[MD] Biography as Literature

[X Acto]

John,
I wiki-ed "biography" and came up with some interesting words
about it.

"Ancient Greeks developed the biographical tradition which we have inherited, 
although until the 5th century AD, when the word 'biographia' first appears, 
in Damascius' Life of Isodorus, biographical pieces were called simply "lives" 
(βιοι: "bioi"). It is quite likely that the Greeks were drawing on a 
pre-existing eastern tradition; certainly Herodotus' Histories contains 
more detailed biographical information on Persian kings and subjects than 
on anyone else, implying he had a Persian source for it..

The earliest surviving pieces which we would identify as biographical are 
Isocrates' Life of Evagoras and Xenophon's Life of Agesilaos, both from the 
fifth century BC. Both identified themselves as encomia, or works of praise, 
and that biography was regarded as a discrete entity from historiography is 
evidenced by the fact that Xenophon treated King Agesilaos of Sparta twice 
in his works, once in the above-mentioned encomium and once in his Greek 
History; evidently the two genres were conceived as making different 
demands of authors who enrolled in them. Xenophon could present his 
Cyropaedia, an account of the childhood of the Persian King Cyrus the 
Great now regarded as so fabulous that it falls rather into a novelistic 
tradition than a biographical one, as a serious work, without any 
disclaimers or caveats.
Whereas Thucydides set the benchmark for a historiographical tradition 
comprising 'conclusions ... drawn from proofs quoted ... [which] may 
safely be relied upon' (Thuc. 1.21), and offering little explicit 
judgement on the people with whom he dealt, biographers were quite 
often more concerned with drawing a moral point from their 
investigations of their subjects. Parallel Lives by Plutarch, 
a Greek writing under the Roman empire, is a series of short 
biographies of eminent men, ancient and contemporary, arranged 
in pairs comprising one Greek, one Roman, in order that a broad 
educative point might be extracted from the comparison (for example 
Mark Antony and Demetrius were paradigms of tyranny, Lysander and 
Sulla examples of great men degenerating into blood-thirsty corruption).
However, although their moralizing approach is not in fashion in 
the current intellectual climate, Greek biographies still have 
much to offer the modern reader, and for the most part it is reasonable 
to assume that while authors may have suppressed details which did not 
fall in with the general theme which they wished to convey, they are
 unlikely to have fabricated much. Not least, they were instrumental 
in developing the modern idea of the person. The traditional Greek 
attitude to individuals was to 'reduce them to types'; the Peripatetic 
tradition records various categories into which men might fall: the 
flatterer, the superstitious man and so on. Greek rhetorical handbooks 
give advice on 'ethopoia', that is creating a character, one of a 
recognised type, to win favour in the law courts.
The biographical tradition does draw on these types, but it also gives 
explicit recognition to the importance of individual idiosyncrasies in 
defining a man, and places the emphasis firmly on a man's personality 
rather than merely listing his accomplishments."