Greek and Roman biography embraces much more than Plutarch, Suetonius and their lost Hellenistic antecedents. In this book Professor Hagg explores the whole range and diversity of ancient biography, from its Socratic beginnings to the Christian acquisition of the form in late antiquity. He shows how creative writers developed the lives of popular heroes like Homer, Aesop and Alexander and how the Christian gospels grew from bare sayings to full lives. In imperial Rome biography flourished in the works of Greek writers: Lucian's satire, Philostratus' full sophistic orchestration, Porphyry's intellectual portrait of Plotinus. Perhaps surprisingly, it is not political biography or the lives of poets that provide the main artery of ancient biography, but various kinds of philosophical, spiritual and ethical lives. Applying a consistent biographical reading to a representative set of surviving texts, this book opens up the manifold but often neglected art of biography in classical antiquity.

The two centuries between a.d. 250 and a.d. 450 witnessed the creation of a distinctive Christian Greek culture in the eastern part of the Roman empire. This book focuses on the transition from ancient to Christian Hellenism as it was expressed in the biographical and panegyric literature of the period. The essays show how literary genres focusing on individual lives help to reveal this historical process. The contributors are leading scholars who bring several disciplines to bear on these texts: they are historians, theologians, classicists, and historians of religion. Together, the collection presents much new research and helps show Late Antiquity not only as an important transitional period but also as an era with an identity of its own.
Among the figures the biographical texts bring to life are Antony the Great, the charismatic desert father, and Basil of Caesarea, the influential church politician. Collectively the essays go beyond discussion of particular texts to consider such general topics as strategies of rhetoric and representation, the place of classical Greek culture in both pagan and Christian education, and what is meant by philosophy as a way of life.
"Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity" will send readers back to many Late Antique texts with an enhanced appreciation of how these highly idiosyncratic works exhibit in concentrated form some of the most characteristic and widespread values, tensions, and literary strategies of their age.

This collection of studies is a sequel to Hagg's popular survey The Novel in Antiquity (1983), and a companion volume to his recent The Virgin and her Lover (with B. Utas, 2003). Parthenope offers an indexed version of his main contributions in the field, especially from the 1980s and 1990s, as well as previously unpublished work, a new introduction and a complete bibliography of the author. Apart from probing further into the literary world of Chariton, Xenophon, and Heliodoros, Hagg also widens the scope with studies on the Lives of Aesop and Apollonios of Tyana and on the oriental reception of the Greek novel.

Tracing the development of Greek romances from 200 B.C. through twelfth-century Byzantium, Tomas Hagg analyses the content, plot and narrative techniques of the ancient novel, and explores the social and literary milieu in which the genre flourished.