one in Marcellinus' Life of Thucydides : «According to Praxiphanes, in his work On Jlistory, he was a contemporary ol sion by the philosopher that he had once adulterated the coinage Plato the comic poet, Agathon the tragedian, Nicoratus the cpic poct, Choerilus (D.L, VI 20). Diogenes’ biographers maintained either that he was the and Melanippides » 181, son of a dishonest banker or that he was himself responsible for the fraud, What truth there was in this story is uncertain. The credibility gap widens when we read that : « Monimus of Syracuse was a pupil of Diogenes; and, according to Sosicrates, he was in the servico of a certain Corinthian banker ...» (D.L. VI 82} 148, that Menippus, another Cynic, There were also efforts to tie literary history in with fixed points in political history 152, It has been noticed that we are told, for example, what each of the three canonical Greek tragedians was doing at the time of the battle of Salamis : that Aeschylus fought in it: that Sophocles, still a boy, took a leading part in the victory celebrations; that: it was then that Isuripides was born 15, These statements taken together present a guide to the chronology of tragic writing which is « Jeut out money by the day and got a nickname from doing so. For he used to make loans on bottomry and take security, thus accumulating a large fortune »(D.L. VI 99) immediately memorable. Whether one is prepared to believe that Kuripides was born on the island of Salamis in the very year of the and that Bion declared that his father, « who had cheated the revenue battle is another matter. The temptation to claim that near-simultanein some way, was sold with all his family» (D.L. IV 46). neous events were absolutely simultancous, and to elaborate legends It will be appropriate to add a caveat here. When one considers around a synchronism, was a very strong one. repetitions like these of similar occurrences in the Lives of different Chronological relationships between writers could be stressed hy an writers, one has to distinguish events which are necessarily accidental, account of a meeting hetween two leading representatives of the same things which nobody could choose to have happen to him (such as to genre, when one was well on his career and the other still young. We have a fishmonger father). from things which a man might choose read that Choerilus gained his enthusiasm for literature from listening deliberately to do, (such as to commit suicide by starving to death, as a to Herodotus 15, Thucydides, too, we are told, attended one of Herodolarge number of philosophers are said to have done) 149, In the case of tus’ readings : this second class of events, we have to take into account the possibility 150 Of course, that does not mean that all stories in this class are true, It should be 147 Ps.-1dt. Life of Homer 207.332 ff. Allen = BGM 12.319 ff.; ef. Pa.-Plut. 244.99 f. Allen = BOM 24.93 ff.; ‘Proclus’ On Homer V 76 f Severyns = BG AL 27.68 ff.; Suda noted, for instance, that in several cases ‘starving Lo death deliberately’ ia given as only one of several alternative death stories. sv. “Opnpos 258.43 ff. Allen = BGH 33.40 ff, Of. E. Frarnser, The Culex, JRS 42 151 Marcellinus, Life of Thucydides 29 Jones = BGM 192.148 ff. (1082), p. 1 ff. 152 Cf. H. Driers, Chronologische 148 Tranal. R.D. Hicks (Loob 1925). Untersuchungen über Apollodors Chronika, Rhein. Mus, NJ, 31 (1876), p. 13 ff. 149 Ky. Pythagoras {D.1. VIT 40); Aristarchus (Suda av. = ROM 361.71 ff); 153 Acschylus : lon of Chios FGrllist 392 V7; Life of Aeschylus 331.11f. Page (O.C.T. Fratosthenes (Suda ay. == BOM 368.215 ff); Zeno (Suda 8,v. = BOS 421.383 1); 1972) = BGM 127.19 ff.; Sophocles : Life of Sophocles Y Pearson = BGA 127,19 ff; Cleanthes (D.L. VII 176); Democritus (Ath. 460-f); Menedemus (D.L, II 143); Polemon Euripides : BGM 133.3, 139,2 ff, 141.5 ff. (Sada sv. == BGM 349.610), 154 Suda 8,v. Xocpllos = BOM 88.05 f.

263 « There is also a story to the effect that once, when Herodotus was giving a that he was the pupil of Isaeus 16, We may suspect that the truth publie reading of his //istories, Thucydides was present and wept on hearing him. in a number of cases was that the man in question was subject, in the They say that afterwards Herodotus, amazed at this, said to Olorus, Thucydides’ father, ‘Olorus, your son has a natural lust for learning’s 155, widest sense, to the influence of one or other of the two great masters, or merely that he had inclinations towards philosophy, or rhetoric. Similarly, Demosthenes is said to have heen known by Lysias, athough, In fairness, it should be said that we are probably dealing with a according to the chronology now accepted, he cannot have been more confusion of terminology here. Perhaps the scholar who had first called than four years old when Lysias died 156, One inight go a step further than this, and make the younger of a Demosthenes a pupil of Isocrates meant nothing more than that he belonged to the Isocratean tradition. (Isaeus was said to be a pupil of pair of famous men the pupil of the elder. Obviously. there must have Isoerates.) 164 After all, we find Sophocles described as the sole pupil been cases in antiquity where a famous man really did receive some of Homer, povev Logordéa tuyydvew ‘Ourpov abri» 15, and we instruction from the leading exponent of his art of the previous generado not write this statement off as a gross anachronism. Some ancient tion. One can imagine this happening often in the schools of rhetoric writers, then, might describe a man as the pupil of another without and philosophy. However, when one reads solemn assertions about meaning anything more than that he was an imitator of his. This could the master/pupil relationships between epic poets before Homer, one lead to confusion if other scholars took the master/pupil relationship realizes to what an extent ancient scholarship was beset with a desire literally. to pigeon-hole everyone into succession lists. We learn that Eumolpus Associated with statements that x was the pupil of y, we frequently was, according to some people, the pupil of Orpheus 157: that Orpheus find. in Greek biography. the aside, ‘whose beloved le is said to have was the pupil of Linus 148, and so it goes on. How seriously, then, are been’. We have seen that this was a type of statement that the critic we to take the assertion that Sophocles ‘studied tragedy under Acschyof the Socraties quoted by Athenacus objected to. Whether such lus’ 159? Is it any more reliable than the statement that Phrynichus was gossip is always to be thought of as malicious in intent is another the pupil of Thespis, the first tragedian? 1% Again, practically every matter. Clearly, invective is one possible source for it 14, However, writer of any importance in the 4th century B.C, was said by someone we do have to remember the strong evidence, from the popularity of or other to have been the pupil either of Plato or of Isocrates '9. In a «dAos names on Sth century pottery, for instance, and from the dialew instances the association of a man with one of these two great logues of Plato, that the love of men for youths was thought a permasters was doubted even in antiquity. Thus, one biographer writes fectly honorable thing in classical Greece, at least in some circles 167, of Aeschines : How long it was before this attitude died out completely it is dilficult «Some people say that he was a pupil of Plato and Socrates, but they are lying» 1%; and, although some people declared to say. and it is possible that it was shared by some of the writers who that Demosthenes had studied under Isocrates, the usual view was were responsible for what has been called the erastes-paidihka motif 168 155 Marcellinus, Life of Thucydides 54 Jones = BGM 198.328 fl. cf. Suda s.v. Oou«udidns = BEM 203.6 ff. 150 BGM 242.37 f.; 290.237 [. ef. K. Jex Brass. E. SELLERS, The Hider Pliny's Chapters on the History of Art, Introd. p. xvii for similar aneedotes in art history 167 Suda av. Edpodmos = BUM 72.53, 163 BGM 281.4 ff. 161 Ibid, Note also the disagreement as to whether Demosthenca was the pupil, or just Lhe emulator of Plato: BGA 281.6 ff. : EnAcón ... LTAdrava rdv diddcodpor, & rives elzov apoyyovpénws adrov ayoddcaz 165 Life of Sophocles 20 Pearson = BGM 96 f. This saying is ascribed in our text to 158 Suda a.v. Opdeds = HOM 78,160, one ‘Tonikos’, but Moineke has suggested that this name conceals that of Ion of Chios, 164 Life of Sophocles 4 Pearson = BGM 127.22. ef. FGrllist 392 1723. 150 Suda s.v. Ppúvios = BGM 153.88. 161 Plato : standard list of pupils, together with less widely accepted variants in D.J.. III 46. Isocrates : influence of school : BOM 246.30 ff.; lists of pupils : Ibid, 248.36 fF.; 250.01 ff. 162 BGM 260.33 £. 166 See BGM 255.50 f.; Ibid. 243.49 ff.; Donatus, Comm. in Terent. init.; cf. LE. Woopsury, Socrates and Archelaus, Phoenix 25 (1971), p. 299 ff. 187 CE TL.T. Marrov, A History of Education in Antiquity (transl. Lamb), New York 19043, chap. 3, p. 50 ff, 188 D,R, STUART, Kpuchs, p. 149.

in Greek biography. The biographers responsible may have derived BIOGRAPHIES OF ANCIENT WRITERS 265 where they cannot have known the truth. IL people wanted to know their information from a number of different types of source. They who invented the potter’s wheel, very well, they should have an answer : might have contemporary evidence : the biographical miscellany of it was Anacharsis; he also invented the anchor 177, There also seems lon of Chios was the source of an anecdote about Sophocles and a to have been a tendency in these writings to assign all the major beautiful youth 159, Then there were the writer's own works, As one innovations to the leading writers of each genre. It was rare for an might expect, the biographers had a field-day drawing inferences from ancient scholar to take into account the possibility that a minor the poems of Anacreon 1% and Pindar 17, Plato's name could, on the figure could have originated something important. For instance, basis of poems ascribed to him, be linked with Aster, Dion, Phaedrus, Alexis, and Agathon 1%, Biographers might choose to see hidden unknown man, significance is some of those declarations of friendship to which Laertius was that Zeno the Eleatic, a much more notable person, was ancient philosophers in particular were prone. Thus Satyrus, who made out that that Empedocles was the lover of the physician Pausanias, Aristotle had attributed the invention of the dialogue form to a virtually but the standard opinion in the time of Diogenes the inventor. Diogenes Laertius can even argue that Plato was in a sense its inventor : may have just been reading a lot into the fact that Mmpedoeles’ wept ducéws was adılressed to the physician 17%, Once again, though. we must ask ourselves whether the desire of ancient scholars to link a They say blint Zeno the Eleatic was the first to write dialogues. But, according to Pavorinus in his Memorabilia, Aristotle in the first book of his dialogue On Poets asserts that it was Alexamenus of Styra or ‘eos, In my opinion Plato, who brought great men together in significant relationships is all that prompted this form of writing to perfection, ought to be adjudged tho prize for its invention some of the associations. We have. once more, a tell-tale sign that this may be the case, in references to the relationships of pre-Homeric (edpyoews) as well as for its embellishment («dAAous)» 178. poets : Olympus, ‘a flute-player and composer of lytic and elegiac poetry’ was ‘the pupil and beloved of Marsyas, a Satyr by birth’. He lived ‘before the Trojan Wars’ 174, Gratuitous assertions of this kind make one wonder if some bright spark has simply worked through Diogenes’ willingness here to regard the man who first brought a form to perfection as practically its inventor. gives us a clue to an attitude which may underlie many ancient statements on inventors 179, Consider, for example, a statement by the elder Seneca about Asinius Pollio and the institution of publie recitation in Rome : the standard succession lists, spicing them up indiscriminately. Besides wishing to clarify the chronology of literary history, ancient scholars wished to set out systematically the stages in development of every art-form. Books on the history of each genre 175, and books on Pollio Asinius numquam admissa multitudine declamnvit, nec illi ambitio in studiis defuit; primus enim omnium Romanorum advocatis hominibus scripla sun recitavit (Contr. 4 Praef. 2). were available to the. biographers. Un- Evidence has been assembled to show that recitations were known in fortunately, it is quite clear that some of the scholars who compiled Rome before Pollio's time 1%, This need not mean that Seneca was an such works were not above fabricating recondite information in cases ignorant fool. Rather, one ancient view of artistic evolution allowed discoveries in general 278, one to regard the earliest person to exploit any device with resounding 189 Ath, 6030-604d = PGrHist 39210. success as the man who truly invented or introduced it. 170 Ath, 6400. Lacrtius, as we have seen, saw no clear distinetion between first and Wt Ibid, GOle-d. Diogenes foremost, and so it may have been with Seneca the Elder, 172 D,L, IIT 29 ff. 129 /bid, VILL 60 = FHG TI 163 fr. 12. 174 Suda 8.v. "OXuprros = BGM 110.41 ff; cf. Plut. Mur. 11330, 175 Vor an example of this type of work, see the wept «opwSlas in BOM 161-4, (Theophrastus had written a monograph with this title, D.L. 5.47.) 176 On this literature, sce K. Turarne, Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum Y, av. Erfinder 11; also Y. Lro, Griechisch-römische Biographie, p. 100; D,R, Stewart, Kpoehs, p. 172. 177 Suda 8.v. "Avéyapois = BOM 407.511. 178 D.L, 111 48 trans), licks; ef, Ath. 505h-0. 12% Cf. the discussion by D.R. Stuart (Epochs, p. 93 FE) of Tsocrates' claim thut his Evagoras was a new type of work, 180 À. Danzer, C. Asinius Pollio und the early history of public recitation at Rome, Hermathena 86 (Nov. 1956), p. 20 IT.

A more famous problem arising from an ancient assertion of priority, 267 each author is pretty firmly bound to him. This is to be expected, the question of who introduced the third actor in Greck tragedy, may when one considers that the Lives were largely composed by a process also be considered in the light of the Diogenes Laertius passage quoted of deduction from the writer's own works and from allusions to him above. It is well known that Aristotle, in the Poetics states that : by contemporaries. standard « The number of actors was first increased to two by Aeschylus, who curtailed the business of the chorus and made the dialogue, or spoken portion, take a leading part in the play. A third actor and scenery were duo to Sophocles», However, patterns of invention we have within already the observed biographers’ certain sources clichés of invective — allegations about disreputable origins, disgraceful morals, plagiarism, and so on, made over and over again by comic poets and orators; popularizing devices aimed to stress the relationships and that the last sentence here is problematic 181, Did Aristotle know for sure that Sophocles introduced the third actor and scenery and that Aeschylus did not use them, or at least not till after the younger tragedian? If this somewhat meagre account of the development of tragic production had been written by anyone but Aristotle, one would not have to hesitate before dismissing it as an instance of the pigeonholing approach to literary history : Aeschylus, the prime exploiter of the two actor system is its ‘inventor’; Sophocles, who used to the full the potential of three actors, as it were, ‘introduced’ them. We do between great men, used by historians of literature, One can imagine that the biographers would sometimes slide into using these same devices of invective and historical simplification on their own account. There are, in addition, many clear cases of simple transference of anecdotes in the Lives : we find certain wise or witty sayings and actions attributed to a variety of people. Diogenes Lacrtius has the endearing habit of being quite candid about the phenomenon, but continuing to record the same sayings and anecdotes in the Lives of different philosophers. From his Life of Thales we learn that : have to hesitate, though, before jumping to this conclusion. seeing that Aristotle knew more about the records of the Athenian dramatic festivals than anyone else, and can be seen to have adopted, in the case of the history of the philosophical dialogue, and also on the question of the origin of the encomium 18, an approach untypical of ancient scholarship towards ‘inventions’. a Hermippus in his Lives refers (dvapéper) to ‘Thales the story which is told by some of Socrates, namely, that he used to say there were three blessings for which he was grateful to Fortune : ‘first that | was horn a human being and not one of the brutes; next, that 1 was born a man and not a woman; thirdly, a Greek and not a barbarian’ » 189, Whole anecdotes may be transferred in the same way. A delightful V We have now looked at the main types of source available to the biographers : the works of the writer who is the subject of the Life, the writings of his contemporaries, and references to him by later scholars, and it is time to ask another question : how firmly were pieces of biographical data tied to the individual in whose Life they were originally found? That is to say : are there any occasions when we must think in terms of floating biographical topoi, of motifs which are freely transferable from one person’s Life to another? It appears that most of the biographical material clustered round 181 Arist. Poet. 1449 a 16 ff., transi. I. Bywater in Aristolle on the Art of Poetry, Oxford 1909; ef. discussion by B.M.W. Knox, Aeschylus and the third actor, AJl'h 93 (1972), p. 104 ff. 182 Arist. Rhet. [ 9.38, cf. D.R. Stuart, Epochs, p. 93 ff. story about the retort of a philosopher who keeps his independence by washing his own vegetables, to another who needs pupils or patronage, is told, with minor variations. of Diogenes the Cynic and Aristippus; Metrocles the Cynic and Theodorus; Diogenes again and Plato 184. Obviously this phenomenon of transference provides great opportunities for destructive criticism of the biographies. That is not to say that everything that recurs can be assumed to be untrue, We have to take into account. as we have already noted. the possibility that a man have imitated a famous predecessor. Thus Horace in his Ars Poetica imitates a saying about the properties of the whetstone which is ascribed to Isocrates in one of his Lives and to ‘a certain sophist' by a biographer of Pindar 18, Yet the saying can unquestionably be 183 D.4, I 33 transl. Hicks, 184 D.L. JT 68; TE 102; VI 58. 185 Hor. Ars Poet. 304 ff.; Ps.-Plut. Vitue X Oratorum 838e = BGM 251.115 ff. Eustath. Prooem. 31 Drachmann = BGAf 96.158 ff.

called Horace's own. To take another case : did Oppian’s patron really there was a counter-current of thought in antiquity which may be reward him, as his biographer declares, with a coin for every line of illustrated by some words from Huripides’ Electra : his poetry, remembering a similar reward said to have been given to «I have seen ere now a noble father’s son Choerilus, or is this story about Oppian a fiction formed by analogy with the earlier anecdote? 269 Proved nothing-worth, seen good sons of ill sires 0189, Both explanations seem about equally possible 186, Besides the transference of minor anecdotes, we find in the Lives certain wider recurring themes. For example, numerous Greek philosophers are said to have left their native land in their youth to visit the Egyptian priests, the Magi. or even the Gymnosophists of India. This idea evidently had a wide appeal. It was not without some reason that Valerius Maximus, and, doubtless others before him, provided anyone who wanted to muse on the nobility of the poor with lists of men qui humili loco nati clari evaserunt and qui a parentibus claris degeneraverunt 1%, Some of the biographers, then, may have presented Without wishing to deny that certain of the Greek philosphers may humble origins as something which made a man’s later achievements have been strongly influenced by oriental thought, one has to admit all the more glorious rather than as a blot on his career 1%, that these biographical notices about the philosophers’ Wanderjuhre are more confusing than informative, simply because there are far too many of them for us to believe them all factual 287. Similarly, people were su given to ascribing ascetic dicts to philosophers that it is now probably quite impossible to sift fact from fiction where the history of vegetarianism and temperance in antiquity is concerned 188, Assertions that a man was of humble birth are a common feature of the Lives of all sorts of men. They might, of course, be true, for everyone knows that men of genius do not necessarily come from high-born families; or, as we have seen, the statements might originate in malicious sources, We ought not, perhaps, to assume that the biographers always Amazing death stories are an even more common feature of the biographies !*2, In order to try to understand them it will perhaps be relevant to remember the old Greek adage that warned one to ‘call no man happy until he is dead’ 19%, and the expansion of this idea which we find in Herodotus’ account of the meeting of Croesus and Solon. (1 29 ff) One of the examples of an ideally happy life which Solon is supposed to have given to Croesus was the case of Cleobis and Biton. It is interesting to find that ‘happy’ deaths similar to the one that Gleobis and Biton are said to have been granted in answer to their mother’s prayer, are also to be found in the Lives of certain writers who were regarded by the biographers as particularly favoured by the shared the malice of their sources when they recorded their information. gods 19, Eustathius, in the preface to his commentary on Pindar, Against the aristocratic assumption that low birth was a bad thing, actually points out the similarity betwoen Pindar's death (which comes 186 Oppian's reward : BGM 64.15 ff.; 66.22 f.; Choerilus’ reward : Suda 8.v. Xorpidos = BGM 88.368 ff, 187 Eg. D.L. ] 27 (Thales visita Egyptian priests); I 89 (Cleobulus is acquainted with Egyptian philosophy); LEE 6. (Plato goes with Euripides (1) to Egypt aapa robs mpopiras) ; 189 Tur. Electra 369 5, transl. AS. Way (Loeb 1912). Aristotle (Hhet, I 7.32 £.) gives us some early examples of the theme : an epigram on an Olympic victor who had been a fish-porter, and the boasta of the self-made Iphierates, and of Phemius, the self-taught minstrel in the Odyssey. VILL 3 (Pythagoras visits Egypt, associates with Chaldaeans and Magi); VIIT 87 (Eudoxus 190 Val, Max. LIL 4 f. (Valerius Maximus! work provides, incidentally, the nearest visits Egypt); TX 34 f. (Democritus visita Egypt, Chaldacans, l'ersia, perhaps India and thing available to a systematic motif-index to Greco-Roman biographical writing.) Ethiopia); IX 61 (Pyrrho visits Indian gymnosophists and Magi.) CE G.S. Kinx - CE. Sen. Contr. 1 6.4. for the use of such exempla. J.E. Raven, The Presocratic l'hilosophers, Cambridge 1057, p. 77; M.l. West, Barly Oreck Philosophy and the Orient, Oxford 1971, p. 3. 188 Vegetarianism : Ath, 4180-419a, cf, D.L, 11 68; IL 102; VI 58, 94, 104; VILE 13; IX 3. Water drinking: Ath. 44b ff.; cf. D.L. VI 90, 104; VII 27, Cf M.L. West, op. ctt., p- 198 and n, 1. The standard view comic poets took of philosophers is concisely stated in some lines from Philemon's l’hilosophera quoted by Diogenes Laertius VII 27, in 101 Cf. K. Jox Brake - E. Seitens, The Hider Pliny's Chapters on the History of Art, Introd., p. xlix, but n.b. the interest in rags to riches stories was not confined to the Peripatetic school; rather, it was, and is, a commonplace of folk-tradition. 192 Cf. Cie. Brut. 421.; Val. Max. IX 12; A. Ronconi, Reallezikon für Antike u. Christeutum VI, 8.v. Ezitus illustrium virorum. 193 Hdt, I 132, ef. Soph. 0.C. 1226 f. Nicks’ translation : “Chis man adopts a new philosophy./He teaches to go hungry : yet 194 For the gods’ favour towards Pindar see BOM 91.43 ff, (Eustathius); towards lie gets/Disciples, One solu loaf of bread his food ;/His best dessert dried figs; water Sophocles : Life of Sophocles 12 Pearson = BM 129.44 ff.; towards Plato: D.L, 111 2,, his drink’. BOM 382.9 ff. (Olympiodorus).

within a year of the time when some worshippers of Zeus Ammon have prayed that he should enjoy the best thing that men can have) and the stories told of Cleobis and Biton, and of the founders of the Delphic shrine 1%, The manner of Pindar's death is also comparable : he dies, we learn elsewhere. in the gymnasium, while sleeping with his head in the lap of his beloved 1%, Similarly blessed deaths are recorded of Sophocles, who in one story dies of joy at a victory 1°7; Plato, who dies peacefully after a banquet at a festival 198; and two of the seven sages, Chilon and Bias 19°, Most of the death stories, however, can be said to reflect the darker side of the old proverb : it is rare for a man, however successful his life may have been, to meet with a happy end 2, Often, the death anecdotes contain a strong hint of the view that the punishment should fit the crime. Thus, Anacreon, that incorrigible writer of drinking-songs, dies as a result of choking on a grape-pip 291: Diogenes the Cynic dies from a dog-bite 22; Theophrastus dies from exhaustion after writing too many books 202! A particularly nasty end. tearing to pieces by dogs, was regarded as appropriate for those thought to have been contemptuous of orthodox religious beliefs 204, This brings us to a further, very important, point. We quite often find in the Lives stories for which there are close parallels in heroic mythology and romantic fiction. There are some good examples among the death stories. We have seen that the ‘happy death’ of Pindar had parallels in ancient legends. The ‘tearing to pieces by dogs’ stories told of Heraclitus, Euripides and Lucian 2 are comparable with the BIOGRAPHIES OF ANCIENT WRITERS 271 myth of the punishment of Actacon 29: there is a parallel for the story of Aeschylus, killed when a hird dropped a tortoise on his head, in fulfilment of an oracle : ovpavidv ce Bélos kurakreveï #7, in a legend about Odysseus, killed when a bird dropped a fish on his head 268, thereby proving Teiresias right in his prophesy in Odyssey 23.281 f. that his death would come from the sea. The long story about the murder of Hesiod 20° is full of the stuff of romance : Hesiod receives an oracle predicting that the place of his death will be Nepetov xaAAıuov dAcos ; he flees from the Peloponnese, thinking that the oracle referred to Nemea there, but there is no escaping destiny and he is murdered in a place called Aios Neueiou tepdv by the brothers of a girl they claim he has seduced; his body is thrown into the sea, but dolphins bring it to the shore and the murder is exposed; the murderers try to escape to Crete, but they meet a sticky end. struck by Zeus’ thunderbolt 220, or executed for murdering their guest 211, There are several themes in this legend for which it is not hard to think of parallels, not just in Greek mythology, but in the folk-lore of any nation : the futility of attempts to escape one’s destiny: the inevitability of punishment for wrong-doers; the helpfulness of animals towards favoured men. This is, for instance, not the only story in which we find helpful animals acting in favour of an ancient poet : Arion is rescued by a dolphin 213; cranes ensure that vengeance is taken on the murderers of Ihyeus #3, Observing this, Karl Lehrs was led to the conclusion, revolutionary in his time, that we are dealing here with a floating motif of the popular imagination 214, He saw these stories as the product 105 BAM 93.97 ff. 190 Val. Max. IX 12 ext. 7. Satyrus, Life of Euripides fr. 39xxi; BGM 197 Life of Sophocles 14 Pearson = BGM 130.69 ff. Suda a.v. Aouxıavds = BGM 345.408 ff. 198 Suda a.v. ITAdrwy = BOM 396.13. 199 D,L. I 72; I 84. 200 This gloomy reflection was borne out by the fall of Croesus (I 86) in Herodotus’ account. N.b. according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus (de Thuc. 5) Ocarpixal... neprnéretat were frequent in the works of the 5th century logographers. 201 Val. Max. IX 12 eat. 8. An identical story was told of Sophocles by Istros (FGrilist 334F37) and Neanthes (84F 18), Life of Sophoctes 14 = BGM 129.60 ff., but then Sophocles liked his wine too, if we can trust Ion of Chios 39214. 202 ]).L. VI 77; Suda s.v. Aioyérys = BOM 416.269. 203 Suda s.v. Oeóppaoros = BOM 425.478. 204 Cf. D.R. STUART, Epochs, p. 147; W. NESTLE, Griechische Studien, p. 685 f. 205 Heraclitus : D.L. IX 3-4: Suda s.v. "HpdxAeros = BGM 422.423 f.; Euripides : 135.46 ff; 110.34 ff; 141.18 ff. Lucian : 206 Stesichorus fr. 59 Page: Ovid Met. LIL 138 ff. 207 Life of Aeschylus 322.17 If. Vago = BGM 120.56 ff.; Val. Max. IX 12. ext. 2; Aelian, De Nat. An. VII 16. 208 Sext. Emp. Adv. Gramm. 267. 209 Certamen B 233,215 ff. Allen = BGA 41.214 ff. ef. Thuc. [11 96. Conv. Sept. Sap, 162d; BGM 48.88 ff.; 50.9 ff. 210 Certamen B 234.238 ff. Allen = BGM 42.37 ff. — Alcidamas' version. 211 Jhid, 240 ff. = BGM 42.39 ff. — Eratosthenes’ version. 212 See especially Hdt. I 24; Plut. Conv. Sept, Sap. 1G0d ff. 213 Anth. Pal. VII 745 = A.S.F. Gow - D.L. Vaan, Hellenistic Epigrams, Cambridge 1965, p. 17, xix; Plut. De Garr. 509 f; Suda s.v.“Ißuxos = BOM 106.66 ff. 214 Populäre Aufsätze, p. 385 IT.

273 There were stories that Homer was the son of Apollo and Kalliope, of a popular belief in the protection of poets by the gods. In addition, since his day an enormous amount of research has been done on popular the Muse; 21% or of the river Meles and Kritheis, a nymph 229; or of some legends, ancient and modern, and it has been shown that the motif of ‘helpful animals’ is found in the folk-lore of a great many lands 219, girl 22, Pythagoras was said to have been the son of Apollo 222, or In Lehrs’ time the standard approach to marvellous tales was to strip away, or rationalize, the miraculous elemeuts in them, and to try to find an underlying kernel of truth. This approach is far from having fallen into disuse since then, and not without some justification, for it is unquestionably true that some legends do arise from the aceretion of fanciful material around a real historical event. What Lehrs pointed out 21 was that not all need originate in this way. Certain types of story, taken from a common stock of folk-tradition which knows no national barriers, can become attached to any great man. divinity who danced with the Muses and Kritheis, in this case a mortal to have been in a previous incarnation Aethalides, the son of Hermes 23, More surprising is the fact that a legend of divine parentage came to be told of Plato, who lived in the full glare of 4th century publicity, either very soon after his death, or perhaps even within his life-time : « Speusippus in the work entitled Plato’s Funeral Feast, Clearchus in his Encomium on Plato, and Anaxilaides in his second book On Philosophers, tell us that there war a story at Athens that Ariston made violent love to Perictione, then in her bloom, and failed to win her; and that, when he ceased to offer violence, Apollo appeared to him in a dream, whereupon he left her unmolested until her child was born» (D.L. IH 2.). In the case of such legends it is a hopeless task to try to find any kernel of historical truth beneath the mérabilia. There may be none; or it Another account is rather more explieit about the part played hy may be that something the man in question said or wrote has been taken in an over-literal sense by his public, and so has given rise to Apollo : the story. Popular legend, throughout the Hellenistic period and right into the time of the Roman Empire, liked to surround the lives of men of genius with marvels 217, We find, for example. in the biographies, paoiv odv ore ddopa 'AmoMwmarov ouveyévero TH parpi duroû rH LI a ITepucrióvy Kai ev vunti pavev TO “Apiorwm ékéeuger alr@ ur La = = peyvivar ri ITepucrióny nexpı TOD xpóvov ris amoretews 2%, x - ” ~ There does not seem to be any sign that [lellenistic rationalizing critics did much to put this story out of circulation. Indeed, later reflections of the typical hero’s birth of folk-lore. which has been biographers seem to have lapped it up and to have taken pleasure in outlined in the following terms : adducing all kinds of weird and wonderful ‘proofs’ that Plato was « His birth is not like that of an ordinary mortal; there is often difficulty in having it legitimized. Gods frequently play a notable part in it ... The mother is a virgin, who is in some cases overpowered by a god, or has extra-marital relations with Apollonian 225, We find, for example, in one Life this delightful piece the hero’s father» 218, Apollonian 226, of reasoning : Plato lived to the age of eighty-one; 81 = 9%; there are nine Muses; the Muses are the attendants of Apollo; therefore Plato was Ancient de-mythologizers can be seen in action, though, in the case 215 Cf, A. Manx, Griechische Märchen von dankbaren Tieren, Stuttgart 1889; A. AARNE- 8, Thompson, The types of the Folktale (FF Communications 184), Helsinki 1964, p. 188 ff. 216 K. Lunas, Pupuläre Aufsätze 303; cf, Wid. SLaren, GRBS 12 (1971), p. 141 ff; LE, Woopnury, {lelen and the Palinode, Phoenix 21 (1967), p. 172 ff. 217 Of D.R. Stuart, Epochs, p. 145 f.; Authors Lines, passim; On Virgil Kelogue IV, Class. Phil, 16 (1921), p. 209 ff; R. Rerrzenstein, Hellenistische Wunderzählungen, Leipzig 1906. 218 J. pe Vrirs, Heroic Song and Heroic Legend (transl. Timmer), Oxford 1963, p. 210 £. N,b, certain military and political leaders in antiquity, as well as the great literary figures 219 Charax FGrilist 103 F62 cited in Suda a.v. “Ojenpos 260.3 Allen = BGM 31.2 f. 220 Vita 1V 245.2 Allen = BAM 27.2 f.; Suda 8.v. "Opnpos 266.1 Allen = 80M 31.1 F. 221 Ps.-Plut, Life of Homer 240,25 Allen = BGM 21.23 ff. citing ‘Aristotle in the third book of the Poetics’. 222 Tamblichus, de Vita Pythagorica 2.7, citing Mpimenides (FGrilist 45716) Euxodus and Xenocratos (fr. 22 Heinze). Other authorities actually identified Pythagoras with Apollo or one of the other gods, ibid. 6.30. mentioned hero, were said to be sons of goda : Alexander : Plut. Alex. 2.1 ff,; Scipio 222 D.L. VUI 4. Africanus : Gell, N.A. VI 1; citing C. Oppius and Julius Hyginus; Augustus : Suet. Ang. 94, citing Asclopiades of Mendes (FGrHist 61712). The Alexander legend was 224 Olympiodorus, Life of Plato = BGM 382.9 ff. elearly the model for the ather two. 225 E.g. BOM 389.44 ff. 226 Ibid. 395.210 ff. Cf. Philostr. Ap. of Tyana 4.

275 of the Homer and Pythagoras legends : Kritheis, the mother of Homer, the reason why it was not known where Empedocles was buried was is transformed into an unmatried mother who just happens to give birth to her son on the banks of the river Meles 227: Tamblichus, the simply that he had left Sicily 232, biographer of Pythagoras, cannot believe that the philosopher was the survival, never far below the surface, of very ancient beliefs in the close We see, then, in the biographies of pagan antiquity, evidence of the son of Apollo, but he can envisage him as in some sense the servant of relationship of men of genius with the gods. We also find rationalistic Apollo, sent by him to mankind 228, speculations designed to explain away supernatural elements in the Stories of the apotheosis of certain mystically-inclined philosophers also circulated, though in the extant Lives they tend to be swamped with hostile criticism. IIermippus. for instance, regarded the descent to Hades by which Pythagoras had convinced people he was divine, as an elaborate hoax. He declared that Pythagoras had merely spent a long time in an underground dwelling, and had been kept informed about news of the world above by means of letters from his mother (D.L. VIII 41). Then there was the case of Empedocles. As this philosopher had once written a poem which contained the claim : «I go about among you an immortal god, no more a mortal» 2%, it is not exactly surprising that a legend arose in which he was said to have transcended ordinary mortality. Heraclides Ponticus related that Empedocles was found to be missing the morning after a sacrifice : legends about great men, but the rationalists were rather prone to let their own mythopoeic instincts get the better of them, so that some of their explanations are just as fanciful as the stories they wished to discredit. Molo The ancient Lives of literary men, Greek and Roman, present a curious mixture of fact and fiction. They contain fact, because, by the process of drawing inferences from a man's works and the writings of his contemporaries, the biographers were hound often to arrive at the truth. The fiction is there because of a lack of good sense on the part of many biographers over the use of this deductive method; because of their assumption that history should fall into neat patterns: and «A search was made, and they questioned the servants, who said thar they because certain powerful motifs derived from folk-tradition, together did not know where he was, Therenpon, someone said that in the middle of the with vigorous story-telling instincts, remained very much alive in the night he heard an exceedingly loud voice calling Empedocles. Then he got up and minds of many people throughout antiquity, and found an outlet, beheld a light in the heavens and a glitter of lamps, but nothing else» 299, not only in the elaborating of myths about the gods and heroes, and in Other historians, however, heaped scepticism on the stories of the foundation of Empedocles' cult, relating what had really happened was that he had jumped into the crater of Actna, hoping that his followers, on not finding his body, would believe him immortal, but the invention of purely fictional romances, but in the weaving of legends around historical figures. Girton College, Cambridge that one of his shoes happened to be thrown out of the volcano, so that the fraud was exposed 23, Timaeus went further, arguing that 227 Ephorus FGrHist 70 FI = Ps.-Plut. Life of Homer 240.25 ff. Allen, BGM 21.7 ff. Va.-ldt, Life of Homer 193.3 ff. Allon = BGM 21.7 ff. For similar rationalising processes of, Hdt. £ 122 (2 versions of the infancy of Cyrus); Livy I 4 (2 versions of the birth ef Romulus and Remus.) 228 lambl. de Vita Pythagorica 2.8. 222 Emped. B 112.4f, Diels/Kranz = D.L. VIII 66. tranal. Hicka. 230 Heracleides fr. 83 Wehrli = D.L. VIII 68 transl. Hicka, For a similar tradition, gcc Vhilostr. Ap. of Tyana 8.30. 23 D.L, VIII 69 quoting Hippobotus. 22 D.L. VIII 71 = FGr/list 66616. Janet FAIRWEATHRR