After Ancient Biography: Modern Types and Classical Archetypes [1st ed.] 9783030351687, 9783030351694

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LIFE WRITING SERIES EDITORS: CLARE BRANT · MAX SAUNDERS

After Ancient Biography Modern Types and Classical Archetypes

Robert Fraser

Palgrave Studies in Life Writing Series Editors Clare Brant Department of English King’s College London London, UK Max Saunders Department of English King’s College London London, UK

This series features books that address key concepts and subjects, with an emphasis on new and emergent approaches. It offers specialist but accessible studies of contemporary and historical topics, with a focus on connecting life writing to themes with cross-disciplinary appeal. The series aims to be the place to go to for current and fresh research for scholars and students looking for clear and original discussion of specific subjects and forms; it is also a home for experimental approaches that take creative risks with potent materials. The term ‘Life Writing’ is taken broadly so as to reflect the academic, public and global reach of life writing, and to continue its democratic tradition. The series seeks contributions that address contexts beyond traditional territories – for instance, in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. It also aims to publish volumes addressing topics of general interest (such as food, drink, sport, gardening) with which life writing scholarship can engage in lively and original ways, as well as to further the political engagement of life writing especially in relation to human rights, migration, trauma and repression, sadly also persistently topical themes. The series looks for work that challenges and extends how life writing is understood and practised, especially in a world of rapidly changing digital media; that deepens and diversifies knowledge and perspectives on the subject, and which contributes to the intellectual excitement and the world relevance of life writing. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15200

Robert Fraser

After Ancient Biography Modern Types and Classical Archetypes

Robert Fraser Department of English and Creative Writing Open University Milton Keynes, UK

Palgrave Studies in Life Writing ISBN 978-3-030-35168-7    ISBN 978-3-030-35169-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35169-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration © ‘The Death of Marat’ by Jaques Louis David, World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo, Image ID: D98FKT This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Brigid Allen

Preface

Biography Ancient and Modern: The Shock of the Old In the concluding sentence of an incisive essay “on the interpretation of late antique biography”, published in 2006, the Plato scholar John Dillon remarks that, in addressing subjects as these, “we are involved in asking what the real purpose and justification of biography is even now”. His point is well taken. It is hard to contemplate an individual work of biography or the work of an individual biographer, ancient or modern, without broaching far-reaching questions about form, intention and what we now call “genre”. The Greeks had no term for biography as such, and when Plutarch, at the commencement of his thrilling Life of Alexander, wishes to tell us what he is about, he says simply “I am not writing history but lives”. His plural noun is bioi, and in deploying it Plutarch is conveying a strong conviction concerning what he is doing and what he is not doing. The statement implies a theory of classification, but it also implies a sense of momentum and direction. Having made it, he gets on with the task in hand. Biography may indeed be a genre, but biographers worth their salt do not proceed generically or not only generically. If, from the point of view of the scholar, biography is indeed a distinctive form, from the point of view of the biographer it is decidedly an activity, and the ways of tackling it are almost infinite. The readership for which this book is intended consists primarily of life-­ writers: that is of practitioners of life-writing such as myself and of students vii

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and scholars of life-writing. Bearing this fact in mind, I have not assumed a mastery on their part of any of the ancient tongues nor indeed any prior acquaintance with the various authors from antiquity whom I selectively discuss. This is not a history of biography in the ancient world; it is a book about craft and the reverberations of craft. More specifically, it is about the opportunities provided by ancient biography for writers and readers of later periods, including the modern era. Its central point, in the broadest of terms, is that ancient biography supplies narrative patterns for later writers. Those among my readers who are classically versed will have to forgive me if in its middle chapters I trawl across what may seem to them familiar ground: it will not always be familiar to many among my intended audience. That said, it is very clear that the reception of ancient biography among professional classicists represents one essential strand in the afterlife of these texts, and to it I have therefore devoted one long chapter (Chap. 2). The upshot of its argument is that, taking the long view, classicists and modernist have found themselves addressing the common and fundamental questions implicit in all life-writing, from a vantage point created by a shared cultural climate. For those who wish to delve further I have supplied bibliographies and suggestions for further reading at the end of every chapter, including a list of relevant classical authorities. In a long and thoughtful essay on the teaching of biography collected in his book The Long Pursuit, the self-styled “Romantic biographer” Richard Holmes introduces a suggestive and useful term. “Comparative biography” is what he calls it, and by it he implies two different processes. The first is a comparison between sequential biographies of the same person: a phenomenon that in a late chapter he applies to life studies of the poet John Keats, the subject of quite a few. The second is a comparison between ways of biographical writing prevalent in different ages (say, the neo-classical and the Romantic periods). The present work aims to be a contribution to the second of these exercises. Life-writing is now a capacious and growing subject endowed with many sub-specialisms and styles of approach, many voices and many ears. Increasingly there has been a move to see across these divisions and draw meaningful comparisons, including those between different “schools” or periods of biography. One advantage of concentrating on life-writing from times far prior to our own is that it opens the subject up along two complementary trajectories. That is, it opens up ancient biography by demonstrating just how far its problems, dilemmas and opportunities mirror those which later biographers have faced, and it opens up modern

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biography by exposing it to something one can only call “the shock of the old”. In this book the periods covered are sufficiently far apart as superficially almost to have lost sight of one another. The first stretches from the fifth century BCE to the second century CE and covers Graeco-Roman biography, the Christian gospels and early lives of the saints; the second covers the late eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth (and to a lesser extent twenty-first) centuries. The range is deliberate, since I am endeavouring to think outside the box. Throughout I have adopted the dual perspectives of an academic critic and an active author of lives: someone who wishes to conduct an argument, but also someone who wishes to tell a story. With an eye to a dramatic opening, the biographer in me has chosen for his narrative curtain raiser a gory assassination in Paris in 1791 so as to demonstrate how one particular passage in a classical author was able to incite political murder fifteen centuries after it was written. Then I lead through a documented discussion of issues raised by ancient life-writing for students of the classics to a sequence of chapters in which I introduce non-classicist readers to Plutarch, Suetonius, Procopius, the Christian evangelists and early writers of saints’ lives. The purpose of these chapters is to inform the non-­classicists among my readers who these writers were, when and where they lived, what they wrote, to what extent they can be thought of as biographers and what is the critical consensus concerning them. Having provided this necessary and varied background (which I need to do in some detail, for my reader’s sake), I then turn to the impact of ancient life-writing on nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century biography and, in the conclusion, on modern fiction and film. This structure is not entirely conventional, but it is deliberate. The historical scope involved in this exercise is a mite ambitious but it is necessary and, I hope, salutary. During the modern period (i.e., at least since the end of the First World War and the elegant coup de foudre of Lytton Strachey) we have somehow got used to a misleading and foreshortened view of the history of biography. A revealing expression of it may be found in Virginia Woolf’s essay “The Art of Biography” from her posthumously published collection The Death of A Moth (1942). “Biography”, Woolf claimed, “compared with the arts of poetry and fiction, is a young art. Interest in ourselves and in other people’s lives is a late development of the human mind. Not until the eighteenth century in England did that curiosity express itself in writing the lives of private

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people. Only in the nineteenth century was biography full grown and hugely prolific.” Wonderful author and critic though Woolf was, her very incisiveness could at times mislead her. Woolf’s generation—which was also the generation of Strachey—was convinced that it had discovered biography anew, an illusion similar to the one which causes generation after generation to believe that it has discovered sex. Her essay was left unrevised at her death; had she lived she might have toned down her generalisations about one of the oldest of literary arts. Curiosity about the twists and turns of individual nature is older than the Parthenon. It is the contention of the present book, moreover, that the history of biographical writing has been extended, continuous and self-referential. There exists a long-standing biographical tradition, though it is not customary to call it by that name. Biographers have for centuries learned from each other, echoed or else reacted against one another: exercised and received what in the consideration of other literary genres is commonly known as “influence”. Whichever way they approach their task, all biographers possess a common starting line. There exists a shared biographical question, or perhaps set of questions. How exactly does one relate the story of a given life— especially another’s life—with justice, candour, freshness and flair? In what order should a life be told? On whose evidence should one draw? Is “oral” evidence as reliable as written? For whom is one undertaking this task, and to what end? Should recorded lives serve as examples, either encouraging or cautionary, to others? To what extent, to render the life described more vivid or meaningful in the telling, is one entitled to tinker with the facts? What are facts in any case? What is truth, and what is falsehood? Should biography reflect all shades of society and opinion, all classes, professions, both (or now all) genders, all religious or political creeds, all types of behaviour? Should one aim to instruct, to amuse or to provoke? These are dilemmas that faced Plutarch and Suetonius in their time as surely as they faced Woolf in hers, and Holmes in his. The challenges involved in biography are perennial, and the answers, if not fixed and finite, are at least recognisably recurrent. If biography from diverse periods can profitably be compared, it is at least partly because its practitioners are all doing the same kind of thing, and facing the same array of problems. Though there are common challenges, there are and have been various solutions. In my survey of the ancient field I go so far as to suggest a four-­ fold paradigm: biography as representation (in Chap. 3); biography as censure (in Chap. 4); biography as persuasion (in Chap. 5) and biography

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as inner drama (in Chap. 6). I have chosen these four archetypes not only because they seem to me to exhaust the schools of ancient biography addressed but because they recur in later biography, sometimes in combination. Nowadays we seemingly live in an age of censure: as my account of nineteenth-century biography in Chap. 7 shows, it has not always been thus. The discussion of these problems has, it appears to me, very often been held back by unavailing short cuts. Questions of definition, of course, are inevitable. A recurrent bugbear, however, has been that those who concern themselves with these issues have too often started out with a ready-­ made rule of thumb, sometimes culled from a dictionary, which they have then attempted to apply lock stock and barrel to the particular biography or group of biographies in which they are interested. What they seem to be looking for is a set of rules which they can then apply to the text or texts in hand to see whether or not they comply. Yet, as Hermione Lee has emphatically demonstrated, while a number of rules are customarily adduced, the principal and overriding rule is that, in very many of the most interesting biographies—ancient or modern—all or most of these are broken. A far more constructive approach is to adjust the rules to the plenitude of examples available and to expand our definitions to suit them. Better to take a close look at the way in which classical or modern biographies, whether of men or women, soldiers, monarchs, saints or sinners, crooks and/or politicians, or of Jesus Christ, recount these lives, and to adjust our notions of biography accordingly. Age answers to age. Throughout ancient biography moments occur that take us aback with the appearance of what we might call modernity. One such occurs towards the end of an eight-volume life of Apollonius of Tyana, a neo-Pythagorean sage of the first century AD, written in the following century by Lucius Flavius Philostratus, one of the most versatile authors of the Hellenistic world. Apollonius is revisiting Rome several years after an earlier episode in which he niftily escaped the clutches of the emperor Nero. This time his opponent is the new emperor Domitian, an unscrupulous bully with a reputation for persecuting Christians amongst others. Domitian wants Apollonius out of the way, so arraigns him before the court on a trumped-up charge of wizardry. On the morning of the trial, Philostratus invites us to eavesdrop on the tetchy Emperor as he rustles through his papers in preparation for what he hopes will be a definitive and damning case:

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Let us now repair to the law court to listen to the sage pleading his cause, for it is already sunrise and the door is open to receive the celebrities. And the companions of the Emperor say that they have taken no food that day because, I imagine, he was so absorbed in examining the documents of the case. For they say that he was holding in his hand a roll of writing of some sort, sometimes reading it with anger, and sometimes more calmly. And we must needs figure him as one who was angry with the law for having invented such as thing as courts of justice.

Here is a sort of verisimilitude, a graphic fly-on-the-wall vividness we might associate with the cinema or with courtroom dramas on television or Netflix (“Cut to the courtroom; subdued hum of voices; judge evidently agitated and distressed”). The apparent familiarity of the scene of course tells us more about ourselves—our hunger for life in the raw, our resentment of authority, our appetite for legal conflict—than it does about Philostratus. Nonetheless, the seeming recognition of a flicker from everyday life demonstrates one of the many ways in which the biographical writings of the ancients appeal to us. Our response is part of the story. The passage quoted here is quite unlike anything else in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana. The use of the present tense, the invitation to the reader to pry into a semi-enclosed world of official procedure and then the turbulent mind of one of the chief actors mark it out as a departure from the chronological and dialectic modes in which the remainder of the narrative is couched. Philostratus is trying out a new trick. Biography involves a lot of preparatory sweat and toil, straining after elusive facts, but the end result is always an art form. Being art, it is experimental. All biographers, whether ancient or modern, take risks, involve themselves in acts of daring, but so do we when reading them. Biography is not a closed form nor does it succumb easily to definitions. This openness is something we associate with our more adventurous contemporaries, but it is equally a feature of antiquity. This is another reason why it is profitable to consider ancient and modern biography side by side. Charlbury, UK Good Friday, 2020

Robert Fraser

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to a number of former teachers whose interests lay across ancient and modern literature and who encouraged me early on to think about connections between the two. Prominent among these were Anthony Nuttall, a scholar equally at home with the Graeco-Roman classics, Shakespeare and twentieth-century writing, and David Daiches who wrote about the modern novel amongst many other things but who long ago had done his doctoral work at Balliol on the Bible, bringing to its study a rich knowledge of Hebrew, Latin and Greek. “A clerk ther was of Oxenford also”: Stephen Medcalf who features in my memory as the closest the mid-twentieth century could supply to a medieval friar. A few former colleagues from Cambridge and elsewhere gave me the benefit of their wisdom and learning. I have in mind Professor Adrian Poole who has published on connections between Greek and Shakespearean tragedy and the late Jeremy Maule, whose curious knowledge spanned the seventeenth century and Medieval Latin. More recently Dr Jeremy Paterson, archaeologist and ancient historian, and Georgios Terezakis, cicerone and church cantor, served as guides to Plutarch’s stomping grounds of Chaeronea and Delphi. My appreciation of biography as a calling and form was greatly enhanced by conversations with Jenny Uglow, Robert Crawford, Michael Holroyd and Zachary Leader. I should like to thank Palgrave Macmillan’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions, Clare Brand and Max Saunders, editors of the Life-Writing Series, for their understanding and imagination and the firm’s in-house editors, especially Lina Aboujieb and Rebecca Hinsley, for their patience and forbearance. I hereby salute my son Benjo Fraser and Ms Maria and Ms Sophia Thanasi for showing me xiii

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what the Greek classics may mean to a younger generation, and to the Thanasi family in general for their hospitality in Albania and Athens. The staff of the London Library, the British Library and the Bodleian Library were unfailingly courteous and helpful. The finishing touches were put to this book during the coronavirus emergency of 2020, when all of these facilities had to close their doors. Under these trying circumstances I was much obliged to the London Library for posting volumes out to me. I also learned to appreciate the excellent services of AbeBooks, the resources of which appeared to be inexhaustible. I owe an immense debt, both emotional and stylistic, to the book’s dedicatee, biographer as it happens of Pausanias’s most fetching twentieth-century translator. All of these people and institutions have helped me along the way. Any faults that remain are my responsibility alone.

Contents

1 Paris in Parallel: Classical Biography in an Age of Revolution  1 2 Ancient Biographers and Modern Classicists: “What Is Truth?” 37 3 Biography as Representation: Plutarch’s Parallel Lives 73 4 Biography as Censure: Suetonius and Procopius 99 5 Biography as Persuasion: The Christian Gospels129 6 Biography as Inner Drama: Athanasius’s Life of Antony163 7 Heroic Biography: Carlyle & Co189 8 Caustic Biography: Strachey & Co.221 9 Conclusion: “Beauty Is Terror”255 Index265

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CHAPTER 1

Paris in Parallel: Classical Biography in an Age of Revolution

Who does not know David’s painting of Marat in the bath? Done from the life—or rather from the death—it depicts the prolific author, one-time physician (MD, St Andrews) and now revolutionary journalist and self-­ styled “friend of the people” just a few hours after his assassination by the twenty-four-year-old Charlotte Corday in July 1793. Marat is lying on his side, a towel around his head, a quill in his dangling right hand. (Marat’s works included a Treatise on Light, An Essay on Slavery, and a helpful work on the treatment of gonorrhoea.) Before him is an improvised desk, a cloth-covered board on which he wrote while steeping himself in a medicinal salve of his own concoction. As a qualified and somewhat opinionated doctor he had decided that the skin complaint contracted in the sewers of Paris while hiding from his political opponents necessitated these ablutions for much of the day. In his left hand he holds a letter of introduction that Corday had brought under the pretext of exposing the enemies of the government. His face is so serene that he might be sleeping. There is more than a touch of the Christ from Michelangelo’s Pietà about him. His skin is smooth and white: no sign of the ravages of skin disease there. The light source is high up to his left and, again, it seems a sort of celestial beam. Here is a fit object for veneration as much as for lament: a martyr to the French Revolution then a mere four years old. A revolutionary icon, no less. What are the messages implicit in this image? Since, depend on it, Jacques-Louis David, an associate of Robespierre and a vocal member of © The Author(s) 2020 R. Fraser, After Ancient Biography, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35169-4_1

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the Jacobin Club, intended his work to be didactic, and thus—despite earlier misgivings about this eccentric intellectual entertained by the Jacobin leadership—was it immediately received. That Marat died unjustly, certainly. That he was a thinker, a scholar, a hero probably, a martyr certainly, maybe even a secular saint. But it is the sculptural, clean-limned, neo-classical style of the picture that commands attention just as surely as its subject. Nineteen years earlier, David, then a student at the Académie royale, had won the academy’s coveted Prix de Rome with a depiction of a scene from Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius: “Eristratus Discovering the Causes of Antiochus’ Disease”. (Antiochus was in love with his mother-in-­ law, who had already borne him a child.) It had been David’s fourth attempt, having failed a third time the previous year with an equally lurid scene from Suetonius’s “Life of the Emperor Nero”: the suicide of the philosopher Seneca (also featuring a bath, but this time a foot-bath). The authorities at the Académie, naturally, chose the subject prescribed each year. Since 1775, when Louis XV1 had appointed Charles-Claude Flahaut de la Billaderie, Comte d’Angeviller as the new director with the instruction to found a new school of historical painting, preference had been given to classical themes.1 In David’s case, this had often involved hunting for suitable sources in ancient biography. His eventual victory would far from exhaust his preoccupation the classics. After spending four years in Rome, he had painted a succession of episodes from Graeco-Roman literature. “The Oath of the Horatii” of 1784 drew on a scene from Livy; “The Dedication of the Eagles” copied images that the young David had observed on Trajan’s Column in the Forum. “The Death of Socrates” in 1787 derived its story from Plato, while in 1789, the year of the outbreak of the Revolution, “The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons” had extended a dramatic episode from the life of a founder of the Roman republic who features both in Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita and in Plutarch’s “Life of Poplicola”. In 1730 Voltaire had written a play about this particular Brutus, Lucius Junius Brutus, a remote ancestor of the more famous Marcus Brutus, the assassin of Julius Caesar. When revived in 1790, it gave rise to a fanatical wave of Republican enthusiasm and even a hairdo, la coiffure Brutus, copied from the curly crop sported by the actor who had played one of the fated sons. When in June 1820 an aspiring young painter asked the mature David how to choose a subject for a new canvas, the 1  Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knoft, 1989), 171.

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veteran master replied in three words “Feuillez votre Plutarque”: “Browse through your Plutarch”.2 Understandably so, since it had been the lives of those designated, in Bishop Amyot’s sixteenth-century French translation of Plutarch, “hommes illustres Grecs et Romains” which had provided the most dependable source for his paintings.3 Which brings us back again to Marat and his young murderess Charlotte Corday. Marie-Anne Charlotte Corday d’Armont had been born in 1768 in the village of Saint-Saturnin-des-Limoges in the commune of Écorches near Caen in Normandy. Her people were decayed gentry, royalist in sympathy, who had seen better days. The playwright Pierre Corneille (1606–1684), as she was only too aware, was a remote ancestor. He had drawn several of his plots from classical sources, frequently highlighting the dynamic role of his women characters. His first tragedy to be staged, Medéé (1635), had taken its story from Euripides, and it had stressed Medea’s plight and decisiveness. The storyline of La Mort de Pompeé (1642) showcased the would-be assassin Cornelia: it was derived from Plutarch, who had depicted her as a geometer, philosopher and expert player on the lyre. The plot of Oedipe, the Sun King’s favourite among his works, came from Sophocles. One of his last plays Tite et Bérénice (1670) drew on the Lives of the Twelve Caesars by Suetonius and vividly evoked the desolation of Berenice, the Jewish queen, who was banished from Rome by the Emperor to placate the xenophobia of the populace.4 So Corday had grown up beneath an ample shade of literature, much of it ancient and biographical, which she was disposed to read in a proto-­ feminist light. She had extended this debt to the classics in early adolescence. After her mother and elder sister died, her grief-stricken father had sent her to the convent of L’Abbaye des Dames in Caen, in the library of which she discovered works by Voltaire, Rousseau and Plutarch. Rousseau, as she would have read in his Confessions, had enjoyed an enthusiasm for Plutarch’s Lives as a young man.5 Since there is no evidence that she had been taught Greek, Corday must have read them in the sixteenth-century translation by Bishop Jacques Amyot, rendered from a manuscript in the Vatican. It was an internationally famous version on which even the 2  Anita Brookner, Jacques-Louis David (London: Chatto and Windus, 1980), 182 and passim. 3  See footnote 19 below. 4  Pierre Corneille, Théâtre Complet texte prefacé et annoté par Pierre Lièvre; edition complétée par Roger Caillois (Paris: Gallimard, 1957). 5  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions (Paris: Flammarion, 1958), i, 47.

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Englishman Sir Thomas North had relied for his translation of 1579–1603. (North knew no more Greek than did Shakespeare who, consequently, had taken all of his Plutarch-derived plots from him.) Corday had been twenty-one, and still at L’Abbaye des Dames, when the Revolution erupted. Two years afterwards, she left the Convent and lodged with her aunt and cousin in the centre of the town, where she imbibed a local, and distinctively provincial, view of national politics. She had never been to Paris, where the revolution was fast adopting a more extreme course.6 The local newspaper covered the whirlpooling events: the Tennis Court Oath, the calling of the Estates-General, the splitting of the Third Estate into factions. Notably among the cliques was La Montagne (The Mountain, thus named since they sat at a high bench) including the vocal Jacobin Club which championed the cause of the urban proletariat and insisted on the guillotining of the King. Against them were ranged the Girondins, provincial based, who counselled less desperate measures. Charlotte was strongly influenced by the Girondins, who were very active in Caen. Her aunt’s house where she now lodged overlooked l’intendance, their headquarters in town, and she had met some of their ring-leaders, notably Charles Jean-Marie Barbaroux. She was just twenty-two when news arrived of the execution of the King and Queen in the newly renamed Place de la Révolution, previously la Place Louis XV, now and ironically La Place de la Concorde. Though Charlotte had grown up in a royalist family, she now regarded herself as firmly republican. The Girondins offered a middle way, epitomised for her by the wife of one of their leaders, Madame de Roland, born Manon Philipion7 whose political education, like Corday’s, had owed much to Plutarch. At the age of nine she had carried a copy of his works to Mass each Sunday, and later wrote “It was at that moment that I date the impression of ideas that were to make me a republican”.8 Both women were very conscious that the balance of power in the Convention in Paris was shifting in favour of Les Montagnards. Robespierre was their ring-leader, Marat their mouthpiece: his newspaper L’Ami du Peuple was easily to be acquired in the streets of Caen. 6  Michel Corday, Charlotte Corday tr. E.  F. Buckley (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1931), 103. 7  Chantal Thomas, “Les exemples de Charlotte Corday et de Madame Roland”, Po&Sie 49 (Bicentenaire de, 1789), 1989, 82–91. 8  Madame Roland, Lettres ed. Claude Perroud (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1802), 512.

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The climax to the story is related by Jean Epois in his L’Affaire Corday/ Marat: Prélude à la Terreur.9 In the second week of July 1793 Corday told her widowed father that she was going to pay a visit to England. Instead, on Tuesday 9th, her cousin saw her off on the Paris diligence. As she entered the carriage she held a copy—presumably an octavo, one-volume edition—of the Amyot Plutarch to allay the tedium of the two-day journey. At five o’ clock on the afternoon of the 11th she alighted in the capital. Then she and her Plutarch checked in at the Hôtel de Providence in the Rue des Augustins, where she slept for fifteen solid hours. On Friday morning she composed an Address to the French People, arguing that she was acting in the interests of Res Publica, the Public Thing, la République. She spent the rest of the day, in the words of Jules Michelet, “quietly reading that Bible to personal fortitude, Plutarch’s Lives”.10 The following morning she purchased a 5 inch kitchen knife from a shop near the Palais Royal. She had intended to confront the Friend of the People at the National Assembly. Instead, learning that his skin complaint nowadays confined him to his home in the Cordeliers neighbourhood, she presented herself at his house, only to be turned away by Marat’s sister-in-law, Cathérine. That evening, having sent another note pleading her pure, revolutionary intentions, she turned up again at the flat, whereupon Marat called out that she should be admitted. She handed over to him a list of Girondin contacts in Caen. Marat promised her that these people would promptly be guillotined. Then she drew the knife from her dress and struck him through the chest. She knew what her punishment would be. The following day she wrote to Barbaroux from the Abbaye prison, stating “Those who disapprove of my actions will be pleased to see me at rest in the Elysian Fields with Brutus and some few of the ancients”.11 Did she mean Brutus the founder of the Roman republic or his notorious descendant, the assassin? Both were Republic icons. In front of the tribunal she defended her actions, re-­ iterating her apologia from her Address, arguing that she had acted in the 9  Jean Epois, L’Affaire Corday-Marat: Prelude à la Terreur (Paris: FeniXX réédition numérique, 1980), passim. 10  Jules Michelet, Les Femmes de la Révolution (Paris: Editions Adolphe Delahays, 1854), Chap. 8. 11  Letter headed “Charlotte Corday à Barbaroux. Aux prisons de l’Abbaye dans la ci-devant chambre de Brissot, le second jour de la préparation de la paix, quoted in Couet-Gironville, Charlotte Corday. Décapitée A Paris, Le 17 Juillet 1793 ou Mémoire Pour Servir à l’Histoire de la Vie de Cette Femme Célèbre (Paris: chez le Citoyen Gilbert, 1796), 140.

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interests of the Republic, which she hoped to save from the extremes of bitter men. She was Marcus Brutus, risen against an impish, pock-­ marked Caesar. Corday was guillotined on July 17 and ever since has divided opinion. When the tide turned against the Enlightenment during the nineteenth century, the poet Lamartine dubbed her “l’ange de l’assassinat”, the angel of assassination. She became a sort of counter-revolutionary Jeanne d’Arc. In the post-modern twentieth century, her intervention was surrealistically and gruesomely staged in Peter Weiss’s morbid Marat/Sade play in which Danton’s murder was re-enacted by the inmates of a lunatic asylum under the direction of The Marquis de Sade. Filmed under the direction of Peter Brook, it was the perfect illustration of the principles of Theatre of Cruelty as further explained in Brook’s book The Empty Space. The result however told one more about the disturbed mind of central Europe in the post-war period than about the French Revolution, the versatile and afflicted Marat, the determined and clear-sighted Corday, or indeed the libertine and masturbatory Marquis. The prevailing impression conveyed by Charlotte Corday’s behaviour at the time remains one of resignation and calm deliberation. She was very conscious of what she was doing and fully prepared to face the consequences. In the hours before the tumbril arrived to take her to her place of execution, she caused her portrait to be painted, demure and serious beneath her lace cap. Hers was an existential choice made with neo-classical determination and grace (at least, as she perceived these qualities). Her experience had prepared her for this sacrifice. But so, it should be emphasised, had her reading of ancient lives.

The Last of the Romans Revolutionary assassination was one public parallel to be derived from reading of classical biography; a second was a political model of democracy copied from the Romans, a third was paganism, a fourth was revolutionary suicide. A fifth, eventually, was to be their seeming opposite: counter-revolution. Paganism was a side-effect of the de-Christianisation, and more specifically de-catholicisation, which the Revolution required in order to purge itself of the remnants of royal and ecclesiastical control. Its prime progenitor and hit-man was Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, the twenty-eight-year-old President of the Commune and a leading opponent of the Girondins, who had changed his apostolic first name to Anaxagoras after the pre-Socratic

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philosopher whose views are set out in Plutarch’s Life of Pericles. Richard Cobb has outlined the effects of the consequent secularisation, which invariably took the form of a substitution of classical, mostly Roman, stereotypes for traditional Catholic forms: In May 1793 the Commune stopped the payment of clerical salaries and publicly tried to prevent the public exercise of Catholicism. It closed the churches in Paris and forced over 400 priests to abdicate. Chaumette demanded that the former metropolitan church of Notre-Dame be re-­ consecrated to the cult of Reason. The Convention hastened to comply and on 10 November a civic festival was held in the temple, its façade bearing the words “To Philosophy”.12

One result of this alienation from—and obliteration of—every vestige of l’ancien régime was the institution late in 1793 of the Republican Calendar. It was devised by a committee of three headed by the mathematician Charles-Gilbert Romme, who presented their findings to the Committee of Public Instruction that September. With the help of the head gardener from the Jardin des Plantes, the months were renamed along botanical and meteorological lines, and each month was divided into three weeks of ten days each. The traditional saints’ days gave way before commemorations of great men of the past. December 25 became a feast for Newton. This was the high tide of Jacobinism. By late 1794 the Jacobins were in retreat. Marat’s body was disinterred from the Panthéon—where it had replaced Mirabeau’s—dragged through the streets and chucked into a common grave. On 29 Priarial of the sixth year of the Revolution (June 17, 1795, according to the old calendar), Romme and two comrade Jacobins, Pierre-Amable Soubrany and Jean-Marie Goujon, were arraigned on the orders of the Diréctoire. Condemned to the guillotine by a revolutionary tribunal, the “last of the Montagnards” as they became known elected instead to take their own lives on their way out of the courtroom. With Victorian distaste, Thomas Carlyle later described the scene in The French Revolution: A History: “Hearing the sentence, Goujon drew a knife, struck it into his breast, passed it to his neighbour Romme; and fell dead. Romme did the like; and another all-but did it: Roman dead rushing on there, as in an electric chain, before your Bailiffs could intervene! The 12  Richard Cobb et al. The French Revolution: Voices from a momentous epoch 1789–1795 (London: Guild Publishing, 1988), 202.

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Guillotine had the rest.” “They”, concludes Carlyle, “were Ultimi Romanorum”, the last of the Romans.13 Suicide had long been a talking point for the Enlightenment. There were plenty of exempla in classical life-writing, especially in Plutarch’s Lives. Marcus Brutus and Marcus Antonius, sworn enemies to one another, had both fallen on their swords. The Church had anathemised the practice so, partly for this reason, it had become fashionable action for intellectual freethinkers to defend it. In 1777, in Edinburgh, that “Athens of the North”, David Hume wrote an essay “Of Suicide” that remains in manuscript since its publication was suppressed.14 His argument is simple, and apparently derived from Christian, or more strictly Deistic, principles. All occurrences are governed by divine law; suicide is an occurrence, and therefore it too is divinely ordained. The cosmos is Lucretian and indifferent; it does not care. It follows that “the life of man is of no greater importance to the universe that that of an oyster”. It appears to have been a matter of no account to Hume that the same argument might be used to exonerate murder. The philosopher Montesquieu, a few decades previously, had long wrestled with this dilemma. In his Lettres persanes (1721) he had imagined a flow of correspondence from two oriental visitors to the Paris of Louis XV1. Writing to associates back in Isphahan, they report on the oddities of western Christian society, among which is an entrenched prejudice against self-destruction. In Letter 76, Usbek, who is writing to his friend Ibben, inveighs against this prejudice, represented by him as a tyrannical imposition on free will: “It appears to me today … that these statutes are quite unfair. When weighed down with pain, misery or misunderstanding, why do they stop me putting an end to my misfortunes and cruelly rob me of a remedy that lies in my own hands.”15 As if to illustrate the point, the work ends with the mass suicide, back in Isphahan, of most of the harem. In his Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734) Montesquieu considers the frequency of suicide in ancient Rome, drawing extensively on Plutarch, specifically the deaths of 13  Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History [1837] (Oxford University Press, 1907), ii, 440. In Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, V. iii, the “last of the Romans” are Cassius and Licinius, and the words in English are spoken by Marcus Brutus. In the singular, the Latin phrase had been applied by Julius Caesar to Brutus himself. 14  David Hume, “Of Suicide”, National Library of Scotland Ms. 509. 15  Montesquieu, Oeuvres de Montesquieu avec Les Remarques des Divers Commentateurs et Les Notes Inédites. Seul Edition Complète (Paris: D’Antoine Bavaux, 1825), 517.

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Brutus and Cato. “Several causes may be adduced for so general a custom among the Romans as this of administering one’s own death”, he remarks, “the progress of Stoicism which encouraged it; the institution of triumphs and slavery, which made a number of great men reluctant to survive a defeat; the advantage gained by those accused through disposing of their own lives rather than submitting to an indictment that would sully their reputation and cause their property to be seized; a subtle point of honour, arguably more reasonable than that which prompts us to eviscerate a friend for a mere gesture or word; lastly a grand pretext enabling each person to complete the role he had played on the world’s stage, each man putting an end to the part he played when and just as he chose”.16 In De l’esprit des lois (1750), he remarks cryptically that, in contrast to the English, who often seemed to top themselves irrationally, the Romans invariably possessed clear-sighted reasons why they thought it appropriate to take their own lives.17 Suicide then was a socially conditioned act which changed its complexion from one culture to another and between historical periods. Montesquieu remains an outstanding early example of a cultural relativist. By the 1790s, half a century later, when society and its laws were in a state of dangerous flux, the way lay open for parallels with ancient Rome, on which so much, aesthetically and politically, was now being modelled. Brutus and Cato, it could be argued, had destroyed themselves in reaction against the erosion of the Republic and the growing threat of despotism. As in Paris the revolution grew more and more extreme, seemingly eating its own children, eventually giving itself over to the control of a supremely gifted tyrant, analogies with a Rome confronted with the menace of the Caesars became increasingly uncomfortable and compelling. Romme’s last recorded words, before he plunged in the knife, were “I die for the Republic”.18

 Montesquieu (1825), 419.  Montesquieu (1825), 370. 18  Jules Claretie, Les Derniers Montagnards: Histoire de l’Insurrection de Prairial An III D’Après les Documents Originaux et Inédits (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1865). See also Marc de Vissac, Un Conventionnel du Puy-de-Dôme: Romme le Montagnard (ClermondFerrand: Dilhan-Vivès, 1883) and Gilbert Romme (1750–1795) et son temps Jean Ehrard and Albert Sobeul eds. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966). 16 17

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Plutarch as a Textbook for Life Taking one’s personal bearing from the writers of ancient lives was already an established habit in France. In Biography and the Question of Literature in France (2007), Ann Jefferson alludes to the “pragmatics” of biography, the convention in accordance which early modern readers turned to authors like Plutarch for models as to how to behave. These Greek and Roman lives were held to be exemplary, fit objects for imitation. In support of this view Jefferson quotes Jacques Amyot, Bishop of Auxerre (1513–1593), who had set out his purpose in rendering Plutarch into French in the Preface to the first edition of his translation, published between 1554 and 1560.19 Plutarch’s lives are worth perusing for a variety of readers, Amyot had declared, but principally “because [examples] do not only declare what it to be done but also worke a desire to do it, as well in respect of a certain natural inclination which all men have to follow examples, as also for the beautie of virtue, which is of such power, that wheresoever she is seene, she maketh herself to be loved and liked”.20 Two years later, much the same argument was voiced by Cruserius in his Latin translation of 1561. As Jefferson insists, this repeated claim for the beneficial potential of reading the ancient lives was in conformity with what Plutarch himself had twice stated to be his objective: once in his life of Pericles and once in the life of Aemilius. Both of whom, one might add, are distinguished in his accounts by their almost total lack of personal blemish. So persuasive a view is this that it can blind the modern reader to just how odd, over-determined and in some ways lopsided, a view of the whole run of Plutarch’s Lives it actually represents. There are fifty lives in all, and many of them are far from exemplary or blameless. These mini-­biographies are not self-sufficient entities but paired—one Roman against one Greek. What unites or divides the pairs is just as often the weakness or vices of the individuals concerned as their strengths. Coriolanus and Alcibiades, for example, are combined because, misled by public admiration, they each betrayed their country. Demetrius and Anthony “were insolent in prosperity, and abandoned themselves to luxurious enjoyments”. Phocion and 19  Plutarque de Charonée, Les vies des hommes illustres Grecs et Romains comparéés l’une à l’autre translatées de Grec en François par Monsieur Jacques Amyot Abbé de Bellozane, Eveque d”Auxerre etc. (Paris: Michel de Vascosan, 1554–1560.) 20  Anne Jefferson, Biography and The Question of Literature in France (Oxford University Press), 32.

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Cato the Younger were self-willed, stubborn and humourless. Themistocles and Camillus forfeited the trust of their fellow citizens, and both ended in exile or disgrace. In other cases, the burden of the comparison lies in the superiority of one partner over the other. Cato is boastful; Aristides is not. Cato’s is profligate and ruins his descendants; Aristides is careful and hands on his wealth. Nicias’s fortune was got by honest means, Crassius’s was gained through usury. Demosthenes’s oratory was direct and unstudied, “not smelling of the lamp”, while Cicero’s was deliberate and showy. Dion’s rebellion against the tyrant Dionysus II was justified, while Brutus’s disloyalty to Caesar was peevish: “It was not the same thing for the Sicilians to be freed from Dionysus as for the Romans to be freed from Caesar”. And so on and so forth. From the reader’s point of view, the inventory of virtues and vices involved in these parallels is frequently less striking than the continuity between them. In practice, as with Alexander the Great and Caesar, the failings of the individuals concerned often represent the flip-side of their virtues. It is this consistency within disparity, the psychological laws underlying and governing the contradictions of character, that overall seems to interest Plutarch most. Once he had been translated from the rare Greek manuscripts, this is certainly the impression made by Plutarch on his Renaissance readers. Of no one was this truer than the author who, more than any other, popularised Plutarch among the French. In 1580, a couple of decades after Amyot’s influential translation, we find the philosophical writer Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592) lauding its excellences in lavish terms in his Essay “A demain les affaires”. Montaigne confesses his ignorance of Greek, but then praises the late Bishop and translator, not simply for the purity and directness of his style (qualities which Montaigne is anxious to emulate) but for opening his eyes to the wisdom to be found in the Lives which he recommends to his own readers as “nostre bréviaire”: “Ignorant people like us would have been lost if that book had not brought us up out of the mire: thanks to it, we now dare to live and write—and the ladies teach the dominies; it is our breviary”. Montaigne cites Plutarch no less than five hundred times in the Essais; if Sarah Bakewell is right indeed, The Moralia may even have suggested the form the Essais took. He cites him on the ambivalence of weeping,21 21  “Comme nous pleurons et rions d’une même chose”, Essais, Book 1. Ch, xxxviii, citing Plutarch’s “Life of Timoleon”.

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on Latin style22 and on the subjectivity of apprehension.23 He cites him on the universal obligation of benevolence,24 on the detection of false flattery25 and on overlooking the minor faults of the great.26 He cites him on the necessity of self-discipline,27 on the benefit of experiencing opposite extremes28 and on the obligation to honour the dead.29 He is most sensitive to him when his observations are most paradoxical, most open to the flow and counter-flow of life. Manifestly, Plutarch and Montaigne took to one another: something polymathic, almost polymorphic, in the Greek author’s temperament clearly appealed. Montaigne’s Plutarch is an author less of precepts than of curiosities, odd insights and off-the-wall observations. In general, he is as interested in Plutarch the psychologist as in Plutarch the moralist. Take, for example, a theme of some relevance to Corday, Romme and the “last of the Montagnards”, and also to the young Napoleon: stoicism. I mean stoicism in the practical sense of the term—fortitude, or patience under duress—rather than in its strictly philosophical sense, of which Plutarch writes more specifically in the Moralia. Though Plutarch does not always the word as such, he often brings the subject up, especially in relation to a clutch of lives depicting eminent men of Sparta. In these cases, Plutarch is writing many centuries after the deaths of those concerned, whom he may in consequence have over-idealised. It is to Plutarch, more than any other authority, that we owe our idea of Spartan restraint. In Moralia he treats such fortitude as a virtue, as when in De Ira he praises the emperor Nero for his self-control when learning that an expensive octagonal tent he had ordered has been lost at sea. (Seneca, his tutor, had advised him under such circumstances to 22  “In “Que Philosopher, c’est apprendre a mourir”, Essais, Book 1, Ch xx, citing The Life of Cicero. 23  In “Que le gout des biens et des maux depend en bonne partie d’opinion que nous en avons”, Essais, Book 1, ch. xiv” citing The Life of Brutus. 24  In “De la cruauté”, Essais, Book 11. Ch, xxxviii, citing Plutarch’s “Life of Timoleon”. 25  In “Apologie de Raimond Sebond”, Essais, Book ii, ch xii, citing “Quomodo adulator ab amico. internoscator” (“How to distinguish flattery from friendship”) in Plutarch’s Moralia. 26  From “De plus excellents hommes”, Essais, Book 11, ch. xxxvi, citing “The Life of Alexander”. 27  In “De la vanité”, Essais, Bk 111, ch. ix, citing “The Life of Solon”. 28  In “De l’expérience”, Essais, Bk 111 ch. xiii, citing “The Life of Philemon”. 29  In “De l’expérience”, citing “The Life of Pompey” (and quoting Amyot’s translation), and “The Life of Julius Caesar”.

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remain calm.) In the Lives, and especially the Spartan lives, by contrast, self-control is more often treated as a form of human behaviour objectively observed, irrespective of moral or didactic comment. Montaigne mentions two examples of such forbearance in his essay “Défence de Sénèque et de Plutarque”. Here Montaigne is protecting Plutarch’s reputation against criticisms levelled a few years earlier by the jurist Jean Bodin in Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem. Bodin had taken Plutarch to task for his credulity and lack of realism when portraying self-control in others. In the “Life of Lycurgus” Plutarch tells of a Spartan lad who allowed a stolen fox cub he had hidden under his tunic to eviscerate him rather than owning up to his theft. In the same life he mentions another Spartan boy serving as a thurifer at the altar of Diana who refused to cry out when a cinder from the smouldering incense ran down his sleeve and burned his whole forearm. In reprising these anecdotes, it is clear that Montaigne is far more interested in the reflexes demonstrated by these young stalwarts than in the morality of the tasks they are engaged in. One is a thief, the other a diligent altar boy. In Montaigne’s eyes (and, I would argue in Plutarch’s too), what is most interesting is that they are equally obstinate or brave, these two mental states being akin. Montaigne expands on this point by adducing experiences within his personal knowledge. Some of these involve people who have refused to abjure their religious or political convictions under torture, as on the rack; others are instances of mere petulant cussedness. In Gascony especially it appears, “I have known hundreds of women … who would rather bite into red-hot iron than abandon an opinion they had conceived in anger”. Bearing in mind the thoughts about the necessity of controlling one’s rage expressed by his mentor Plutarch in De Ira, it is doubtful that Montaigne regards the intransigence of these women folk as being in any way exemplary, since ironically their anger is the source of their self-control. They are motivated by pique, where those in his earlier example are supported by faith. For Montaigne, however, they illustrate the same psychological law: whether from pride, from determination or from cussedness, people under stress do not like to give up. This is the multivalent humanist vision of Plutarch inherited by Shakespeare, who draws on him in all three of his Roman plays and Timon of Athens. The protagonists of each of these tense dramas are bitterly torn: Caesar between duty and ambition, Brutus between loyalty and liberty, Antony between discipline and desire, Cleopatra between Egypt and Rome, Coriolanus between fealty and arrogance, Timon between

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munificence and spleen. Shakespeare conjures up his characters, he does not judge them. For all their Plutarchian freighting, there is no absolute right and no wrong in any of these plays. Despite this, a political reading of these Shakespearean dramas is always available for use, and critics and directors across the ages have not been slow to take advantage, including in France. If James Shapiro is right, Julius Caesar, first produced in 1599, served as a focus for the conflicting responses to the Earl of Essex’s botched campaign in Ireland—where one of its commanders was Sir Thomas North—and his insubordination towards Queen Elizabeth (who had just finished Englishing Plutarch’s De Curiositate).30 In 1735, drawing on Plutarch, Suetonius and Shakespeare, Voltaire created a version of the story in which Marcus Brutus, aware that he is Caesar’s son, struggles with filial affection before ridding the republic of the peril posed by his dad. (In this version of events there is no comeuppance, and Brutus does not die.) In the 1960s, Julius Nyerere, President of independent Tanzania, wrote a Swahili version of Shakespeare’s play that converted it into an anti-colonial putsch. Between 1951 and 1953 Berthold Brecht re-worked Coriolanus as a play about the class struggle. It is not difficult to turn Timon of Athens into an anti-capitalist fable. The original plays outstrip any such loaded understanding. Their message, insofar as they have one, has to do with the complex and irreducible nature of human affairs. Of this there are few better examples than their treatment of two themes of much concern to the French revolutionaries: the action of suicide and the idea of nobility, for his presentation of both of which the playwright is indebted to Plutarch. The most famous suicide in all of Shakespeare is Marcus Brutus’s after the Battle of Philippi in Act V, Scene V of Julius Caesar. The source here is Plutarch’s Life of Brutus, which gives us two alternative versions of the same event. This is how in 1579 North had rendered them, translating from Amyot. Facing defeat at the hands of the triumvirate, Brutus takes his old school mate Strato aside. Then: He came as neere to him as he coulde, and taking his sword by the hilts with both his hands and falling downe up on the poynte of it, ran him selfe through. Others say, that not he, but Strato (at his request) held the sword,

30  James Shapiro, 1599, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber, 2005), 182–92.

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and turned his head aside, and that Brutus fell downe upon it: and so ranne himself through, and dyed presently.31

Shakespeare follows the second version, except that he interprets the verb “ran” or “ranne” in an intransitive as well as a transitive sense, since his Brutus literally runs into the extended blade. In Plutarch, in Amyot, in North and in Shakespeare, the death at Philippi is regarded as sublime, which is at least part of what Mark Antony, much given to eulogies, appears to mean when a few lines later in the play he calls Brutus “the noblest Roman of them all”, though he is of course also referring to his disinterested motives in slaying Caesar. His speech opens up the question of what Shakespeare and his sources, let alone successive readers, understand by the adjective “noble”. In her recent biography Brutus The Noble Conspirator Kathryn Tempest takes up this point: in Roman usage, “nobilis” meant that you were eminently born, specifically that one member of your family at least had held a consulship.32 That is how Plutarch’s Latin-­ speaking contemporaries would have understood the word nobilis, roughly equivalent to Greek aristos, which is Plutarch’s term. By the time of Shakespeare, the aristocratic connotations of nobility were held in precarious balance with a universal concept of heroic virtue not entirely separated from rank but theoretically distinct from it. When his verbally resourceful Anthony calls the recently dead Brutus “noble”, therefore, he is indulging in a pun between these two senses of the word, a pun that also works in Latin and Greek. Brutus is indeed well born, being descended from the Julius Brutus whom the revolutionaries admired so much. Like his great ancestor, he is from the top drawer of society, but his sympathies are with the people. As Tony Nuttall remarks in Shakespeare The Thinker, “Brutus in Shakespeare’s play is that mildly paradoxical thing, an aristocratic republican”.33 In which respect, one should add, Shakespeare’s portrayal of him is in line with Plutarch’s.

31  Plutarch, “Life of Marcus Brutus”, 52, as rendered in The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans Compared, Translated out of Greek into French by James Amyot, Abbot of Bellozane, Bishop of Auxerre, etc. and out of French into English by Thomas North (London: Thomas Vautroulier and John Wright, 1579), Vol. 6, 235. Compare The Daily Telegraph, Thursday 28 March 2019, headline to page 1: “May falls on her sword”. 32  Kathryn Tempest, Brutus The Noble Conspirator (Newport, CT: Yale University Press, 2017) 33  A. D. Nuttall Shakespeare the Thinker (Newport, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 172.

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Gilbert Romme and his co-conspirators were only interested in one of these meanings. To be “nobilis” in the original sense would for them have been, not simply anathema but actively dangerous. In 1795, blue blood almost certainly took you to the scaffold. Their reading of Plutarch—in line with the nobly descended Corday’s—thus did not simply disregard hierarchy but needed actively to oppose it. As Frederick Raphael has recently observed, Brutus and his fellow conspirators had regarded themselves primarily as liberators34: it was in this light that the French Revolution chose to interpret them exclusively. Thenceforth, in France, Plutarch’s Lives became a revolutionary text, a literary foundation stone of Republicanism, which is what, through all the political twists and turns of the period, they would remain for the whole of the nineteenth century. To put it succinctly, Plutarch (and, along with him, Shakespeare) was radicalised. Or, to use a term that was just coming into use in 1795, they were subjected to an “ideology” which, as Nuttall also shrewdly observes, “is an Enlightenment or post-Enlightenment word. Its life began in Paris in the 1790s.”35 From now on Marcus Brutus was noble because he had paid a political sacrifice. As for the gentle and pious Plutarch, he came to be regarded as some ferociously committed citoyen, some harbinger of the Marseilleise.

In Search of a Hero: Plutarch and Stendhal By the late eighteenth century, Plutarch, mostly in the Amyot translation, was a staple of the French educational system. Marie-Henri Beyle (1783–1842), better known as the writer Stendhal, absorbed him in the 1790s during his youth in Grenoble. By 1812, when he joined Napoleon’s invading armies in Russia, the impression had already bitten deep. The following year, when he settled in Italy, we find him writing to his younger sister Pauline reprimanding her for not having followed his advice to take the works of Plutarch to heart.36 In his critical study Stendhal’s Parallel Lives, Francesco Manzini has charted the extent of this influence on the mature Stendhal, both as biographer and as novelist. Nowhere is this more manifest than in the Vie de Napoléon which he drafted in Milan in  Frederick Raphael, Antiquity Matters (Newport, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 167.  Nuttall, 171. 36  Geoffrey Strickland, Stendhal: The Education of a Novelist (Cambridge University Press, 1974). 34 35

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1817–1818, partly in repudiation of Madame de Staël’s virulently anti-­ Bonapartist, and posthumously published, Considérations sur les principaux événements de la révolution française.37 “I am”, the draft began, “writing this life of Napoleon in refutation of a libel”.38 Who could fathom Madame de Staël? A child prodigy who was proposed to by Edward Gibbon at the age of eleven, she had introduced Goethe’s works to the French, had minted the term “Romanticism”, had outraged Napoleon when they met because he could not stomach her uppity spirit. (Napoleon could not take insubordination from anyone, and in his eyes it was worse when coming from a woman.) In general, she said, she preferred dogs to people. Her life was pretty well coterminous with the dates of the French revolutionary period, her varied contributions to which have been charted by Simon Shama. After her death at the age of fifty-one, her last book was published: an account of the Revolution from its origins in the ancien régime to the débâcle of Waterloo. Her work stung the thirty-year old Beyle, not yet known as Stendhal, into a response. Like hers it was published posthumously (in his case not until 1929), and it was as much a product of revolutionary neo-classicism as hers was of the Romanticism she helped bring into being. That the manner of treatment suited the subject well is patently clear, since Napoleon himself, though no great reader, had early aspired to the condition of neo-classical hero. The most blatant evidence for this, apart from his titles, his military tactics and the laurel crown he had worn at his coronation, was the lofty column he had caused to be erected between 1806 and 1810 in the Place Vendôme to celebrate his victory at the Battle of Austerlitz. It was consciously modelled on Trajan’s Column, raised between 106 and 113 AD in Rome to celebrate the emperor’s conquests in the Dacian war, as recounted for us by the biographer Suetonius. Like Trajan’s archetype, it was of the Doric order and at its summit stood a bronze statue of Bonaparte himself, carrying the staff of peace, and wreathed in the aforesaid chaplet. On entering Paris in 1814, the allied armies with some difficulty hauled it down with ropes. 37  Stendhal, Une Vie de Napoléon, texte établi et annoté avec un avant-propos par Louis Royer; Préface de Albert Pingaud (Paris: H. Champion, 1929). The text to which I refer here is the authoritative Une Vie de Napoléon and Mémoires sur Napoléon Edition établie et présentée par Catherine Mariette (Paris: Editions Stock, 1998). For the inception of Une Vie de Napoléon, see Mariette, iv–v. 38  Stendhal, Une Vie de Napoléon ed. Mariette (1998), 15.

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Stendhal sets out his neo-classical stall from almost the beginning. In recounting the volley of victories by means of which the twenty-six-year old general drove back the Austrian armies from Northern Italy in 1796, he refers us to Alexander and Caesar as Plutarch had described them in one notable double-life, then to Hannibal, described in “The Life of Titus Flamininus” offering as instances of supreme generalship “either Alexander or Pyrrhus, then himself”.39 “No general of either ancient or of modern times”, Stendhal remarks, “had won so many great battles in so short a space of time, and with such inadequate means and over such powerful enemies. … In the course of a single year a young man of twenty-six finds himself in the position of having surpassed an Alexander, a Caesar, a Hannibal and a Frederick.”40 “Finds himself in a position of having surpassed”—“se trouve avoir effacé”—there is a willingness to perceive Napoleon’s precocious achievement as the man himself may well have regarded it, partly because one of the narrator’s main focuses is this man’s psychology, and partly because he is interested in plumbing the depths of Napoleon’s sense of his own infallibility as the root of his subsequent fall. His sense of infallibility but also what was nearly allied to it: his arrogance, both as virtue and as vice. From that time on, Stendhal tells us, he regarded mere politicians with marked contempt. “He usually”, we are told, “ended by pointing out to his generals that, if a man could succeed in conciliating the new way of life inside France with a military form of government, he could easily make the Republic play the part of ancient Rome”.41 Societies are judged in this youthful work by the extent to which they successfully duplicate imperial Roman fortitude. On his Egyptian campaign of 1798–1799, we are told, Napoleon faced an enemy who “only lacked aristocracy to be Romans”.42 When he peremptorily returns to France in August 1799, he finds the Directorate in a condition of desuetude and assumes the position of first Consul, just as Caesar had in 60 AD. The Jacobins, meanwhile, have reduced themselves to a position of public derision by unsuccessfully attempting to replicate the institutions of the Roman Republic. Napoleon is not interested in discussion; like his Plutarchan prototypes, he simply wishes to rule. “Imbued with Roman ideas”, effective government for him is a product of command, so that  Plutarch, “Life of Titus Flamininus”, 21, 3–4.  Stendhal, Une Vie de Napoléon ed. Mariette (1998), 22. 41  Stendhal, Une Vie de Napoléon ed. Mariette (1998), 26. 42  Stendhal, Une Vie de Napoléon ed. Mariette (1998) 32. 39 40

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“the greatest misfortune in his eyes, was to be conquered, not to be badly governed and pestered in one’s own home”.43 We are approaching the apex of Bonaparte’s fortunes. His rapid advance on Vienna in the Spring of 1809 is rehearsed in staccato prose, the rhythm of which echoes the speed of his progress: “Napoleon left Paris on April 13th, 1809; by the 18th he was in Ingolstadt. He fought six battles in five days and won six victories. On May 10th he was at the gates of Vienna.”44 On March 11 of the following year he marries Marie Louise, Archduchess of Austria, and in so doing links himself formally with the Hapsburgs. “He received”, as Stendhal phrases it, “the daughter of the Caesars. That day, the most glorious of his life, he was as gloomy as Nero.”45 (For all of which, Stendhal gets the date wrong.) Invading Spain, Napoleon sets up his own brother Joseph as King under a constitutional monarchy. The reluctance of the conservative Spanish to perceive the advantages of this arrangement over their own corrupt oligarchy arouses Stendhal’s full-­ throated disdain. To confound them, he draws on the words of the man who was to assume the difficult role of Joseph Bonaparte’s first minister. Mariano Luis de Urquijo (1669–1817) had been Prime Minister for a little under two years under the previous constitution. He was a wily and broadminded bureaucrat who had earlier translated Voltaire’s La Mort de Caesar (based on Shakespeare’s play which itself had borrowed from Plutarch) into Spanish. In April 1808, according to Stendhal, he was reprimanded by the acolytes of the deposed Bourbon King for his emerging support of the new Napoleonic regime. De Urquijo knew his classical precedents only too well. He replied “Read Plutarch, and you will find that all of those heroes of Greece and Rome only won their fame over thousands of dead bodies. All that is now forgotten, while the results remain to be contemplated with respect and astonishment.”46 Three months later, de Urquijo was serving under Joseph. At this juncture Stendhal himself enters the story. In August 1810 he is appointed as an auditor under the conseil d’état and, two years later, at the age of twenty-nine, he accompanies the army on its disastrous Russian expedition. Stendhal witnessed the burning of Moscow from outside the gates and was made partly responsible for securing supplies during the  Stendhal, Une Vie de Napoléon ed. Mariette (1998), 45.  Stendhal, Une Vie de Napoléon ed. Mariette (1998), 97. 45  Stendhal, Une Vie de Napoléon ed. Mariette (1998), 98. 46  Stendhal, Une Vie de Napoléon ed. Mariette (1998), 84. 43 44

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long retreat. Arguably, this is the clue to his whole approach: Stendhal only ever observed Napoleon in defeat. Everything previous to that, he has been obliged to re-construct. In his eyes, Napoleon is an overreacher, and his destiny is tragic. Now he pauses and, as he does so, he surveys the scene with Plutarchian detachment. Once again, Alexander provides the compass: Thirteen and a half years of success turned Alexander the Great into a kind of madman. Good fortune of exactly the same kind produced the same disorder in Napoleon. The only difference was that the Macedonian hero was lucky enough to die. What fame Napoleon the Conqueror would have left behind had a bullet killed him on the evening of the battle of Moskowa!47

That gloss falls half-way between Menander’s “Those whom the Gods love, die young” and the seventeenth neo-Latin century proverb “Quem Juppiter vult perdere, dementat prius” (“He whom Jupiter wishes to destroy, he maddens first”, based on lines 620–623 of Sophocles’s Prometheus).48 Be that as it may, Stendhal is evidently attempting to lend tragic grandeur to Napoleon’s predicament, which he sees as a product of his temperament. From this moment on, he does not hesitate to correlate the two. He is at pains to depict the great man’s failings: his vanity; his inability to relate properly to women (which, shrewdly, he connects with anticipation of their scorn); his deafness to public opinion; his political ineptitude; his contempt for liberty; his suppression of the press; his inability to delegate or to know when he is beaten. The last hundred pages of Une Vie de Napoléon are in effect a summing up of his character that reminds one of nothing so much as Plutarch’s resumés at the end of each of his carefully balanced lives. Finally, after the Hundred Days, he leaves him at Saint Helena, dignified in defeat. He concludes “He was a man with amazing abilities and a dangerous ambition; by his talents the finest man to have appeared since Caesar, whom in our eyes he would have appeared to have surpassed”.49 Napoleon was “no more prodigal of blood, no more indifferent to humanity than men like Caesar, Alexander the Great or Frederick the Great, to whom he will be compared and whose and whose fame will diminish daily”. In his  Stendhal, Une Vie de Napoléon ed. Mariette (1998), 102.  Menandri: Reliquae Selectae ed. Francis Henry Sandbach (Oxford, 1972), fragment 4; Sophocles, The Plays and Fragments Richard Claverhouse Jebb ed (Cambridge, 1900), 256. 49  Stendhal, Une Vie de Napoléon ed. Mariette (1998), 134. 47 48

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final exile he demonstrated a faculty for simplicity and renunciation quite at odds with the view of him put about by his detractors. “In modern times, it is perhaps this which puts us most in mind of Plutarch.”50 Madame de Staël knew Napoleon in his prime and detested him. Stendhal saw Napoleon in decline and revered him. Plutarch, what is more, taught Stendhal how to write. From him he acquired a style that was brisk, rapid and direct. There are few frills in any of Stendhal’s works, just as there are few frills in Plutarch’s. Instead, we meet in both of them a manner of address that is forthright and subtle, rubato and yet crisp, lean and yet unguent. That style served Beyle well, from La Chartreuse de Parme through to Le Rouge et le Noir. Moreover, if Erich Auerbach was right in his seminal work Mimesis in seeing Stendhalian austerity as the foundation stone of French nineteenth-century realism, an argument might even be made out for the realistic mode of writing, as inherited by say Flaubert and Zola, as a very late, though in their cases unconscious, after effect of the Plutarchian aesthetic paradigm.

A Counter-Revolutionary Diaboliad In the long eighteenth century there was a growing fashion for collective or group biography. To some extent this seems have been a product of the Enlightenment, of a search for knowledge about human behaviour and the laws that underlay it: the kind of omnivorous curiosity that underlay Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728) and the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné Des Sciences Des Arts et Des Métiers compiled between 1751 and 1766 by Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond and their contributors. Early examples appear to have been attempts to define or limit a literary movement or school. Hence literary encyclopaedias with a strong biographical bias were compiled by Pierre Bayle in 1695, and by Charles Perrault, better known for his collections of fairy tales, in 1695. The organisational principles behind other collations were sometimes national, sometimes dynastic and sometimes ideological, and a fair proportion invoked Plutarch in their titles. The pioneering economist Thomas Mortimer (1730–1810) collated The British Plutarch in six volumes in 1762.51 It depicted the lives of eminent Englishmen in every branch of  Stendhal, Une Vie de Napoléon ed. Mariette (1998), 190.  Thomas Mortimer, The British Plutarch, Containing the Lives of the Most Eminent Statesmen, Patriots, Divines, Warriors, Philosophers, Poets, and Artists, of Great Britain and 50 51

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national endeavour who lived between Henry VIII and George II; enlarged to six volumes in 1774, it eventually reached twelve. In 1785 the intrepid Belgian baroness Cornélie Wouters (1739–1802) translated them all into French.52 The revolution provided a fresh impetus to such activity, and those who exercised it came from diverse and sometimes conflicting backgrounds, though all to a greater or to a lesser extent harked back to the ancients. Under the pressure of political events, classical biography as a model for contemporary lives could now be used to different, even countervailing, ends. Thus, just as there was a neo-classical Napoleon, so there was a Romantic Napoleon. There was Napoleon the hero, and there was Napoleon the monster. Both of these visions drew on the similar sources, and both battened on classical biography. The salient theme of so many Greek and more especially Roman lives had, after all, been one that attracted Byronic Romanticism from its inception: the ambivalence of greatness. But, whereas writers of a neo-classical temperament tended to dwell primarily on Plutarch, the Romantics, possessed of a dark streak, were just as preoccupied with the ancient biographer who for centuries rivalled him at the bar of informed opinion: Gauis Suetonius Tranquillus. And, whereas the young Stendhal, and other writers inspired by revolutionary sentiment, naturally reached out to Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar as points of comparison, there was an increasing tendency in reactionary circles to view Bonaparte as akin to the heirs of Augustus—to Tiberius, Caligula and Nero—as Suetonius had memorably described them. In 1804 John Murray II, later publisher to Byron, Jane Austen and Walter Scott, issued one of the most enigmatic literary productions of this turbulent period: The Revolutionary Plutarch, Exhibiting the Most Distinguished Characters, Literary Military and Political In The Latest Annals of the French Republic, The Greater Part From The Original Information of A Gentleman Resident in Paris.53 This work was in two Ireland, From the Accession of Henry VIII to the Present Time, Including a Compendious View of the History of England During That Period 6 vols (London: Edward Dilly 1762; second edition 12 vols., 1774). 52  Cornélie-Pétronville-Bénédicte Wouters, Baronne de Vassé, Le Plutarch anglais 12 vols (Paris: 1785–6). Settled in Paris, she completed her translation with the assistance of her Anglophone sister, Marie Thérèse. 53  H.  Stewarton pseud, The Revolutionary Plutarch: Exhibiting the Most Distinguished Characters, Literary, Military and Political in The Recent Annals of the French Republic the Greater Part from The Original Information of a Gentleman Resident in Paris (London:

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volumes, to which in 1805 was added a third. Its author was anonymous, and the text identifies neither him nor his Parisian informant, though the first, for professional purposes and in correspondence with the publisher, had adopted the pseudonym “H. Stewarton”. For the last two centuries, all attempts to penetrate this intriguing alias have proved fruitless.54 At the time, the work was briefly confused with that of Sir Richard Phillips, author in 1797 of Biographical Anecdotes of the Founders of the French Republic; the claim ended up in a libel court.55 More recently this mysterious writer has been confounded with Lewis Goldsmith (1763–1846), turncoat, double-agent, and author of The Secret History of the Cabinet of Bonaparte, though for a variety of reasons that identification is also impossible. The book, however, contains a fair share of clues as to his background, since in its lurid and occasionally cantankerous pages there is almost as much autobiography as there is biography. “H. Stewarton”, whether French or British by birth, is a forceful, aphoristic writer who derives much of his material from eye-witness accounts, including his own, and from a copious documentation from contemporary sources. He also, perplexingly and in his hide-and-seek manner, tells us quite a bit about himself. Like so many of the idealistic young in France and England, he had at first been an enthusiast for the revolution. In the early 1890s he had enlisted in the Army of the Rhine, where he served for several years under General Victor Moreau. There, according to his own account, he also made the acquaintance of Moreau’s commanding officer, General Jean-Charles Pichegru (1761–1804). Both of these soldiers were fast losing faith in Napoleon, in which attitude of disaffection they soon influenced their protégé. Moreau John Murray, 1804, 1805, 1815). The Female Revolutionary Plutarch, Containing Biographical, Historical and Revolutionary Sketches, Characters and Anecdotes, equally pseudonymous, appeared from the same publishing house in 1805, with a second edition in 1808. 54  For correspondence concerning Stewarton’s Identity, see Robert Fraser, “Mystery Author”, The Times Literary Supplement, No. 6058, May 10, 2019, 6, and a reply under the same headline by Christopher McKane, The Times Literary Supplement, No. 6059, 17 May, 2019, 6. McKane proposes Lewis Goldsmith (1763–1846) as an answer to the riddle. Unfortunately, in 1804 Goldsmith was a committed Bonapartist. See also Simon Burrows’s entry on Goldsmith in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; also his French Exile Journalism and European Politics, 1792–1814 (Martlesham, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2000). 55  See Cobbett’s Political Register, August 6, 1808, cols 204–8, and The Trial at Large of An Action Brought by Sir John Carr Against Hood and Sharpe … taken in shorthand by Thomas Jenkins (London: Stewart and Jones, 1808), 71.

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was involved in a failed coup against the rising star of Napoleon in 1797 and exiled to America: he was to spend much of the rest of his life there. Denounced by Moreau during an earlier attempted coup, Pichegru was banished to French Guiana, from which in 1799 he escaped to London. Meanwhile the author of The Revolutionary Plutarch, suspected of complicity with reactionary forces overseas, had been incarcerated in the Temple Prison in Paris. There in February 1797 he claims to have befriended one of the most exotic and active among the émigrés, Antoine Le Picard de Phélippeaux (1767–1799). A former officer in the pre-­ revolutionary French army, Phélippeaux had studied with the slightly younger Bonaparte at the Ecole Militaire in Brienne, where he had contracted a permanent aversion towards his fellow student. Subsequently, he had served in the anti-revolutionary Arméé de la Condé and been cooped in the Temple gaol as a result. It was this resentful and prejudiced cell-­ mate who became Stewarton’s principal source for Napoleon’s early life. In March 1798, Phélippeaux and Stewarton assisted in the escape of the rogue British Admiral Sir William Sidney Smith who had been gaoled in the Temple following a botched raid on Le Havre. The details of the escape can be followed in the Dictionnaire Biographique. At first, a tunnel was built but, this proving impracticable, Phélippeaux disguised himself as a Commissioner of Police while several of his companions, including it would seem Stewarton, dressed as fellow officers. Presenting false papers, they secured Smith’s release, and made their way to the coast, travelling onwards to London on false passports. The following year, Smith and Phélippeaux were in Egypt, where together they frustrated Napoleon’s siege of Acre before Phélippeaux succumbed to fever that May. Meanwhile, in London, Stewarton had again met up with Pichegru, whose appearance and mannerisms he describes minutely in his book. In 1803 Murray agreed to publish its first, two-­ volume, edition. Early the next year Pichegru returned to France and was immediately imprisoned. On February 28 he was found strangled in his cell. The French government claimed this was suicide but much British counter-revolution opinion suspected it had been murder.56 The third edition of The Revolutionary Plutarch was then in the press; published early in 1805, it included a footnote reporting on Pichegru’s death. The first chapter of its second volume is devoted to him; the rest consists of a 56  Stendhal accepted the official version, for which see Stendhal, Une Vie de Napoléon ed. Mariette (1998), 54. For Bonaparte’s explanation, see 63 sqq.

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c­ haracter assassination of the Bonaparte family, including Napoleon himself, compared throughout to the tyrants of early imperial Rome. If The British Plutarch demonstrated the comparative biographical impulse as instilled by patriotism and curiosity, The Revolutionary Plutarch illustrates the same instinct spiked with divisiveness and malice. Dedicating his work to the combined shades of the executed French monarch Louis XVI and Edmund Burke, the Irish philosopher who a year after the outbreak of the disturbances in Paris had in his Reflections on the Revolution in France warned his English readers against the excesses of insurrection, Stewarton makes no bones about his conservative sympathies, or his ad hominem intent. From the very beginning, his avowed intention is to lay bare “the ambition, intrigue, tyranny, and the ferocity of Napoleon Bonaparte”.57 Stewarton is strongly aware of Napoleon’s rising cult and equally determined to resist it. He is also aware of that cult’s classical embellishments, which in his opinion cut two ways: “Who were those praising and worshipping a Caesar, extolling and adoring an Octavius Augustus?” he rhetorically asks. “Were they not the base slaves of an usurpation, and not the free citizens of a commonwealth who would as willingly and as cordially have prostrated themselves before their rivals and oppressors, before a Scylla, a Pompey, a Brutus, an Antony?”58 Stewarton devotes his first volume to portraits of Moreau and fellow generals in The Army of The Rhine. Then he passes on to Napoleon’s family before addressing his principal object of detestation. It is a Bonaparte scarcely recognisable from Stendhal’s later account. Growing up in Ajaccio, the young scamp haunts the operating theatres of the local hospital to observe the writhing contortions of unanaesthetised patients, which afterwards he mimes before his callous classmates. At the military academy in Brienne, the ambitious cadet adopts as his Plutarchian idols the twin icons of Cato and Brutus. In December, 1793, after the capture of Toulon from the English, he orders the artillery to open fire on the collaborators herded onto Le Champ de Mars. Two years later, placed at the head of the troops of the National Convention, he decrees the same fate for the populace of Paris. The successes of the Italian campaign are put down to a combination of luck, Austrian incompetence and Bonaparte’s opportunism. He sacks the treasures of the Republic of Venice, kidnaps the Pope and exacts exorbitant financial penalties from the cities of Genoa and  Stewarton pseud, i, vii.  Stewarton, ii, 180.

57 58

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Naples. After an action near Salo on the western shore of Lake Garda, he orders the wounded to be buried alive. He orders the devastation of Switzerland, but decamps before it can be carried out. Revolted by these decisions, one of his own, unnamed generals bears testimony against him. Indicating as he does so the classical author who is evidently the author’s own vituperative model, he accuses Bonaparte of “deeds of atrocity, at which Nero himself would have blushed and which Suetonius would not have dared impute to that monster”.59 Bonaparte’s politics, though, are those of Plutarch’s Julius Caesar. In 1797 he is about to cross the Rubicon between defender of the republic and incipient dictator. His unnamed accuser carries on: what I contend for is that Buonaparte is the most dangerous of all the French citizens; that Buonaparte is a citizen after the manner of Caesar, that it is in the manner of Caesar that he loves equality, and that it is with all the contempt that Caesar entertained for the senate of Rome that Buonaparte speaks of the government of France.60

Napoleon sets sail for Egypt, resolved to place his personal mark on the East, in which objective he is inspired less by the interests of France than by a “personal ambition to tread the ground which had been impressed by the victorious footsteps of Alexander and Caesar”.61 Once landed, his declared tolerance towards the institutions of Islam, like his restoration of the forfeited rights of the Church and the Jewish community back home, is instigated by classical example: after observing that the Roman protected all religions, he requested the soldiers to treat the Muftis and Imams of Africa with the same respect that they had exhibited towards the bishops and rabbis of Europe.62 In Egypt his cruelty, boastfulness and hypocrisy persist. Annoyed by the overcrowding of the hospitals near Joppa, he finds an obliging apothecary who agrees to distribute food relief to the patients; it is poisoned, and they all expire. At Acre, thanks to the intervention of Smith and Phélippeaux, his siege proves an abject disaster that Napoleon claims for a victory. He abandons his armies and makes for France, where, posing as a defender of the ideals of the Republic, he has himself elected First Consul. Posing  Stewarton, ii, 218.  Stewarton, ii, 218–9. 61  Stewarton, ii, 229–30. 62  Stewarton, ii, 233. 59 60

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again as a proponent of peace, he approaches the English crown and is repulsed. Stewarton’s account advances no further than the end of the fragile peace of 1802. He has, already done enough, however, to show how the green bay tree of denunciatory biography might flourish when fertilised by a rich compost of gossip. Near the beginning of his account he presses into service a phrase from Pope’s Essay on Man describing Oliver Cromwell, echoed more recently in A Diaboliad, a scurrilous broadsheet poem of 1777 by the hack writer William Combe: Napoleon, he says, is “doomed to everlasting fame”.63 Bonaparte’s notoriety, he is certain, will never fade. In the Preface to the Third Edition of 1805, newly revolted by his friend Phélippeaux’s death which the authorities had attributed to suicide, Stewarton rounds up his diatribe. In Suetonian sum, “the reigns of Nero, Caligula, Domitian and Robespierre must appear less intolerable than the usurpation of Napoleon Bonaparte”.64

At Napoleon’s Tomb: Two Phases of Chateaubriand Nine years later, amid the smoke and din of the French capital, François-­ Auguste-­René, vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) crouches over his desk, pouring bile from his pen. France is almost on its knees, since Napoleon has advanced westwards without realising that the armies of the coalition ranged against him (Prussia, Russia, Britain) have crept around behind him to the west and occupied central Paris. Too late, the Emperor has come to his senses and rushed back to Fontainebleau, from whose height he is now attempting a futile resistance. In the middle-aged person of Louis XVIII, the Bourbon dynasty, spurned twenty years before, is poised at the helm. Catholic, Royalist, and sick of totalitarian cant, Chateaubriand is determined that they should succeed. Chateaubriand had come a lot closer to Napoleon than had Stendhal: in fact, several times face to face. Successively First Minister to the Holy See and Minister to Valais, he had served his master with moderate enthusiasm until in 1804 his loyalty had been sabotaged by the judicial murder of Louis Antoine, Duc d’Enghien, scion of the Condés and thus 63  Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man”, line 284. William Combe, A Diaboliad: a poem dedicated to the worst man in His Majesty’s kingdoms (London and Dublin, 1777). The British Library copy is misdated as 1677. 64  Stewarton, I, vii.

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a minor royal, shot down in the moat at Chantilly on the day of the spring equinox. Breaking with the regime, he had voyaged in the Levant, researching the early persecutions of Christianity and, returning, found Napoleonic France tottering on the brink. He had always subjectively identified with the Emperor, who was almost exactly of the same age as himself. He had been briefly used, and his services rapidly discarded. His disillusionment, on the humiliation of his country, was proportionately great. The result was a pestiferous pamphlet entitled Of Bonaparte and the Bourbons and of the Necessity of Rallying Around Our Legitimate Princes for the Happiness of France and That of Europe. Finished “under the roaring of cannon”, it was immediately published “as it were, on the breach”, and promptly translated into English. Once Napoleon had been temporarily banished to Elba, Louis claimed that this bilious little book had been of more use to him than one hundred thousand troops. Earlier in his variegated life, Chateaubriand had read for the priesthood, and he had just been immersing himself in Roman imperial history. He needed to appeal to the intelligentsia of France and of England. Remembering the sorry annals of Suetonius and his own researches into the travails of the church, he reached for classic parallels. Napoleon had outdone even Diocletian: It appears that the enemy of our race was bent on destroying France to its very foundations. He has more corrupted men, done more mischief to the human race in the short space of ten years, than all the tyrants of Rome put together, from Nero down to the last persecutor of the Christians.65

Napoleon was perverted and he was vainglorious. He had ridden roughshod over his people, had no respect of liberty and bullied his subordinates. In sober, Suetonian truth, “Tiberius never made such a mockery of the human species”.66 To which one might add, each emperor spent their dying days an island: Tiberius on Capri, Napoleon on Saint Helena. In venturing to Egypt he was motivated by ambition alone, though his terrestrial forays fell far short of his idol’s: “Any man may dream he is making a conquest of the world”, sneers Chateaubriand, “but ALEXANDER 65  François-August—René, comte de Chateaubriand, Of Bonaparte and the Bourbons and of the Necessity of Rallying Around Our Legitimate Princes for the Happiness of France and of Europe (London: Henry Colburn, 1814), 16. 66  Chateaubriand, Bonaparte and the Bourbons, 24.

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alone accomplished it”.67 He may half conquered half of Europe, but he had quite a few legions to help him. With hundreds of thousands of men at his disposal, a greater man could have accomplished more. Supreme commanders have no need of such gargantuan armies. Besides, “the whole Roman Empire was protected by one hundred and fifty thousand men, and Caesar had but a few legions in Pharsalia”.68 Bonaparte preens himself beneath the laurels of the mighty, but he has not their grandeur. What is more, he is surly and tongue-tied: “Buonaparte is not a genuine great man: he wants that magnanimity which constitutes heroes and true monarchs. There is not one of those sayings quoted of him which announce ALEXANDER and CAESAR, HENRY IV and LOUIS XIV.”69 He lacks the wit to say “L’état, c’est moi”. Besides, it isn’t, and wasn’t. Basically, once you strip the pomp away, what you discover inside is a pygmy, and “The man of little worth and of indifferent abstraction is discovered beneath the mask of ALEXANDER and CAESAR”.70 Finally, Chateaubriand turns to Napoleon and addresses him direct. You are an impostor, a fraud, and you should now step aside. Your publicity is modern, but your misdemeanours are antique: The voice of the universe proclaims you the greatest culprit that ever appeared upon earth, for it is not upon a barbarous people or upon degenerated nations that you have poured so many calamities; it is in the midst of civilization, in an enlightened age that you wished to reign by the sword of ATTILA and the maxims of NERO71

This tract was not biography, of course. It was agitprop and diatribe, a clarion call to resistance. Chateaubriand never retracted it—the damage was already done—but after the Hundred Days, after Saint Helena, after Napoleon’s lonely death in 1821, he thought again. He had already started on his memoirs and was to work at them for forty years. Finally, they were published in instalments following his own death in 1848 as Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe, (Memoires From Beyond the Grave). They contain (rather as a coffin does a body), his final, considered thoughts on Napoleon.

 Chateaubriand, Bonaparte and the Bourbons, 32.  Chateaubriand, Bonaparte and the Bourbons, 36. 69  Chateaubriand, Bonaparte and the Bourbons, 46. 70  Chateaubriand, Bonaparte and the Bourbons, 48. 71  Chateaubriand, Bonaparte and the Bourbons, 54–5. 67 68

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The Mémoires are life-writing in a double sense. In relation to their author, they are autobiography; in relation to their subject (who, for much of the time, is Napoleon) they are biography of a certain, Romantic kind, a biography laced with appreciation, identification and remorse. “My admiration for Bonaparte”, he now tells us, thinking back to 1814 when he penned his passionate assault on his leadership, “has always been great, even when I attacked [him] with the greatest ferocity”.72 What emerges is a complicated piece of portraiture, compounded of puzzled wonderment, and something approaching adoration: Napoleon in three dimensions. It centres around two themes: personal encounter and venerated entombment. Chateaubriand and the subject of his attachment-­cum-detestation and his rapt obsession (it is not too forceful a word) met twice. The first occasion was in 1802 shortly after Chateaubriand’s return from exile in England. The concordat with the Pope had been signed the previous year, and Bonaparte was keen to appear in the guise of defender of Mother Church. He had already chosen the Corsican Archbishop of Lyon, Joseph Flesch, as his emissary to the Vatican: he now needed a secular First Minister to accompany him. Chateaubriand, who was enjoying a burst of limelight after the recent publication of his Génie du christianisme, seemed the ideal candidate. He was standing in the gallery at a reception in the house of Napoleon’s brother Lucien, when the Emperor entered the room. Chateaubriand was struck by his appearance: “He was gentle and beautiful; his eyes were admirable, particularly on account of the way in which they were set beneath his forehead and framed in his eyebrows. There was as yet no charlatanism in his glace, nothing theatrical or affected. … A prodigious imagination animated the cold-blooded politician; he would not have been what he was if the Muse had not been there: reason carried out the ideas of the poet.”73 He told the young author of his admiration for the Egyptian Muslims who he had seen praying in desert. Chateaubriand went to Rome with Flesch; the two men quarrelled and Chateaubriand returned to Paris. In March 1804 the Duc d’Enghien was gunned down in the moat in Chantilly. Two days before, Chateaubriand had called on the emperor at the Tuileries to pay his respects. He was instantly struck by a 72  François Auguste René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe (Leipzig: Brockhaus & Avenarius, 1850), iv, 54. 73  Chateaubriand (1849–1850), iv, 51.

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transformation in his appearance: “his cheeks were hollow and livid, his eyes hard, his complexion pale and blotchy, his expression gloomy and fierce”.74 The emperor approached him and withdrew, approached again and again withdrew. Chateaubriand had before him a man distracted. This was neither the ingratiating presence of 1802 nor the ogre portrayed in the denunciatory screed of 1814. It was a human being on live coals, a sensibility enflamed, in certain respects a mirror image of the author himself. At the beginning of Book Two of the Mémoires Chateaubriand describes an ancient Hindu pandit memorialising the faithful departed with a rosary of flowers. This is cultural deflection: the rosary is Roman Catholic and his own, and the dead whose memory he is honouring are four, or maybe five. His mistress and patroness Pauline de Montmorin Saint-Hérem had been the daughter of one of Louis XVI’s most trusted diplomats who lost his life in the Massacres of September 1792; her mother and brother were both guillotined in 1794. It was at her house in Savigny-sur-Orne that he had completed La Génie. Succumbing to tuberculosis, she had accompanied him to Rome, where she expired in their house close to the Spanish Steps in 1803. In his written homage she is joined by his sister Lucile to whom he was intensely, almost incestuously attached, and who died the following November. Emotionally disturbed, she had been an enthusiastic follower of Rousseau whose confessional sensibility pervades Chateaubriand’s account of his own life throughout. These two women frame a central tableau occupied by Napoleon and the Duc d’Enghien. At opposite ends of the ideological spectrum they are joined in Chateaubriand’s characteristically reconciling imagination. In 1816, after Napoleon’s banishment to Saint Helena, the Duc’s remains were exhumed and re-buried in the Sainte Chapelle at the Palais de Vincennes: in 1840, even as Chateaubriand was writing, Napoleon’s body was transported from its humble and distant grave in St Helena and re-interred with much pomp and ceremony in Les Invalides. Chateaubriand had wanted them left where they were, in rustic and primitive solitude. So “the abandoned skeleton of the duc d’Enghien and Napoleon’s lonely grave at St Helena would have made a pair: there would have been nothing more commemorative than those remains, at opposite ends of the earth”.75 By the time the book was published (1849–1850), their graves,  Chateaubriand (1849–1850), iv, 96.  Chateaubriand (1849–1850), iv, 135.

74 75

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and those of Chateaubriand’s two beloved men had been joined by a fifth: Chateaubriand’s own. Thus the book comes at us d’Outre-Tombe in far more than an individual sense. Towards the end of Book Two, Chateaubriand does everything that he can to sanctify, even canonise, the former emperor, at least partly, one suspects as an act of Christian charity and remorse. Placing him in the centre of this reredos of memorial statues, flanked by two men and two women, also has the surprising effect of feminising him. Napoleon’s last few years isolated on a tiny island off the coast of South America are depicted as an almost holy sojourn: a condition of dedicated renunciation, a contemplative retreat. These chapters hover between Romantic biography and hagiography. As he tells the beads and flowers of his private rosary, Chateaubriand springs a trick on us. One ancient biographical mode—the diatribe—is exchanged or sacrificed for another—the saint’s life.

Plutarch & Co. Amyot, North and Montaigne were approximate contemporaries—and Shakespeare, even if he absorbed his Montaigne as late as Florio’s translation of 1603, followed very soon after. It is through these authors that the works of Plutarch—the Lives pre-eminently, but also the Moralia—entered the bloodstream of the European Renaissance. There were, however, national differences in the subsequent patterns of reception. So recent had been Amyot’s translation—a mere twenty-one years old when the first volume of Montaigne’s essays appeared—that Montaigne is able to treat his great Hellenistic forebear almost as a familiar contemporary, spooning from his richness homely lessons as to how to order your existence, how to regulate your personality, how to comport yourself in society, even how usefully to be alone. During the eighteenth century, however, the legacy of Plutarch in France inevitably got caught up in the ongoing political debate about governance and social justice. By the time of the Revolution, the French perception of Plutarch had in consequence narrowed down. Thenceforth, and for the whole of the nineteenth century, he came to be seen as the custodian and champion of republican rectitude, martial resolve, and certain stridently civic virtues: la liberté, l’egalité, la fraternité. This is the Plutarch to whose monolithic memory Corday, the last of the Montagnards, Stendhal and the young Bonaparte had dedicated themselves, and this is the Plutarch enshrined in popular French post-Romantic culture. Once Plutarch had been politicised, there was no going back.

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The result was a radical re-reading of classical life-writing in line with the ideology of the times. It was a re-reading that re-orientated several aspects of the nation’s life: its ideals of leadership, its conduct of affairs, its military strategy, its art and architecture. Though it was to last for well over a hundred years, the origins of this melange date from the Revolution. As Karl Marx later remarked, “Camille, Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their times in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases”.76 In the words of Simon Schama: There was no higher praise for orators than to be compared with the figures from antiquity whom they sought to emulate. The French Revolution was obsessed with the model of the Roman Republic in particular, and it was Cicero’s speeches as well as oratory reported in the histories of Sallust, Livy and Plutarch to which it looked for inspiration. Camille Desmoulins, for example, quoted Cicero no less than forty-three times during his relatively brief periods in the revolutionary assemblies, and Brissot quoted him by way of Plutarch ten times.77

Madame Roland and Charlotte Corday were then very far from unique in seeing in the Roman republic some sort of ideal: The result was to create a powerful bond of identification between ancient and modern republicans. … “Roman” patriotism (for it was much more rarely Athenian) shares some of the virtues of the cult of sensibility, but in other respects it was differently accentuated. For one thing, it was less inclined to marinate in the lachrymose, but instead exalted stoical self-­ possession over emotional outpouring. It was, quite self-consciously, a “virile” or masculine culture: austere, muscular and inflexible, rather than tremulous, sensitive and compassionate. As a style of architecture and interior decoration neo-classicism worked with stripped—down and severe forms: capitals that were plain Doric rather than elaborately Corinthian or delicately Ionic. And the publication of Roman wall painting (by the future ultra-Jacobin Sylvan Maréchal among others) from Pompeii and Herculaneum popularised a relief-like formalism.78

76  Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1954), 11. 77  Schama, 169. 78  Schama, 171.

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The revolutionary period had transformed the ways in which Plutarch, pre-eminently among classical authors, was read. The versatile and curious observer of human affairs, so beloved of Montaigne and Shakespeare, faded out to be replaced by someone hard, obdurate and resolute. Plutarch was politicised and, in the process, guillotined. This narrowing of perspective was to have far-reaching consequences, for French classical scholarship, but also for officially espoused, nationalist political and military ideology until, as we shall see Chap. 8, the façade came crashing down in 1914. But that is a story for Chap. 8.

Bibliography and Further Reading Anita Brookner, Jacques-Louis David (London: Chatto and Windus, 1980). Simon Burrows, French Exile Journalism and European Politics, 1792–1814 (Martlesham, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2000). Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History [1837] (Oxford University Press, 1907). François Auguste-René de Chateaubriand, Of Bonaparte and the Bourbons and of the Necessity of Rallying Around Our Legitimate Princes for the Happiness of France and of Europe (London: Henry Colburn, 1814). François Auguste-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe (Leipzig: Brockhaus & Avenarius, 1849–1850). Jules Claretie, Les Derniers Montagnards: Histoire de l’Insurrection de Prairial An III D’Après les Documents Originaux et Inédits (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1865). Michel Corday, Charlotte Corday tr. E.  F. Buckley (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1931). Pierre Corneille, Théâtre Complet texte prefacé et annoté par Pierre Lièvre; edition complétée par Roger Caillois (Paris: Gallimard, 1957). Couet-Gironville, Charlotte Corday. Décapitée A Paris, Le 17 Juillet 1793 ou Mémoire Pour Servir à l’Histoire de la Vie de Cette Femme Célèbre (Paris: Chez le Citoyen Gilbert, 1796). Jean Epois, L’Affaire Corday-Marat: Prelude à la Terreur (Paris: FeniXX réédition numérique, 1980). Gilbert Romme (1750–1795) et son temps, Ed. Jean Ehrard and Albert Sobeul (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966). David Hume, “Of Suicide”, National Library of Scotland Ms. 509. Anne Jefferson, Biography and The Question of Literature in France (Oxford University Press, 2007). Francesco Manzini, Stendhal’s Parallel Lives: Romanticism and After in France (Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2004).

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Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1954). Jules Michelet, Les Femmes de la Révolution (Paris: Editions Adolphe Delahays, 1854). Michel de Montaigne, Essais Edition présentée, établie et annotée par Emmanuel Naya, Delphine Reguig-Naya et Alexandre Tarrête 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). Montesquieu, Oeuvres de Montesquieu avec Les Remarques des Divers Commentateurs et Les Notes Inédites. Seul Edition Complète (Paris: D’Antoine Bavaux, 1825). Thomas Mortimer, The British Plutarch, Containing the Lives of the Most Eminent Statesmen, Patriots, Divines, Warriors, Philosophers, Poets, and Artists, of Great Britain and Ireland, From the Accession of Henry VIII to the Present Time, Including a Compendious View of the History of England During That Period, 6 vols. (London: Edward Dilly 1762; second edition 12 vols. 1774). A further edition was issued in 1791 under the imprint of Edward Dilly’s brother Charles. A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (Newport, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). Marianne Pade, The Reception of Plutarch’s Lives in Fifteenth-Century Italy (2 vols., University of Chicago Press, Distributed for the Tuscularum Press, 2007). Plutarque de Charonée, Les vies des hommes illustres Grecs et Romains comparéés l’une à l’autre translatées de Grec en François par Monsieur Jacques Amyot Abbé de Bellozane, Eveque d’Auxerre etc. (Paris: Michel de Vascosan, 1554–1560). Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes Compared together by the grave learned Philosopher and Historiographer, Plutarke of Chaeronea Translated out of Greek into French by James Amyot, Abbot of Bellozane, Bishop of Auxerre, etc. and out of French into English by Thomas North (London: Thomas Vautroulier and John Wright, 1579). Frederick Raphael, Antiquity Matters (Newport, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). Madame Roland, Lettres, Ed. Claude Perroud (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1802). Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knoft, 1989). James Shapiro, 1599, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber, 2005). William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Ed. John Wilders (Bloomsbury: Arden Shakespeare, 3rd Series, 1995). William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Ed. Peter Holland (Bloomsbury: Arden Shakespeare, 3rd Series, 2013). William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Ed. David Daniell (Bloomsbury: Arden Shakespeare 3rd Series, 1998). William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Eds. Anthony Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton (Bloomsbury: Arden Shakespeare 3rd Series, 2008).

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Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), Une Vie de Napoléon, texte établi et annoté avec un avant-propos par Louis Royer; Préface de Albert Pingaud (Paris: H. Champion, 1929). Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), Une Vie de Napoléon and Mémoires sur Napoléon, Edition établie et présentée par Catherine Mariette (Paris: Editions Stock, 1998). H. Stewarton pseud, The Revolutionary Plutarch: Exhibiting the Most Distinguished Characters, Literary, Military and Political in The Recent Annals of the French Republic the Greater Part from The Original Information of a Gentleman Resident in Paris, 3rd Edition (London: John Murray, 1804/5). H. Stewarton pseud, The Female Revolutionary Plutarch, Containing Biographical, Historical and Revolutionary Sketches, Characters and Anecdotes (London: John Murray, 1805, second edition 1808). Geoffrey Strickland, Stendhal: The Education of a Novelist (Cambridge University Press, 1974). Kathryn Tempest, Brutus The Noble Conspirator (Newport, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). Chantal Thomas, “Les exemples de Charlotte Corday et de Madame Roland”, Po&Sie 49 (Bicentenaire de 1789). Marc de Vissac, Un Conventionnel du Puy-de-Dôme: Romme le Montagnard (Clermond-Ferrand: Dilhan-Vivès, 1883). Cornélie-Pétronville-Bénédicte Wouters, Baronne de Vassé, Le Plutarch anglais, 12 vols. (Paris: 1785–6).

CHAPTER 2

Ancient Biographers and Modern Classicists: “What Is Truth?”

The reception, translation, discussion and appropriation of classical biography during the period of the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath—as we have just seen—proves very revealing of how, in any given slice of historical time, structures of assumption, priority and interpretation, immediately relevant to that age itself, come to be constructed atop a sub-stratum of ancient texts, influencing and even in some cases determining conventional patterns of reading and re-enactment. We turn to such readings to find out what our recent ancestors thought about the ancients, but more usually we turn to them to discover what these people thought about themselves. Stendhal’s Plutarch does indeed have much to tell us about Plutarch; he has even more to tell us about Stendhal. This generalisation is true of all subsequent centuries, including our own. Ancient biography has been subjected to an ever-growing body of specialist commentary in the present age. In part, this reflects a burgeoning corpus of knowledge around these texts, a welcome archival acuity, a sharper focus, a truer aim than were evident in ages past. It also inevitably speaks to preoccupations of our own, contemporary concerns and cultural conflicts only half visible to us but probably evident to future times, nagging anxieties in the here-and-now concerning the nature and scope of literature and truth, both in the academic world and well beyond it. As a result, a set of wide-ranging conversations has taken place among the classicist community, especially in England, America and Germany, on the nature and meaning of biographical representation, one which to © The Author(s) 2020 R. Fraser, After Ancient Biography, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35169-4_2

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noticeable extent parallels equivalent conversations in the circle of non-­ classicist literary critics. As we shall see, the subject has also been of some interest to philosophers, particularly those with a classical or literary background. Within all of these communities, parallel concerns have been aired concerning the meaning, origin and evolution of biographical writing, and the limits of the biographical: what counts as biography and what does not. These questions are both very old—as old as biographical writing itself—and perennially new. Consequently, the conversations about them have been continuous. In this chapter I shall attempt to discuss some connections between them.

Biography in The Dock It is no arbitrary claim that the twentieth-century specialist debate concerning the significance, meaning and origins of biography in the ancient world begins with the august but fallible figure of Arnaldo Dante Momigliano (1908–1987). As recently as 2018, in their book Ancient Biography: Identity Through Lives, Sandra Cairns and Trevor Luke acknowledge him as the compass point from whom subsequent bearings have been taken.1 Momigliano’s seminal contributions to the subject are all the more instructive and interesting in that, throughout his long career, which ranged from Italy to Britain and the United States, he manifested the most extreme ambivalence towards the practice of biography, both as craft and as field of study. Momigliano’s Carl Newell Jackson Lectures The Development of Greek Biography, delivered at Harvard in 1968, are normally taken as the most succinct expression of his views. The lectures cover the beginnings of biographical writing in the Greek world, but they start by worrying about the contemporary status of the form. “When I was young”, Momigliano begins, “scholars wrote history and gentlemen wrote biography. But were they gentlemen? Scholars were beginning to wonder.”2 This was a quite loaded statement, taking its origin and tone from the niceties of European, and more narrowly of English, cultural hierarchy. “Scholars” are professionals, “gentlemen” amateurs. It is the amateurs, on this view, who 1  Ancient Biography: Identity Through Lives eds Francis Cairns and Trevor Luke (Prenton: Francis Cairns, 2018), vi. 2  Arnaldo Momigliano, The Development of Greek Biography Expanded Edition (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1.

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are wont to write biographies. The question thus arose as to whether professional scholars like Momigliano should bother their heads about them. These misgivings were all the more poignant since thirty-five years previously Momigliano himself seemed set to be a biographer. His life of the Emperor Claudius had been published in Italian in 1932 when he was twenty-four and issued in English two years later.3 When, mid-way through that troubled decade, Robert Graves came to write his middle-brow novels I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935) he had relied for much of the political context of the emperor’s reign on the English translation of Momigliano’s book. This had exclusively concerned itself with politics and governance and had more or less ignored Claudius’s private life. In vain will you scour the early books of Momigliano for the salacious circumstances that have attracted the gaze of ancient and modern biographers, prominent in Suetonius and Tacitus and also in Graves. Indeed, in his introduction, Momigliano had advertised his reticence on this score: “It is scarcely necessary to add that Agrippina and Messalina and their kind (le Agripinne e le Messaline) will appear but in the dim background (in vaga lontananza) of this essay”.4 Following his book on Claudius, Momigliano had completed a slender work on Philip of Macedon, hailed in The Classical Review as “a masterpiece”,5 and soon afterwards contributed articles on Plutarch and Suetonius to the Enciclopedia Italiana. There were to be biographical sketches of fellow ancient historians George Grote (1952) and Gaetano de Sanctis (1957), the much revered second of whom had been his teacher in Rome. He would also write on that eminent Swiss student of the Italian Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt (1955). In all of these exercises, Momigliano was palpably more at ease with the professional and public conduct of his subjects than with their private lives, a topic he carefully avoids. There were profound reasons for this embargo, since Momigliano the private individual had himself suffered acutely in ways of which he was reluctant to speak. Scion of the well-established Jewish community in 3  Arnaldo Momigliano, L’Opera dell’imperatore Claudio (Firenze: Valecchi, 1932); trans as Claudius the Emperor and His Achievement trans. W.D.  Hogarth (Oxford University Press, 1934). 4  Momigliano (1932, xiii, 1934a, 9). 5  Arnaldo Momigliano, Phippo il Macedone. Saggio sulla storia greca des 1V secolo A.  C. (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1934). Reviewed in The Classical Review Vol. 50. Issue I (February 1936), 32–3.

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Piedmont, he was from a family of biographers, the most illustrious among whom had been his father’s first cousin: the socialist, Jewish moderniser and biographer of Mazzini, Felice Momigliano (1866–1924), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rome and an influential friend of the dramatist Pirandello. Late in life, Arnaldo drafted a biographical sketch of Felice, published posthumously as part of the section on “The Jews in Italy” in Essays in Ancient and Modern Judaism (1996). It portrays his distinguished relative as a victim of racial prejudice and of cultural, political and religious confusion. As a boy Arnaldo had been taught the Pater Noster by Felice in his uncle’s own Hebrew translation. Half a century later, this is what he has to say of him: The most original thinker among all of my socialist relatives, he tried to combine socialism, Mazzini, and the Hebrew prophets, but found himself thrown out of the socialist party when the war came in 1915. About the enigmatic and tragic figure of this religious thinker, who was basically a reformed Jew like his friend Claude Montefiore—in a country where there has never been an organized Reform Judaism—there is much to be said, if we want to understand why the Jews were less a part of Italian life than they thought they were.6

“There is much to be said”, this biographer manqué concedes, yet stops short of saying it. The nephew calls his uncle “tragic”. He does not spell out the dreadful fact that on April 6, 1924 the fifty-seven-year-old Felice threw himself off the balcony of his flat in the Via Antonio Musa in Rome, or that the respected Franciscan psychologist Fra Agostino Gemelli, founder and rector of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, and a supporter of the papal concordat with Mussolini, promptly published an article rejoicing at his death. One Jew less.7 Arnaldo had been a brilliant student at the University of Turin, and by his early 20s was already established in a chair at Rome. This was the period of those early biographies, but they were completed at a cost. After 1931, it had been mandatory for Italian academics to join Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista if they wished to keep their jobs. De Sanctis 6  Arnaldo Momigliano, Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism Edited with an Introduction by Silvia Benty, Translated by Maura Masella-Gayley (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 130–1. 7  For the suicide, Alberto Cavaglion, Felice Momigliano (1866–1924): Una Biografia (Napoli: Instituto italiano per gli study storici, 1988), 203.

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who, as his one-time student Momigliano was later to remark, “did not know what fear was”, refused. He forfeited his chair; Momigliano complied and kept his post. When this fact came to light seven years after his death, it caused a small flutter in the academic world; Momigliano himself had never spoken of it. In 1938, however, new racial laws agreed between Mussolini and Hitler had obliged him to relinquish his post. With his wife Gemma and their daughter Anna-Laura he fled to England, where he became a member of the group of intellectual exiles known as “The Bund”, centred around the Ashmolean museum in Oxford. About this time too, he met a young undergraduate reading Classical Mods and Greats at Somerville College, later to become famous as a philosopher and novelist: Iris Murdoch. After the war he returned briefly to Pisa before being appointed to chairs at Bristol and at University College, London, where he remained for twenty-four years, building a formidable reputation as an exceptionally versatile but sometimes irascible scholar. He used to refer to his academic adversaries as “imbeciles”.8 Gradually he had learned that eleven members of his own family had perished in the Holocaust, including his parents. His private life grew even more fraught when in May 1952, on weekly visits to Oxford research in the Bodleian, his friendship with Murdoch turned into an affair that was urgent and dependent on his side, compliant and sympathetic on hers: “moving and enormously saddening” is how she described his eager love in his diary. They read Dante together on Saturday nights before he returned to his single room in the Old Parsonage Hotel in the Banbury Road. Thrice they travelled to Italy together, and on July 15, 1953, her thirty-fourth birthday, he presented her with a copy of Dante’s Rime at the poet’s grave side in Ravenna. By this time, they were lovers. Three years later, Murdoch announced her engagement to the literary scholar John Bayley, and Momigliano requested that all of his presents be returned.9 Did he think he might divorce Gemma and marry Iris? He does not tell us, nor does Peter J. Conradi, from whose biography of Murdoch these facts are gleaned. Momigliano’s former doctoral supervisee Oswyn Murray in his short study “Arnaldo Momigliano in England” is similarly 8  The historian Peter Burke, who taught me Burckhardt at university, said of Momigliano that he was the second most intelligent person he had ever known; the most intelligent was Isaiah Berlin. 9  Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (London: Harper Collins, 2001), 313–5.

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guarded.10 A deep decorum, which he himself would have welcomed, shrouds much of Momigliano’s personal life. It was a discretion much of its time that would, however, have been quite alien to some of the classical biographers whom he had studied and about whom he had written. As the Columbia classicist William Harris remarked on the appearance in 1996 of Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism: “Momigliano deplored the merely biographical in the history of scholarship, but biography kept breaking in”. Whatever his conflicted feelings about the biographical form, Momigliano seems to have been quite clear about one thing: he did not wish himself to be made the subject of biographical speculation. In his review, Harris was deliberately violating this preference. His article was headed “The silences of Momigliano”.11 Poignant as was Momigliano’s shyness in the face of personal revelation, and sceptical as he may have been as to the legitimacy of biographical probing, in none of these things was he untypical of his time. In the critical world of the mid-twentieth century, both classicist and early modernist, biography as a field of study was widely held to be suspect. The most extreme form this aversion took was the adumbration of the “Biographical Fallacy”, according to which the life of an author was held to be irrelevant when it came to an understanding of his (it usually was his) work. By 1967 indeed Roland Barthes, the doyen of Parisian literary critics, was claiming that the writer, as the ultimate reference point for an interpretation of his work, was in effect dead. The source of this taboo was a reaction against the nineteenth-century habit of regarding works of literature in the light of their writer’s daily lives, the most notorious instance of which in France had been the gossipy Causeries du lundi by the socialite literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869) published weekly in Paris newspapers between 1849 and his death. In 1909 Marcel Proust had subjected this tendency to gentle scrutiny in his book Contre Sainte-Beuve, championing the autonomy of fiction in the face of naïve biographical interpretation. It is no accident, therefore, that the pros and cons of this approach have been most vigorously discussed in the context of Proust criticism.12 10  Oswyn Murray, “Arnaldo Momigliano in England”, History and Theory, Vol. 30, No. 4 “The Presence of the Historian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano”. 11  W.V. Harris, “The silences of Momigliano”, The Times Literary Supplement, Friday April 12, 1996, 6–7. 12  I assessed the implications of this debate a quarter of a century ago in the paragraphs on Sainte-Beuve in my monograph Proust and the Victorians: The Lamp of Memory (London:

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Akin to the “Biographical” was the “Intentional Fallacy”, first expounded in an article by the American critics W.K.  Wimsatt Jnr and M.R. Beardsley in 1946, according to which, when examining a work of literature, an author’s purposes, declared or undeclared, were not be taken into account.13 These twin proscriptions ruled the roost in academic-­ critical circles for the better part of forty years but, among literary biographers, they were more honoured in the breach than in the observance. Indeed, it would have been next to impossible to operate successfully as a literary biographer if, in all literalness, one avoided these taboos. Their origin and justification lay in the theory, dating back at least as far as T.S.  Eliot’s influential essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” of 1919, a work of literature as impersonal and sacrosanct, severed from the compromising circumstances of its making. Yet this theory of Eliot’s, as his recent biographers have not been slow to point out, itself possesses roots in the poet’s personal life. The desired restrictions, one might add, were principally applied to literary rather than political discourse. Few seem to have thought that the character of Napoleon was irrelevant to his conquests or that the personality of Winston Churchill, widely biographised then as now, was irrelevant to our victories and defeats. Against this general background, however, Momigliano’s refusal to entertain any discussion of Claudius’s private life in his estimate of his governance is not difficult to understand.

The Quest for Origins In any case, by 1968, when Momigliano came to deliver his famous Harvard lectures, attitudes to biography, both among classicists and among critics of modern literature, had gradually begun to turn. What had been a proscribed topic was becoming a vogue. “Even in the palmy days of the eighteenth century when Plutarch was the master”, Momigliano instructed his audience, “are nothing in comparison with the present popularity of biography among historians in general, and the ancient historians in particular”.14 Gradually, biography had come to be viewed as a distinct genre, with its own attractions and rules, its own strengths and Macmillan, 1994) pp. 93–4, 118–19, 141 and 261–2. 13  W.K. Wimsatt Jr. and M.R. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy”, The Sewanee Review Vol. 54, No. 3 (July–September, 1946), 468–488. 14  Momigliano (1971, 5).

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weaknesses, its own amplitude and limitation of scope. In the interval, a slew of questions had surfaced around the generic definition of various kinds of life-writing in the ancient world and about the status of these varieties of testimony as truth-telling. What were the origins of ancient biography? Was it of one kind or of several kinds? Was there ever such thing as a tradition of biography in the ancient world? Was there more than one tradition? Could ancient biography be distinguished from history? How did ancient biographers regard themselves? Where, and in what manner, could we distinguish in their work between fact and fiction? In Momigliano’s mind these questions were closely related. If you could unearth the earliest roots of biographical writing, you might be able to work out what kind of thing biography was. And if you could connect the earliest instances of biographical writing to other developments that were going on at the same time—in culture, politics and literature—you might be able to contextualise its rise and to distinguish it from several forms of expression with which it might otherwise be confused: history, for example, or tragedy. There was an additional question: of much interest to classicists and of some long-term interest to the rest of us as well. How much, and in what way, in this particular generic development, did the Romans owe to the Greeks? There were two ways of investigating the last of these problems, and during the twentieth century both had their exponents. One was to argue from the Romans backwards; the other was to probe from the Greeks forwards. In 1901 the Pomeranian classicist Friedrich Leo, Rector of Gottingen and a colleague of Wilamowitz, published a well-regarded book entitled Graeco-Roman Biography in Relation to Its Literary Form [Die griechische-römische Biographie nach ihrer literarischen Form]. Leo had taken a good hard look at the most two best known biographers of the Roman age, Plutarch and Suetonius—subjects of our Chaps. 3 and 4— from the point of view of the characteristic structures of their work. In Plutarch, he had argued, you have a fairly straightforward rehearsal of life events from the cradle to the grave (though this is complicated by the fact that his lives come in pairs—one Greek and one Roman—followed by an essay in which the two of them are compared). Suetonius also gives you the basic facts of his subject’s lives and careers, but he devotes the lion’s share of each account to a resumé of their qualities good and bad, set out as a kind of balance sheet of achievements and failings. Leo had noted that of the surviving works of Suetonius—his Illustrious Men and his Lives of the Caesars—the first concentrates on writers and the second on

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statesmen. Thus the first represents a set of literary, the second a set of political, biographies. Leo’s theory was that the distinctive form which Suetonius, a grammaticus or critic and teacher of literature, had adopted in both works was far more appropriate to authors than to politicians. Therefore, he argued, Suetonius must have taken the template of his literary lives and applied it with uneven success to his twelve chosen emperors.15 Leo had then turned his attention to the roots of these forms, both of which he thought must have had fourth-century Greek antecedents. The Plutarchian form with its accumulation of detail, he thought, must have originated with the Peripatetics, students of Aristotle who applied the philosopher’s passion for classification to the subject matter of human lives. Once these Aristotelian methods had spread to Alexandria, they were, he argued, taken over by grammarians interested in the writers who had produced the contents of their famous library. The first phase had given rise to political, the second to literary, biography.16 On this view, biography was the invention of Aristotelian disciples: men such as Theophrastus, the second head of the peripatetic school who, as well as writing on botany, has left us a set of character types recognisable even today: the grumbler, the gossip, the miser and so forth. One thing for which we have to thank Leo, therefore, is his linking of the evolution of biography to the History of Ideas. Later in the twentieth century, an equivalent splicing of intellectual and literary history would lead the literary critic Ian Watt to explain the rise of the novel in England in the early eighteenth century to the influence of the Empiricists.17 In both instances, one suspects, the practice went hand in hand with the theory, and both were products, less of specific borrowing than of a suffused zeitgeist. About the same time as Watt, the polymathic German philologist Albrecht Dihle came up with an alternative theory of the development of Greek biography that traced its beginnings to a different philosophical school. In his book A Study of Greek Biography (Studien zur griechischen Biographie), Dihle adopts the Great Man view of literary history. If biography really got going in the fourth century BCE, this in his opinion could only have been because it found a supreme subject in Socrates. On this view, it was the 15  Friedrich Leo, Die griechsiche-römische Biographie nahr ihrer literarischen Form (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1901), 11 sq.; 135, 139 sqq.; 319. 16  Leo, 139 sqq. 17  Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957). See especially chapter one, “Realism and the Novel Form”.

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school of Socratics, with their various testimonies to the life and example of their master, who pioneered biography—or at least biographical consciousness. Many of these accounts are now lost, but the Socratic dialogues of Plato and several works by Xenophon, one-time general and Socratic acolyte, survive. Dihle labours under no illusion that these works represented biographies in the nineteenth- or twentieth-century sense. He speaks rather of “biographical elements” in them.18 We might add that they serve to raise the same questions as biographies in the conventional sense do. How true is this to what happened? How objective is it? Is the personality of the writer getting in the way? Xenophon, for example, left a long account of his mentor known since the Middle Ages as the Memorabilia. It is in several sections, the first two of which (one and two of its first chapter) read very much like a defence of Socrates against the charges levelled at him at his trial. This work has much to tell us about its author as about its ostensive subject. Of Xenophon himself we gather much: his belief in strong leadership and personal restraint, his faith in enlightened oligarchy and the traditional gods, his Polonius-like fondness for sententious truisms, his distrust of narcissistic self-display and the callow self-assurance of the young. All of these concerns he puts into Socrates’s mouth. By the same token, the many Socratic dialogues written by Plato are as much Platonic as they are Socratic, expressing as they do their author’s idealism (in both the philosophical and the everyday senses of that word), his belief in the Forms, his contempt for the mere body and his faith in life both before birth and after death. Indeed, so implicated are the thoughts of author and the subject— who also serves as a mouthpiece—that these dialogues have consistently been drawn on as prime sources for the intellectual systems of both men.

What Is Truth? There are other instances in these works of imaginative projection. Both Xenophon and Plato, for example, provide their narratives with dramatic contexts woven out of events that are typical though imagined (as distinct from imaginary: a vital distinction). In Plato’s Euthyphro, for example, the year is 399 BCE, and Socrates is on his way to his trial when he encounters the eponymous youth Euthyphro in the road. Euthyphro puts before him 18  Albrecht Dihle, Studien zur griechischen Biographie (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1956, 1970), passim.

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a moral and legal dilemma of direct relevance to the forthcoming proceedings. He has just given evidence against his own father, accusing him of manslaughter. The father has detained a day-labourer on their family farm on the Cycladean island of Naxos. A few days before, we are told, while working the fields, this labourer lost his temper with one of the family servants and killed him. In his zeal for justice, the father has inadvertently caused the death of the labourer, who has died in his bonds. When Socrates asks his disciple how he can bear to give evidence against his own parent, Euthyphro cites the example of Zeus who, according to a legend recounted by Hesiod, once put his father Cronos in chains. Cronos what is more had earlier extracted justice from his father Uranus and castrated him. So, according to Euthyphro, he is honouring the Gods by following them. In effect, he is displaying the very virtue of piety which Socrates is about to be tried for flouting.19 So far, so Plato. Did any of this happen? Socrates’s trial did for sure, but it would be a rash historian who went in search of an act of homicide taking place on Naxos in the year 399. The murder is almost certainly a convenient fiction supplied to give edge to the ensuing discussion around the meaning of piety. The frame is fictional; is it by that token “fictitious”? A far more fruitful line of inquiry, and one pursued recently by the American philosopher Blake Hestir, is to consider where Plato himself was inclined to position the boundary between truth and untruth.20 It is a question very relevant to an ancient philosopher who famously excluded all poets— a category which, in his view, seems to have included all imaginative writers—from his Republic on the grounds that they were prone to mislead the public. Where, we may well ask, in the context of this ancient debate, lies the difference between the fictional—regarded as an achievement of much imaginative literature—and the fictitious, normally presented as a vice, especially by prosecutors in court? Euthyphro’s tale, after all, is grounded in just the sort of hypothetic situation that specialists in the science of ethics habitually provide when illustrating a moral point at issue. Plato does this sort of thing time and time again, but Xenophon is far from immune from it. Both he and Plato recount symposia, dinner-party debates featuring Socrates and his circle that probably never took place.  Plato, Euthyphro, 4A–5B.  See Blake E.  Hestir, Plato on the Metaphysical Foundation of Meaning and Truth (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Hestir is particularly interested in parallels between Plato’s views on this subject and post-modernist “pluralist” notions of truth. 19 20

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And both of them left behind reconstructions of Socrates’s speech at his trial. Legal submissions in any case were already proving an important seedbed for biography, or at least for proto-biography. In the year 4003 Plato’s younger contemporary Lysias, who was born in Syracuse and had been earning his living writing speeches for the Athenians courts, took out an action against Eratothenes, one of the thirty tyrants who had terrorised the city during much of the previous year, and under whose heel Lysias himself had languished. Lysias was a passionate democrat, and his argument involved him in a virtual resumé of his life up until that point. It is a vivid piece of personal apologetics, but very far from unique. In an earlier speech Lysias observes that applicants for high office who are being examined by the presiding city council should be expected to render an account of their whole lives. The practice was known as dokimasia, and Momigliano identifies it as a contributory factor in the evolution of life-writing.21 The difference between Lysias on the one hand and Plato and Xenophon on the other is that we possess Lysias’s scripted speech, whereas the words that Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates are imagined, even if the argument reproduced is close to what we know of Socrates’s actual attitude. This kind of ventriloquism happens time and time again in their work. In the Memorabilia, for example, Xenophon gives us a hilarious conversation between Socrates and Plato’s brother Glaucon. Glaucon has aspirations to high office, and in order to take him down a peg or two, Socrates quizzes him as to his fitness, revealing in the process this young man’s entire ignorance of economics, foreign affairs and practically every topic with which as a would-be statesman he should have acquainted himself. At one point the penny drops and Glaucon cries out “are you making of fun of me?”22 The incident is very revealing both of Glaucon’s ambition and Socrates’s skill as a tease, but did it ever take place? Almost certainly, not. Does this mean, in Plato’s own terms, that he is being untruthful? There are many adjectives that could be applied to this sort of poetic licence: “playful”, “illuminating”, “resourceful”, “intriguing”, even “inspiring”. Writing in the 1960s, however, Momigliano is disinclined to give Plato the benefit of the doubt. As a professional historian, his criterion of truthfulness is a defiantly empirical one. Either an account of ancient events is to be relied on as evidence for a construction of the past, or it is not. If it is not, it is confusing or potentially mendacious.  Momigliano (1993, 53).  Xenophon, Memorabilia, 3.6.7.

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Momigliano’s choice for an epithet to describe the Socratic approach to life-writing fell on “infuriating”: The Socratics were infuriating in their own time. They are still infuriating in our time. They are never so infuriating as when approached from the point of view of biography. We like biography to be true or false, honest or dishonest. Who can use such terminology for Plato’s Phaedo or Apology, or even for Xenophon’s Memorabilia? We should all like to dismiss Plato, who cared too much about the bigger truth to be concerned with small factual inaccuracy. We should all like to save Xenophon the honest mediocre historian, who told the facts as he knew them best, by damning Xenophon the Socratic memorialist, who lost interest in historical correctness.23

Momigliano, it is clear, is approaching these works with the priorities of an academic historian: someone who wishes to unearth the factual past with the evidence at his disposal. As such he inevitably bumps into the problem that, viewed as evidence, biography—which he straightforwardly defines as “the account of the life of a man from birth to death”—is a very peculiar kind of source. Momigliano was lecturing to fellow classicists and, even if he were not, his pronouns gave him away. Who are these “we” who so wished to dispose of Plato and to rescue the reputation of Xenophon? Not surely fellow philosophers, though as Karl Popper unforgettably demonstrated in the first volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies, philosophers have sometimes been keen to take issue with the Platonic inheritance: in Popper’s instance for espousing a sort of proto-Fascism. Few philosophers, however, would quarrel with Platonic dialogue as a genre. And who are these people who so devoutly wish biography to be either true or untrue? Not surely all biographers or the many readers of biography who turn to biographies for escape or entertainment.

Some Aspects of Truthfulness Professionally narrow though it may now appear, Momigliano’s emphatic intervention proved invaluable since it served to raise questions of prime relevance to the nature of biography and, for that matter, of veracity. What exactly do “we”—in the broader sense of those who write or read biography, or both—expect of the form? What is our standard of truth, always  Momigliano (1993, 46).

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supposing that there is such a thing as a standard? All of these questions have changed complexion over time, which is not to say that the prevailing solutions have become any more convincing. Momigliano conceded this up to a point when he recognised, not simply that biography is not history but that, by at least the beginning of the fourth century BCE, the distinction between biography and history was already well advanced. “Greek historians”, he remarked, “were concerned with political and military events. Their subject matter was states, not individuals.”24 He was far less happy to concede that truth itself is an elastic term. Moreover, by claiming his twentieth-century audience found the Socratics as infuriating as their contemporaries did—and by implication in the same kind of way—Momigliano bypassed a vital issue. Across the centuries notions of truth have gradually but emphatically changed. To put it a different way, such notions have become distanced and ironised. In the late twentieth century this tendency, and its implications for the semantics of truth-telling, came to be examined in two successive lecture courses delivered as part of the same ongoing series in Cambridge. The Clark Lectures have been delivered annually under the auspices of Trinity College since 1888, and the lecturers have included T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, André Maurois talking about biography, and Frank Kermode talking about Forster. On these two occasions the speakers were philosophers equipped with radically different notions of truth. In 1987 the Clark lecturer was the American philosopher Richard Rorty who, under the general heading “Irony and Solidarity”, used the platform to mount a full frontal attack on The Logical Positivist conception of truth as a faithful representation of the real world associated with A.J.  Ayer and his “Verification Principle”.25 For Ayer a proposition had been either true or untrue. It was true if it consisted of a tautology (i.e., if its inevitable correctness derived from the very nature of the terms it employed) or if it could be attested by reference to an empirically ascertainable state of affairs (call this a fact). If it failed to meet either of these conditions, such a proposition was a pseudo-statement or a falsehood (for Ayer, all myths and most poems fell into this category). In his Clark lectures, and in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, the book based on them which appeared two years later, Rorty propounded an alternative vision of truth as multivalent, hybrid and relativistic. For Rorty, any observation  Momigliano (1993, 39).  A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (Oxford University Press, 1936).

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tells us as much about the observer as it does about the world. “Truth”, he asserted, “cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own unaided by the describing activities of humans cannot.”26 Though Rorty did not mention biography specifically, either in his lectures or in his book, the implications of this position for the trustworthiness of written accounts of the lives of others—or of the self for that matter—are obvious. In 1993 the Clark lecturer was the classically educated British philosopher Bernard Williams, who used the opportunity to counter Rorty’s argument. His title was “Three Models of Truthfulness” and his lectures formed part of the foundation for his last book, Truth and Truthfulness, published nine years later. Williams was an impressive and showy lecturer, who distrusted his own showiness.27 He was also palpably a product of the Oxford Literae Humaniores school, especially of the second part of it called Classical Greats which mixes philosophy with ancient history. Williams had taken this course at a time when Logical Positivism was a dominant influence in Oxford. Throughout his lectures, he uses Greek history as a testing ground for rival conceptions of the truth, but he also insists that truth, contra Rorty, is something reliably ascertainable. Williams was thirdly, and in some eyes uncomfortably, a moralist who connected the deployment of untruth with the practice of deception. Again, the relevance of this stance to the obligations implicit in the art of biography is overwhelming. Take the scholarly ideal of accuracy, regarded by the majority of biographers as incumbent on themselves. Williams approvingly quotes a statement by an earlier classical scholar, A.E. Housman (this one, it is true, a poet) that in scholarly work accuracy is not a virtue, but a duty. In order to defend this position, he feels obliged to demonstrate how this ideal came about and how it is to be distinguished from other and earlier modes of accounting such as myth. This he does by contrasting the procedures of the two leading Greek historians, Herodotus and Thucydides. Both writers tell us about Minos, the legendary King of  Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4.  In 1993 Williams seemingly delivered his talks extempore as he prowled across the stage. The impression he gave was of a man walking through his thought. My neighbours along the eighth row were overheard to remark “He’s really a classicist, you know”. In reality, Williams brought the two disciplines into perfect alignment. 26 27

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Crete. From their respective accounts, however, it is clear that Herodotus believed that Minos once existed, whereas to Thucydides it was clear that he did not. In the chapter of his book headed “What was wrong with Minos?” Williams accordingly argues that while for Herodotus the legendary King of Crete was a sort of misty and ill-conceived fact, for Thucydides he was a product of unreliable hearsay, of the noise of gossip. Another way of putting this is that by the close of the fifth century BCE, Minos had come to be recognised as a figure of “myth” as distinct from “history”.28 Myth was now to be discerned as something different from, and perhaps inferior to, the chronicled course of events. Williams connects this with what he calls the invention of historical time, which he views not so much as an improvement as an intellectual opportunity: “The invention of historical time was an intellectual advance, but not every intellectual advance consists of refuting error or uncovering confusion. Like many other inventions, it enabled people to do things they could not conceive of doing before it happened.” In Chap. 3 of this book I shall be dealing with this distinction between myth and history insofar as it relates to the lives written by Plutarch, some of whose subjects such as Theseus and Romulus are evidently mythic, whereas others such as Nicias and Crassus are equally evidently historical. The concept of myth is also important when we come to deal with the Christian gospels, as we do in Chap. 5, and to hagiography in late antiquity, as we do in Chap. 6. In the meantime, it is important to recognise that by the 1990s it had become commonplace in scholarly circles, classical and non-classical, to recognise that truth in literary discourse has many layers, and that this impacts on standards of verisimilitude in biographical, as well in as other sorts of, writing. Consider, for example, the issue of quotation. We have already seen, with the assistance of Bernard Williams, how Thucydides shunned legend, but this does not preclude the possibility that he consciously used quasi-­ fictional devices in his work. An obvious example is Pericles’s oration in honour of the dead following the end of the first Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE.29 That the speech was delivered in that year none would deny, but by his own admission Thucydides reproduces something that represents the sort of thing Pericles said rather than his actual words, no written transcript having survived. Manifestly, Thucydides was visualising the 28  Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton University Press, 2002), 149–161. 29  Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.34–2.46.

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speech, much as a thousand years later Shakespeare, relying on Plutarch, was to visualise Mark Anthony’s speech to the Roman mob after the assassination of Julius Caesar. The occasion was real enough, but the words were imagined (again, as distinct from imaginary). Once that is conceded—as indeed it must be—it puts Thucydides on an equal footing with Plato and Xenophon as recorders of the statements of others. If Plato and Xenophon were found by Momigliano to be “infuriating”, surely Thucydides should in this respect be infuriating as well? The issue of truth as distinct from non-truth is manifested more complicated than Momigliano in his time would have allowed.

Fact and Fiction in the Theory of Biography As a result, come the millennium, the art of biography began to be perceived in quite a different light, in both modernist and classicist circles. To both it was clear that, if a decent theory of biographical representation was to be forthcoming, scholars would need to adjust their ideas on the boundary between fact and non-fact. As representatives of the new mood, one from each scholarly community, take Hermione Lee, biographer of Virginia Woolf amongst others, writing in 2009, and the Scandinavian classicist Tomas Hägg (1938–2011) whose last work, about biography in the ancient world, was published posthumously in 2012.30 Lee is very aware that conventional definitions of the biographical form have too frequently been derived from a dictionary or literary encyclopaedia, rather from wide reading across the genre. Such definitions prove inadequate in the face of the plethora of biographical literature. In fact, practically all precepts habitually associated with the biographical form turn out to be pretty illusory. In her Biography: A Very Short Introduction she lists some of them: . The story should be true. 1 2. The story should cover the whole life. 3. Nothing should be omitted or concealed. 4. All sources should be identified. 5. The biographer should know—that is be personally acquainted with—the subject. 30  For Hägg’s career, see Symbolae Oslonienses: Norwegian Journal of Greek and Latin Studies, Vol. 86, no. 1 (2012).

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. The biographer should be objective. 6 7. Biography is a form of history. 8. Biography is an investigation of identity. 9. The story should have some value for the reader.31 Helpful though these guidelines appear in theory, in practice they are well-­ nigh impossible to sustain and, even if some of them apply to some biographies, in combination they apply to almost none. Lee produces several examples, and we could add others. 1599 by James Schapiro is a biographical study of Shakespeare’s life and work that covers only one year (as does his later 1606: The Year of Lear). Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens features long conversations between the twentieth-century biographer and his Victorian subject that can never have taken place. Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World tells the life of a species sometimes eaten with chips. Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind tells the story of another species that eats them both, sometimes with vinegar. One might add others. The Gambling Man, Jenny Uglow’s ripping biography of Charles II of England, begins in 1660 with the King’s return from exile and covers only the first ten years of his reign. Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Knox Family is a portrait, not of an individual but of a family. The same can be said about Simon Goldhill’s A Very Queer Family indeed, which is about the Bensons: a clan very productive of priests, poets and scholars. Ackroyd’s London: A Biography is a portrait of a city. Lee’s tenth rule is that, in the recent history of the form, her definitions have been honoured as much in the breach as the observance. In effect, it would appear, there are no rules.32 Lee is also very concerned to open the subject to non-specialists. If in 1968 Momigliano was addressing an audience of cloistered Ivy League classicists, in 2009 Lee is writing for open-minded members of a busy metropolitan class used to, and quite keen on, relativistic notions of truth. Momigliano’s limitations had been his pedantry, his insistence on narrow notions of accuracy, and his resistance to private revelation. His “we” were historians determined to get at the unvarnished, sensation-proof, facts. 31  Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2009), 26 sqq. 32  For an exploration of the exfoliation of biographical writing in the modern period, see Robert Fraser, “The fish and the stream: publishing, genre and life-writing’s crisis of form” in Alison Baverstock, Richard Bradford and Madelena Gonzales eds Contemporary Publishing and the Culture of Books (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 133–151.

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Lee’s “we”—herself, you and I—possess different, but not necessarily more advanced, priorities: the ethics of our society depend on openness. This has partly to do with an increasing resistance to authority. We no longer want to treat leaders, monarchs, priests, or doctors with reverence, and we think that their lives should be open to inspection. And the line we draw between the private and the public has changed.33

When it comes to the crux of truth, views have shifted as well. Folk wisdom has it that biography tells us what happened in a life: This looks like a solid, unarguable rule for biography. But there are many ways of breaking it. Plenty of biographers dramatize their narratives with descriptions of emotions, highly coloured scene-setting, or strategies of suspense. Some go further, and deploy full-scale fictional methods: inventing meetings between author and subject, imaginary episodes, musings on the identity of the biographer, hypothetical conversations.34

Lee’s position on modern biography is that it is a hybrid, protean form, impossible to yoke to any inclusive set of definitions, beyond being an attempt to write out a life, or sometimes set of human lives. This catchall generalisation serves for the moderns; but what, we wonder, of the ancients? Lee’s second chapter is entitled “Exemplary Lives”, and in it she draws successive examples from the Biblical book of Exodus, from Plato’s Phaedo, Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Suetonius’s Life of Caligula and Simon Winter’s fifteenth-­ century Life of Saint Jerome. On these she is emphatic, and a little dismissive. For Lee, these are not fully-fledged biographies at all, and for them she coins the term “ur-biography”, or as she puts it, “primal forms of a genre that has not yet evolved”. More than that, she claims, “their structures are not what we would call biographical”. Lee’s treatment raises quite a lot of questions. “Ur-biography” is a term that entails a notion of development from an inferior, or at least imperfectly realised, form towards a better, fully-made one. Palaeo-zoologists allude to the extinct animal bos taurus primigenius as an “ur-oxe”. Shakespeare scholars refer to plays about Hamlet before his as  Lee, 29.  Lee, 26.

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“ur-Hamlets”. These represent early or primitive versions of something that was to grow, and needed to grow, properly sophisticated. It is questionable whether such evolutionary models are applicable to any literary tradition. In the case of biography they are a consequence of embracing a conception of the genre based on post-Enlightenment norms and regarding all previous attempts as imperfect or “proto-” biography (which should logically involve us in calling all post-modern divergences from the artificial norm as “post-biography”). The alternative view, of course, is to recognise that biography of all periods pertains to this constantly transformed rag-bag of a thing. In the latter case, Xenophon and Suetonius are every bit as much biographers as Richard Holmes (1945–), biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, or Richard Holmes (1946–2011), biographer of the generals Marlborough and Sir John French. There is surely no “ur-” about it. Tomas Hägg’s achievement was to apply Lee’s breadth of insight to ancient life-writing. The initiative was all the more telling as he had devoted the whole of his career to the study of various literary genres in ancient literature. Beginning as a student of the early Greek novel (a term similarly contentious), he had gradually turned his gaze on biography. In The Art of Biography in Antiquity he sets his back against treatments of classical biography that possess too narrow a professional base.35 Instead, he extends Lee’s broadminded approach backwards in time. If modern biography transcends any given set of rules, then for Hägg so does Graeco-­ Roman biography. And if the fallibility of conventional yardsticks is easy to observe in modern biographical practice, in the period of Greek and Latin antiquity they fit very uncomfortably indeed. Applying Lee’s pseudo-rules to say Plato and Xenophon, rule 1 (that the story should be true) is only valid in a rather limited sense, and 5 (that the biographer should have known the biographee), 8 (that the biography should be an exploration of identity) and 9 (that the story should possess value for the reader) to a fuller extent. The other rules do not apply to these writers at all. It is not until Plutarch that we come across biographies that meet several of these illusory requirements, and even with Plutarch rules 3 (that the story should cover the whole life) and 4 (that all of the sources should be identified) are only partly helpful, and rule 5 is not relevant in the least. In view of this fact, Dihle once drew a distinction in ancient biography between life-writing (Lebensbeschreibung) and what the Greeks called bioi: narrative  Tomas Hägg, The Art of Biography in Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 2.

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biography in a much narrower, generic sense. To the latter category none of the works of the Socratics belong. In the broader sense, the accounts left by Plato and Xenophon of the presence, conversation and fate of Socrates qualify and so, as Dihle argued—and as we ourselves shall see presently—do the much later Christian gospels, since in all of these instances, the essential element—the subject’s personality described in all of its human strangeness and uniqueness—is there for all to see. The narrow rules do not apply, even to bioi. In the ancient as much as in the modern field, Lee’s concluding comment, eagerly adopted by Hägg, remains true: “biography is, rather, a mixed, unstable genre, whose rules keep coming undone”. Except that of course, in the case of ancient biography, the lives were written well before these pseudo-rules laws were devised. Which does not mean, course, pace Lee, that we are not dealing with biographies. This, roughly speaking, is the position that classicists interested in the history of biography have now reached. Quite recently, the Belgian scholars Koen de Temmerman and Kristoffel Demoen in a co-edited volume entitled Writing Biography in Ancient Greece and Rome have extended Hägg’s broad understanding of biography’s multiple modes of representation.36 Temmerman and Demoen have taken on board the whole gamut of post-modern, post-structuralist notions of truth. Rather than insisting on veracity, they seem quite keen for biography to be untrue, but in interesting ways. They are thus concerned with Lee’s first, fragile axiom about the truth value of life accounts. To apply this fallible criterion to classical biography, they distinguish between ascertainable fact on the one hand and two contrasted qualities they call respectively “fictiveness” and “fictionality” on the other. Fictiveness, in their adopted terminology, refers to what is more-or-less made up—that is, ascertainably untrue—and fictionality to the process of shaping, moulding and aesthetically presenting what is essentially true: what we have so far called “re-imagining” or “re-creation”. The contributors to their book explore this distinction in some detail. Several of the lives treated exist on the borderline between these two terms. An interesting example is the Cyprus-born first-century philosopher, marriage counsellor and stand-up comedian Demonax, who lived until he was a hundred, and was then made the subject of a laudatory life 36  Koen de Temmeran and Kristoffel Demoen eds, Writing Biography in Ancient Greece and Rome: Narrative Technique and Fictionalization (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

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by his pupil Lucian. This is a mini biography that has long divided the critics. Momigliano noticed that it consists, less of a connected narrative, than of a string of anecdotes. Most of them, we must add, are rather good. They show Demonax’s wit to some advantage: it is pithy, barbed and quite unlike that of Socrates. When asked if he would grudge the fishes of the Aegean a meal if he drowned, he answered that they were welcome considering how often they had fed him. When an unsuccessful orator complained of his failures, Demonax asked him if he ever practised. Yes, replied the orator, on himself. No wonder, Demonax replied, considering you practise on so dismal an audience. All this is so entertaining and somehow pat, that the late Diskin Clay called the work a “philosophical fiction”, and even cast doubt as to whether Demonax ever existed outside Lucian’s star-­ struck imagination.37 The lack of corroborating evidence has frequently been noted: few contemporaries mention the philosopher apart from Lucian. Tomas Hägg noted that this biography, short as it is, passes through phases. There is a preamble, a eulogy and then a string of jokes. The preamble reads like Plutarch, the laudation like a funeral tribute, and the witty sayings like accounts of the Cynics. The rather jumbled collection of wise sayings towards the end reminds one of the way in which Xenophon treats Socrates. Indeed, it is the contention of the American classicist Mark Beck that Xenophon is the chief model throughout.38 What this brief work seems to illustrate above all is what Beck calls the paradigmic method. Demonax may well have existed, but in telling us about his life, Lucian falls back on a melange of styles reminiscent of previous biographers he had read. Thus early biographies supplied a pattern for later writers to follow much as, as I shall argue, classical biographers as a whole were to provide examples for even later centuries, supplying themselves with a series of afterlives in the process. There remains the issue addressed by Hermione Lee’s sixth pseudo-­ rule: the desired objectivity of the biographer as opposed to his subjective leanings: the presuppositions or prejudices employed. These do not amount to fictionalisation in the proper sense; they do, however, represent a compromise with cold fact. In the volume discussed, David Konstan and 37  Diskin Clay, “Lucian of Samosata: Four Philosophical Lives (Nigrinus, Demonax, Pegrinus, Alexander Pseudomantis)”, Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, 1992, 3425–3426. 38  Martin Beck, “Lucian’s Life of Demonax: The Socratic Paradigm, individuality and personality” in Temmeran and Demoen eds. 80–96.

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Robyn Walsh highlight two varieties of authorial bias they link to the names of Plutarch and Suetonius.39 Where Leo typified these two biographers of the Roman period by recourse to the literary forms espoused in their work, Konstan and Walsh tie them to two varieties of conscious authorial agenda. Plutarch, they maintain, was deliberately providing models for public behaviour (a tendency picked up, as we have seen, by the antagonists of the French Revolution.) Plutarch was thus working within a tradition of civic biography. Suetonius, they argue, offered the opposite: a social solvent: biography as subversion. Exactly how subversive Suetonius really is, we shall see in due course.

Greater and Lesser Truths Fundamental to this discussion is the problem of the motivations of a biographer, the effect this person desires to have upon their readership. Lee calls ancient biography “Exemplary biography” and while this may not be a fair characterisation of everything covered by Hägg, it is obviously applicable to, say, the Socratics, and also to the biography of later antiquity which deals with the lives of holy men and saints (and, in the case of the biblical gospels, of Jesus Christ.) All of these writings aim explicitly to improve and to instruct. And, sometimes, it would appear, the effort of instruction gets in the way of what we would call the objective truth. The implications of this for the verisimilitude of their accounts (Lee’s first pseudo-rule) are extreme. How do we square this circle? Once again Momigliano put his finger on the crux of the matter. If, for him, the Socratics were “infuriating”, this had not only to do with his belief that they were factually misleading but also with his impression as to why. The Socratics experimented in biography, and the experiments were directed towards capturing the potentialities rather than the realities of individual lives. Socrates, the main subject of their deliberations (there were other subjects, such as Cyrus), was not so much the real Socrates as the potential Socrates. … In Socratic biography we meet for the first time that conflict between the superior and the inferior truth which has remained a problem for the student of the Gospels or the lives of the Saints.40

39  David Konstan and Robyn Walsh, “Civic and subversive biography in antiquity” in Temmeran and Demoen eds, 26–45. 40  Momigliano (1993, 46–7).

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Thus as well as truth and untruth, we have—so it appears—two other different sorts of truth: one “superior” and one “inferior”. The “superior” truth attaches to the “potential” Socrates rather than to his real-life—that is his “inferior”—embodiment. Momigliano then goes on to extend this observation to much later texts: the Jesus of the Gospels and the saints depicted in early Christian and medieval hagiographies. So there is a real-­ life Christ who washes and eats fish, and a potential one who is the Son of God. And there is a real-life Saint Anthony who suffers the inconveniences of the desert and a potential Anthony who wrestles with devils and cures the sick. Momigliano’s thesis was that the authors of these high-charged accounts allowed the potential individual to obscure the common-or-­ garden one. Two different value systems thus come into play in the discussion of late classical biography. And these value systems have in turn given rise to two different traditions. Much attention has therefore been recently paid to classical authors who escape easy generic classification because their work appears at first sight to represent a hybrid between these various forms. Late antiquity abounds in writers whom it is hard to pigeon-hole in this way. Lucius Flavius Philostratus (c. AD 170–250), sometimes known as the Athenian or Second Philostratus, is an exceptionally impressive example. On the basis of his Lives of the Sophists alone, Philostratus was certainly what we would call a biographer. But Philostratus also left us several dozen love letters, an account of the Olympic Games and other athletic contests (Gymnasticus), and, in the work entitled Heroicus, a dialogue discussing Homer’s portrayal of heroes. Provided that the work entitled Imagines, describing a picture collection he had seen near Naples, is attributable to him, he was also a pioneer of art history, or more precisely of ekphrasis, the verbal evocation of graphic images; a second sequence of Imagines is probably by his son-in-law. On the basis of this range of interests, Jas Elsner has said of him that “his self-consciousness about genre, inter-relations within the written corpus and an almost obsessive concern for variety are perhaps more intense than in any other comparable writer”.41 Because it is not only between, but within, his works that Philostratus’s versatility is evident. The Life of Apollonius of Tyana recounts the life and career of the first-century Pythagorean sage, whom it follows from cradle to grave. It is chronologically organised in eight books (with a 41  Jan Elsner, “A Protean corpus” in Philostratus eds Ewen Bowie and Jas Elsner (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3.

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thematically organised excursus between books six and seven) recounting Apollonius’s miraculous birth, his induction into Pythagorean teaching, his journeys in the Middle East—including a stay in Nineveh—his crossing of the Hindu Kush, his entry into India, his encounters and conversations with Indian Sages, his avoidance of the Emperor Nero whilst staying in Rome, his exposition of the lunar theory of marine tides, his journey to Ethiopia and quest for the sources of the Nile, his sojourn in Alexandria where Vespasian seeks his advice, and his return to the imperial capital where he is arraigned before Domitian. He prepares a reasoned defence for his trial which is quoted but not delivered. Instead he escapes from the courtroom and receives telepathic intelligence of Domitian’s death whilst residing in Ephesus before himself being assumed into heaven. Later he appears to some of his followers, before whom he defends the theory of the immortality of the soul. Approximate parallels with the mission of Jesus Christ are clear to anyone who knows the canonical Gospels, starting with an annunciation to his mother, to whom Apollonius appears in divine shape before his birth: “She was in no way frightened, but asked him what sort of child she would bear. And he answered ‘myself’. ‘And who are you?’ she asked. ‘Proteus’, he answered. ‘The God of Egypt.’” His many miracles include the raising from the dead of a young married woman and the curing of a boy bitten by a rabid dog (followed by a cure of the dog itself.) Most striking of all is the way in which, like Jesus, he speaks truth to Roman power, both in his interviews with Vespasian in Alexandria and his confrontation with the bully Domitian in Rome. Where Christ is reviled by the authorities and maintains silence like a lamb led to the slaughter before a humiliating execution, Apollonius however is treated with marked respect by Vespasian, and finally outfaces and outwits Domitian. His ultimate ascension from the threshold of the temple of the goddess Dictyana in Crete bears a superficial resemblance to Christ’s assumption as recounted in Luke, chapter 24 and Acts chapter 1. The sacrificial theology of atonement and the process of redemption so central to the Christian story, though, are naturally absent. Though all of these resemblances are approximate at best, and the didactic edge of the sophist Philostratus’s work is distinctively its own, the book proved sufficiently threatening to the early church for Eusebius, the third-century Bishop of Caesarea and later Constantine’s biographer, to denounce Appollonius as “a wizard if there ever was one, rather than a philosopher”.

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What manner of text is this? In particular, how true is it? For a start, it is quite unclear whether the historical Apollonius wandered very far from Italy, Greece or Anatolia, ever stayed in Babylon or set foot in India or Africa. As the Polish scholar of Roman history, the late Maria Dzelska, effectively demonstrated, he may indeed have been a local Hellenistic figure whose movements were far more restricted.42 Nor indeed, as Cornell’s Verity Platt has proved, can Philostratus have actually seen all the sights that he describes, such as the colossus of Memnon at Egyptian Thebes, supposed to have vocalised a harp-like twang as each morning it greeted the rising sun.43 What is more, the eight-volume format in which Philostratus’s work is couched is more familiar to us from what Hägg, borrowing an anachronistic term, calls the ancient “novel”. Philostratus may be elaborating or else drawing on the elaborations of others. Are we then faced with a stark instance of what Temmeran and Demoen call “fictionality” or “fictiveness” in this work? Yet again, is this divide just too absolute? Might it be philosophically untenable to insist that the events narrated are either true or not true? Is there perhaps a middle, or quite different, path to take? Once again, Platt proves helpful. Though the Life may not be veracious in a literal way (i.e., though it is far from any conception of realism), it may yet be true (or at least authentic) in a highly mystical sense. Mindful that Philostratus also wrote art criticism, Platt is interested in his manner of seeing, proposing this as a paradigm for the way in which his book should be read. To support her point, she quotes an intervention made by Appollonius in his discussion with the Ethiopian sage Thespesion in Book Six about rival schools of art. Thespesion has attacked the style of representation associated with the sculptor Phidias, and Apollonius defends it, insisting that “Imagination (phantasia) … wrought these works, a wiser and subtler artist than imitation (mimesis), for imitation can only create with its handiwork what it has seen, but imagination equally what it has 42  See Maria Dzielska, Apollonius of Tyana in Legend and History trans. Piotr Piénkowksi (Rome: l’Erma di Bretshneider, 1986). Also Maria Dzielska and Karmilla Twardowska eds Divine Men and Women in the History and Society of Late Hellenism (Jagiellonian University Press, 2013). Dzelska’s account of a comparable figure from late antiquity, the Alexandrian philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, is addressed in my chapter “Of Sirens, Science and Oyster Shells” in Robert Fraser, Literature, Music and Cosmopolitanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 51–64. 43  Philostratus 6.4. See Verity Platt, “Virtual Visions: Phantasia and the perception of the divine in The Life of Apollonius of Tyana” in Bowie and Elsner, 131–154.

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not seen, for it will conceive of its ideal with reference to the reality, and imitation is often baffled by terror, but imagination by nothing; for it marches undismayed to the goal which it itself has laid down”.44 “Imagination” turns out to be rather a weak translation of phantasia, which Platt implicitly connects with another Greek term theoria, which she defines as “the acquisition of knowledge by ‘going to see’”. Interestingly this noun has etymological affinities with both “theatre” and “theory”, as well as with “theorem”.45 Wisdom (sophia) is a product of witnessing, a process meaningless and ineffective unless the witness brings to the encounter “an eidolon or eikon of the thing represented”. What is represented in the Life is the theios aner or Holy Man, of which Apollonius is the ideal exemplar. In reading this book, the reader is meditating on the life of this exemplary figure which he has to some extent conceptualised in advance. He perceives in a sense before he sees. If this is a paradigm of the depiction of human character in late antiquity, it is important to realise that it is one among many: sanctity with a strongly Hellenistic, neo-Pythagorean face. There were others, in a contested, often polemical field, as in the centuries following Christ alternative sects fought over rival notions of the good life, seeking out and biographising champions for each. Perhaps the most searching treatment of these problematic works is contained in Helen Cox’s Biography in Late Antiquity: The Quest for the Holy Man. Cox first of all disposes of the theory, expounded by David Tiede and Howard Kee amongst others, that these texts lie behind the Christian gospels; they are much too late for that, even if they draw on similar mind set.46 The writers in whom she is interested belong instead to the agonistic world of the centuries subsequent to the inception of the Christian church when proponents and opponents of the new faith fought an often bitter battle over its merits and demerits. Cox takes a couple of contrasted cases: Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea (263–339) in his apologia for the Church Father Origen (184–253) and Porphyry of Tyre (234–305) on the neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus (205–270). These are lives in a late antique mould, but they are also propaganda for their respective causes, contributions to a  Philostratus 6.19 quoted by Platt, 148.  Liddell and Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon 1888 etc.), 364. 46  Patricia Cox, Biography in Late Antiquity: A Quest for the Holy Man (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1983), 3–5. 44 45

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­ assionate ancient debate which saw life-writers at loggerheads. Porphyry p it is who fires the opening shot with his Contra Christianos or Against the Christians, a fifteen-book expose of this relatively new religion. Eusebius we have already met in his diatribe against Apollonius: deeply involved in the scholarly polemics of his time, he is consciously arguing with the pagans on their own ground, and defending the academic credentials of Christianity against intellectual assault. “By defending Origen’s philosophical erudition, by showing the value of his allegorical interpretation of Scripture, and by developing an image of Origen as the rational schoolman”, in Cox’s words, “Eusebius was in fact answering Porphyry’s charges against the Church”.47 In his turn Porphyry presents us with Plotinus as a sage in a reputably classical and pre-Christian (and, he hopes, post-­ Christian) shape, a true heir to Socrates and Plato. In this contest no holds were barred. As Cox puts it “as a literary form, biography was suitable to the creation of caricatures, portraits so dominated by the ideals imposed by the biographer that history was distorted, almost lost”.48 In late antiquity, therefore, biography was warfare on a fairly lavish scale. Not all recent scholars have been sympathetic to these developments or to attempts to defend them. In 2006, Dublin’s John Dillon begins his galloping essay “Holy and Not So Holy” by tilting at Cox full-speed. Hers he maintains, in a tone of voice reminding one of Momigliano, is a “thought-­ provoking but ultimately rather annoying work”. What annoys Dillon is Cox’s tolerance for half-truth and tendency towards mystical interpretation, her indulgence towards what she calls “biographical interpretation as a labyrinthine tracing and a weaving together of the tracks of soul in life”.49 Like Momigliano one suspects, Dillon wants life accounts to be either true or not true. He is also very resistant to the idea that biographies such as Eusebius’s and Porphyry’s are different in kind from those in the central, would-be objective tradition represented by, say, Plutarch. For Dillon, all biographers have sought the facts, even if sometimes they idealise them. “The purposes of biography then were more or less what they are now, that is to present a portrait of a life for our edification and instruction.”50 In place of a hard-and-fast distinction between biography and what he  Cox, 140.  Cox, 145. 49  John Dillon, “Holy and not so holy: on the interpretation of late antique biography” in The Limits of Ancient Biography eds Brian McGing and Judith Mossman, (Classical Press of Wales, 2006) 156, citing Cox, 107. 50  Dillon, 164. 47 48

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calls (using a term that Cox by and large avoids,) hagiography, he proposes a “sliding scale between the theoretical extremes of factuality and fantasy”. Eusebius and Porphyry for him lie at the factual end; the fantastical is occupied by Athanasius’s Life of Antony, the subject of our Chap. 6. The sliding scale idea is useful, though Dillon cannot disguise his belief that, as the fantastical trend laid hold in still later antiquity, the needle tended to drift towards the far end, nor his distaste for this tendency. As he himself insists, if there is such a scale, it is still applicable, though the drift in our case has been in the opposite direction, towards hard, unsympathetic facts. In fact, Dillon seems to think that it has gone so far in that direction as to stray beyond the legitimate near end of the scale. As his concluding salvo puts it “it seems now as if the purpose of most biography is to demolish reputations rather than establish them”. This is trend we will be discussing in Chaps. 7 and 8.

The State of Play: Genre and Beyond Nonetheless, from whatever direction biography ancient or modern is approached, the question of genre continues to raise its hoary head. Were authors such as Philostratus, Eusebius and Porphyry deliberately experimenting, pushing at boundaries and merging “genres” evident to themselves, or are we, back-projecting post-Renaissance literary categories onto a much earlier age, retrospectively fastening on seeming exceptions to our own parochial rules? To us it may appear as if a text such as The Life of Apollonius of Tyana represents a cross-fertilisation between “biography” and “the novel”. Yet, as a matter of undeniable fact, both “biography” and “the novel” are categories that swam into prominence during the same late phase of European culture, namely the eighteenth century, a good sixteen hundred years after Philostratus died. Given the mutations of perspective consequent on such refraction, it is no surprise that discussions of biography and the novel among classicists and critics of early modern literature have shown a marked tendency to shadow one another, that classicists such as Hägg have applied the category of the novel to their own chosen period, or that biography has now become a talking point among scholars of antiquity.51 One reason is that both academic communities 51  Compare, for example, Ian Watt The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957) with Tomas Hägg, The Novel in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983).

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have been responding to perceptions overtly trained upon distinct periods of cultural time, though in essence arising from a shared reaction to a common, and present-day, zeitgeist. What, in the end, do we mean by genre, and the biographical genre in particular? As recently as 2018, in the introduction to their comprehensive symposium Ancient Biography: Identity through Lives, Francis Cairns and Trevor Luke re-iterate Momigliano’s rule of thumb dating back fifty years, that “an account of the life of a man from birth to death is what I call biography”.52 They do not question the seeming exclusively of “man” in this formulation, employed it would seem in its English rather than its German sense, but aptly note that exceptions to Momigliano’s generalisation are apparent as early as Cornelius Nepos, an early biographer of parallel lives who had an largely uncharted influence on the parallel biographies of Plutarch and with whom I deal in Chap. 3.53 Hägg pointed out many of these exceptions in 2012. Yet, as Cairns and Luke note, Hägg himself at one point repeats Momigliano’s rule before going on to indicate its limitations. Cairns’s and Luke’s own approach is thematic: they are concerned with various manifestation of “identity” in ancient biography, through cultural (which seems to incorporate political) identity to the identities implicit in power and religion, and in “Greek lives under Roman rule”. “Identity”, however, is a contemporary buzz-word, much deployed in modernist, post-modernist and gender-based discourse: it has no precise equivalent in Latin, Greek or Hebrew. To modernise the critical vocabulary is not necessarily to move the discussion forward, nor do Cairns and Luke offer a definition of their own. Are there no boundaries then? It is question put by Brian McGing and Judith Mossman in their wide-ranging collation The Limits of Ancient Biography of 2006. McGing and Mossman are acutely aware of the almost anarchic plethora life-writing in today’s bibliographic world, as exemplified by the Biography shelves of stores such as Blackwells or Waterstones, which regularly display soi-disant life-histories of entities as various as the city of London (Ackroyd 2000), the Indian Rope Trick (Lamont 2004), and Cod “the fish that changed the world” (Kurlancky 1997). This 52  Ancient Biography: Identity Through Lives Francis Cairns and Trevor Luke eds (Prenton, Chichester: Francis Cairns, 2018), vii. 53  An excellent, and largely superannuated, essay on Nepos’s contribution to the development of the biographical form is Edna Jenkinson’s “Nepos—An Introduction to Latin Biography” in Latin Biography ed. T.A. Dorey (London; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967).

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absence of border-posts, this freedom of movement across the Biographical Union, has proved stimulating for readers and writers alike. It is, however, a little confusing for critics and scholars attempting to locate, make sense of, and potentially to chart a “field”. McGing and Mossman begin by echoing a much cited statement of Somerset Maugham’s to the effect that “There are three rules for writing biography, but unfortunately no one knows what they are”. Maugham, as it happens, was adapting Lord Palmerston’s assessment of the Schleswig-Holstein question, equally recondite, as quoted by Lytton Strachey.54 They then quote Strachey himself on the difference between biography and history, a distinction Plutarch himself once drew. When it comes to biography, they warn against ready-­ made guidelines, the adoption of “too strict a notion of what a genre might be or mean; even some recent work has tended to view exceptional texts as ‘bad’ biography or perhaps as ‘not’ biography. We need a more sophisticated approach than that.”55 “Genre-bending” is what they call the result, on the analogy of gender-bending. Biography can be transgressive; is it therefore “trans”? Not quite, or not always, at least according to Mark Edwards who warns that, “when you open a biography, there are certain things that you expect, and are surprised if you do not find”.56 Perhaps, after all, as the Renaissance scholar and poet Heather Dubrow once urged, biography like all genres is best viewed as a structure of expectations that are fulfilled, confounded or occasionally outraged.57 Bearing all of this in mind, it is not surprising to find Cox pointing out as early as 1983 that in the context of life-writing “genre” turns out to be closer to a myth than to a type. For Cox, the art of biographical writing is best viewed as a cluster rather than a form. She is focusing on later antiquity, but her ample hold-all of a definition accommodates much modern biography as well: Ancient biographies are constellations of … gestures, carefully selected and assembled not to chronicle a life’s history but to suggest its character. These 54  “The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert who is dead. One was a German professor who became mad. I am the third, and I have forgotten all about it.” Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria (London: Chatto and Windus, 1921), 185. 55  McGing and Mossman, op. cit, x. 56  M. J. Edwards and Simon Swain Eds, Portraits. Biographical Representation in the Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1997), 228–34. 57  Heather Dubrow, Genre (London: Routledge, 1982, 2014), 106–7.

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character-revealing gestures are presented in biographies primarily by means of images and anecdotes, and they show the free play of the biographical imagination as it works in the service of history’s “meaning”. If the facts of history form the “landscape” of a man’s life, character is “inscape”, the contours and the hollows which give a landscape its individuality. Biographies are like caricatures, bringing landscape and inscape, event and character together in a single moment of evocative expression.58

Cox’s deployment of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s lovely term “inscape” here is far from being a late Romantic interpolation. It is offered as a supplement and counterpart to the term “landscape”, the milieu in which actions take place. What is especially striking, however, is her use of the phrase “biographical imagination”, since imagination is not a quality traditionally associated with a trade often regarded as consisting of a foot-­ slogging pursuit of the facts. However, all biographers know in their bones that they must exercise a certain degree of creative power to project people or events of which they do not always possess immediate, personal experience. This poses both an opportunity and a danger. Even if they were present at the scenes they describe, the imagination is called into play firstly to interpret those scenes, secondly to render them vividly on the page. To convey this truth, Cox refers to the biographer as a “prism” through which events are observed by the reader, who thus experiences the life of the subject at one remove. “The biographer” she says, “dwells in this seeing through”.59 Nor is the prism translucent; the biographer is a medium whose presentation of the life of the subject is inevitably affected by a bundle of impinging factors, social, psychological, political or religious. Which is why, of course, diverging accounts may be given of the existence of the same woman or man. McGing and Mossman allude, as examples of this apparent fact, to contrasting lives of Julius Caesar by Plutarch and Suetonius.60 These accounts, which we ourselves lay side by side below in Chaps. 3 and 4, tell us almost as much about their respective authors as they do about Caesar. In the light of this reality, it seems quite legitimate to inquire into the backgrounds these two biographers. Nor—in these and all other chapters of the present work—have we scrupled, in defiance of the “biographical fallacy”, to sketch the social, political and personal  Cox, xi.  Cox, 146. 60  McGing and Mossman, xi. 58 59

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background of biographers as they come up.61 All biographers, after all, are themselves potential biographical subjects. A recognition of this reality involves us in an infinite regression: from the subject or subjects of a given work to the biographer her- or himself, to the reader and/or critic of those works, even to those who in their turn read the resulting critiques, which more or less includes all of us. Nobody quite stands above the fray.

Works Cited and Further Reading Roland Barthes, “The Death of An Author”, first published in Aspen magazine Nos 5/6, 1967, subsequently collected in Image—Music—Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 142–149. Walter Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter (5 volumes, Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1986–2004). Ewen Bowie and Jas Elsner Eds, Philostratus (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity”, The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 61 (1971), 80–101. Ivo Bruns, Das literarische porträt der Griechen im fünften und vierten jahrhundert vor Christi geburt (Berlin: W. Hertz, 1896). Francis Cairns and Trevor Luke, Ancient Biography. Identity through Lives (Florida: Francis Cairns, 2018). Alberto Cavaglion, Felice Momigliano (1866–1924): Una Biografia (Napoli: Instituto italiano per gli studi storici, 1988). Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (London: Harper Collins, 2001). Patricia Cox, Biography in Late Antiquity. A Quest for the Holy Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Kristoffer Demoen and Danny Praet, Theios Sophistes. Essays on Flavius Philostratus’ Vita Apollonii (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009). Albrecht Dihle, Studien zur griechischen Biographie [1956] (Gottingen: Vanderhoek and Ruprecht, 1970). Albrecht Dihle, Die Entstehung der historischen Biographie (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1987). Thomas Allen Dorey, Latin Biography (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967). Heather Dubrow, Genre (London: Routledge, 1982, 2014). Maria Dzielska, Apollonius of Tyana in Legend and History, trans. Piotr Piénkowksi (Rome: l’Erma di Bretshneider, 1986) 61  There is some doubt as to whether the Biographical and Intentional fallacies should ever be applied to biography itself. Were they literally so applied, it is questionable whether we should earlier have looked into the private experiences that seem to lie behind Momigliano’s books. The justification lies in this: our appreciation of his achievements against such odds is immeasurably enriched thereby.

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Maria Dzielska and Karmilla Twardowska eds Divine Men and Women in the History and Society of Late Hellenism (Jagiellonian University Press, 2013). M. J. Edwards and Simon Swain Eds., Portraits. Biographical Representation in the Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1997). T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920). Richard Fletcher and Johanna Hanink Eds, Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity. Poets, Artists and Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Robert Fraser, Proust and the Victorians: The Lamp of Memory (London: Macmillan; New York: The St Martin’s Press, 1994). Robert Fraser, “The Fish and the Stream: Publishing, Genre and Life-Writing’s Crisis of Form”, in Contemporary Publishing and the Culture of Books, Eds. Alison Baverstock, Richard Bradford and Madelena Gonzales (London and New York: Routledge, 2020). Italo Gallo, La biografia greca: Profilo storico e breve antologia di testi (Calabria: Rubbettino Editore, 2005). Bruno Gentili and Giovanni Cerri, History and Biography in Ancient Thought (Bari: Laterza, 1988). Nora Goldschmidt, Afterlives of the Roman Poets. Biofiction and the Reception of Latin Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Tomas Hägg, The Novel in Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983). Tomas Hägg and Philip Rousseau Eds., Greek biography and panegyrics in late antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000). Tomas Hägg, The Art of Biography in Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2012). W.  V. Harris, “The silences of Momigliano”, The Times Literary Supplement, Friday April 12, 1996, 6–7. Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2009). Friedrich Leo, Die griechisch-römische Biographie nach ihrer literarischen Form (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1901). Brian McGing and Judith Mossman Eds., The Limits of Ancient Biography (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2006). Arnaldo Momigliano, L’Opera dell’imperatore Claudio (Firenze: Valecchi, 1932); trans. as Claudius the Emperor and His Achievement trans. W.D.  Hogarth (Oxford University Press, 1934a). Arnaldo Momigliano, Filippo il Macedone. Saggio sulla storia greca del IV secolo a.C. (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1934b). Arnaldo Momigliano, The Development of Greek Biography, Expanded Edition (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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Arnaldo Momigliano, Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism. Edited with an Introduction by Silvia Benty, Translated by Maura Masella-Gayley (University of Chicago Press, 1994). Oswyn Murray, “Arnaldo Momigliano in England”, History and Theory, Vol. 30, No. 4 “The Presence of the Historian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano”. Dennis Pausch, Biographie und Bildungskultur. Personendarstellungen bei Plinius dem Jüngeren, Gellius und Sueton (Berlin and New  York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004). Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies Volume 1: The Age of Plato (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1945). Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989). Duane Reed Stuart, Epochs of Greek and Roman Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1928). Holger Sonnabend, Geschichte der antiken Biographie: Von Isokrates bis zur Historia Augusta (Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2002). Koen de Temmeran and Kristoffel Demoen eds, Writing Biography in Ancient Greece and Rome: Narrative Technique and Fictionalization (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Thea S. Thorsen and Stephen Harrison Eds, Dynamics of Ancient Prose: Biographic, Novelistic, Apologetic (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2018). Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton University Press, 2002). W.K.  Wimsatt Jr. and M.R.  Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy”, The Sewanee Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (July–September, 1946), 468–488.

CHAPTER 3

Biography as Representation: Plutarch’s Parallel Lives

From whatever angle you are coming at it, biography is radically involved with questions of veracity. The spirit of Pilate’s stark query to Christ during his trial, as recorded in The Gospel According to Saint John—ti estin aletheia [“What is Truth?”]—inevitably hangs over all discussion of the biographical genre, whether ancient or modern, and many ancient biographers were understandably preoccupied with it.1 To this general rule, Plutarch is no exception: five centuries separate him from Herodotus, and four from Plato and Thucydides, yet between these various writers there exists a clear kinship, not of method, but of the surrounding epistemological frame. There is, for a start, the disputed boundary between myth and fact. Hence if, according to Bernard Williams, Herodotus and Thucydides between them could not quite decide whether the Cretan King Minos was real or not, we should spare a thought for Plutarch.2 The earliest pairing in his Parallel Lives of the Great Greeks and Romans features Theseus and Romulus, both of whom we confidently regard as legendary. Politically, however, and perhaps artistically too, it is quite important for Plutarch that these two gentlemen should have drawn breath: the foundation myths of Athens (with Theseus) and Rome (with Romulus) depended on them. There were, moreover, literary sources on which he could rely for both of 1  The Gospel According to Saint John, 18, 38. See Bacon’s Essay “Of Truth”, opening sentence: “What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer”. 2  Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton University Press, 2002), 149–16. See Note 23 to previous chapter.

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them; (indeed, for Theseus, these partly coincided with those for Minos).3 With this in mind, Plutarch sets out in pious anticipation of vindication. As his Life of Theseus puts it in the Dryden translation of 1683: “Let us hope, that Fable may, in what shall follow, so submit to the purifying processes of Reason as to take the character of exact history”. But what was “Reason” and what was “Fable”? What was history, and where could exactitude be found? Throughout his work Plutarch is much exercised with this conundrum of truth. First, because he is scrupulous; second, because he is imaginative; and third, because he wishes to allow ample scope for the depiction of character. The conflict between these different objectives could involve him in crises of conscience: over details, dates and the like. In a trenchant essay on Truth and Fiction in Plutarch, Christopher Pelling has pinpointed a salient example from the Life of Solon.4 It is an example which has the further advantage of highlighting Plutarch’s research methods, his treatment of sources and his double fascination with morality and psychology. The incident involves Solon the Athenian lawgiver and his supposed meeting with Croesus, King of Lydia. Plutarch had two sources for this: Herodotus and Xenophon’s biographical novel Cyropaedia.5 In Herodotus, the story has an unforgettable vividness, but Plutarch truncates it, and adds one or two touches of his own. Solon has absented himself from Athens for a ten-year period so as to avoid having to repeal any of the provisions of his legal code. When he visits the city of Sardis in Lydia, the king attempts to impress him with his fabulous wealth. But Solon is unmoved, so Croesus puts him on the spot by asking him who is the most fortunate individual he has ever met. Solon mentions Tellus, a fellow Athenian blessed with children and grandchildren and who met a glorious end in battle, then Cliobis and Bito, dutiful sons who pulled their mother to the shrine of the goddess Hera by taking the yoke of her cart on their own shoulders, and then died contentedly in the goddess’s 3   Specifically, Plutarch’s sources for his Theseus are Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, Herodotus, 9.73 and Thucydides, I, 89–90: and for Romulus and Remus, Dionysus of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, 71, and 79–87 and Livy Ab Urbe Condita, 1.3–1.6. Pelling, however, is sceptical about the possibility of Plutarch having read Livy, or indeed many Roman accounts of the Roman lives. 4  Plutarch, Solon, 27–28. Christopher Pelling, Plutarch and History: Eighteen Studies (London: Duckworth and Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2002), 143–170, see especially 149–50. 5  Herodotus, Histories 1.32 and Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.7.

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shrine. When Croesus asks him why he has not mentioned him, Solon replies that no man can be counted happy until he dies, since there is no way of predicting fate or luck. So Croesus sends him away, convinced of his foolishness. Several years later, however, the Lydian king is defeated in battle by Cyrus of Persia and punished by being burned on a pyre, whereupon he cries out Solon’s name three times in recognition of the lawgiver’s wisdom. The incident is completely consonant with the impression of Solon’s personality conveyed elsewhere in the Life. It is such a good yarn that several centuries later Tolstoy based a short story on it entitled “Solon and Fate”. But there is one problem with it. The usual dates given for Croesus, always supposing that he lived, are from 594 to 547 BC, and for Solon 640 to 558. When and if Solon ever visited him in Lydia then, Croesus can have been no more than twelve. Plutarch considers this difficulty, and then he sets it aside, because he says the story “fits Solon’s character so well, and is so worthy of his wisdom and largeness of spirit”. It is, in short, too good an anecdote to pass over, and overwhelmingly germane to the portrait of Solon that he is attempting to create. Chronology is important, but it is not that important.

Plutarch Portraitist The uncertainty surrounding such matters as Solon’s interview with Croesus is only a problem if we consider Plutarch to be, by inclination and calling, primarily a historian: that is, someone we can rely on to establish the facts. That Plutarch was interested in history, that he drew extensively on the existing work of historians, there is no doubt. As Pelling points out, approximately half of the material concerning the Sicilian expedition of 415–413 BC in the Life of Nicias is derived from Thucydides and the rest from the Sicilian historians Timaeus and Philistus.6 What is truly significant, however, is the reason Plutarch himself cites for drawing on these writers. They are all useful to him, he says, less because they help him to fill out his description of the expedition itself, than because they enable him to visualise Nicias more vividly: “they include material that gives an especially clear notion of the man’s character and his disposition”.7 The prime focus of Plutarch’s account is thus on the personality of a man who 6 7

 Pelling, 119.  Plutarch, Nicias, 1.

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failed to dissuade his fellow citizens of the inadvisability of the risk they were about to undertake, and implicitly to contrast this individual with the personality of the more dashing and heedless Alcibiades, subject of another of his lives. This is not a chronicle, but a portrait. Plutarch himself stresses these priorities over and over again. Specifically and repeatedly, he emphasises the fact that he is no historian, preferring instead to call himself a writer of bioi, that is in our terms a biographer. His clearest indication of this aspiration occurs at the beginning of his Life of Alexander. This is the longest of his life studies and, although it bustles with incident, Plutarch starts by apologising for the condensed account he is about to offer of his subject’s military campaigns. His explanation is that “it is not Histories that I am writing, but Lives [bioi]”. He goes on to observe that “in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue and vice, nay a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities. Accordingly, just as painters get the likenesses in their portraits from the face and the expression of the eyes, wherein the character shows itself, but make very little account of the rest of the body, so I must be permitted to devote myself rather to the signs of soul in men, and by means of these to portray the life of each, leaving to others the description of their great contests.”8 Though Timothy Duff believes these remarks refer to Alexander alone, there is little doubt that they apply to the whole run of lives.9 As a generalisation about portrait painting the observation that artists invariably concentrate on the face at the expense of the rest of the body now seems lopsided—think but of Gainsborough, let alone of Lucian Freud—but as an epitome of Plutarch’s approach to character the analogy is perfect. The face, after all, is the index through which others read the rapid succession of our moods as they emerge casually: in “a slight thing like phrase”, as Plutarch phrases it, “or

8  Plutarch, Alexander, 2–3. Except when stated otherwise, the translation on which I draw for the Lives is that by the Yale classicist Bernadotte Perrin in the Loeb edition published jointly by Heinemann in London and Harvard University Press in Cambridge, Mass. between 1914 and 1923. For the Moralia I have relied on the Loeb edition of 1939 by the same publishers translated by the Berkeley scholar W.C. Helmbold. 9  Timothy Duff, Plutarch’s Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice: (Oxford, Clarendon, 1999) But Plutarch’s Greek terms—historias and bious—are both specifically plural.

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a jest”. It is indivisible, unaccountable, ever changing, and its fluidity is us.10 Plutarch’s analogy with painting is particularly apposite to Alexander the Great, since by the time of his writing, shortly after 100 CE, an official impression of his subject’s physical appearance was well established and can be observed to this day in statuary, in funerary art and mosaic. In various busts from Anatolia and the island of Kos, Alexander appears smooth-­ faced and determined, his chin dimpled, lips tight and grim, eyes wide and direct, nose straight and Roman, hair set back in ringlets from a fine forehead in the style of a Greek dancing girl.11 Perhaps the most memorable image of all is from the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus recovered in the 1880s from a grave near Sidon.12 It shows the Macedonian commander on horseback, cutting a swathe through Darius’s troops at the Battle of Issus in November, 333: bare-legged, braided locks tight as a lion’s pelt, scarf flying in the breeze, weapon raised. Contrast Plutarch’s description of the battle, viewed less as a feat of bravura than of strategy and psychology, flanked by two scenes of almost comic double bluff. It is September, and for weeks Alexander has been laid low with a feverous chill. Philip, an ally from Asia Minor and a respected physician, wants the king well again, and prepares a medicine—perhaps hellebore13—which he takes to the king’s bedside. Alexander meanwhile has received a letter suggesting that, bribed by Darius, Philip’s intention is to poison him. As soon as Philip enters the sick chamber, Alexander takes the cup and quietly begins to drink. As he does so, he hands Philip the libellous letter. Plutarch now invites us to imagine the atmosphere in the tent, the expression in the two men’s eyes as they sum one another up, “worthy” as he says “of the stage”.14 This, I believe, is what he means by portraiture: projected inwardness, mutual in this instance: tense with

10  Recent scientific work as confirmed this. See Roger Highfield and Rob Jenkins “How your looks betray your personality”, The New Scientist, February 11, 2009. 11  Istanbul Museum of Archaeology, Cat. Mendel 539 and 597. Plutarch also mentions a painting by Apelles and a bronze statue by Lysippus (Alexander, 4, 16). For years afterwards, groupies liked to affect the tilt of Alexander’s neck. 12  Istanbul Museum of Archaeology, Cat. Mendel 68. 13  White hellebore could be administration as a medicine or, in much stronger doses, as a poison. 14  Alexander, 19.

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wariness, revelation, guile, all ultimately resolved by a reinstatement of trust.15 Darius meanwhile believes Alexander to be funking. He quits the open plain to the west of Armenia and advances south-east into the narrow defile between the mountains and the sea—the “Cilician Gates”—hoping to lure the Macedonians to their destruction. But Alexander is waiting for him and tricks him in his turn. He slips into the pass and out-manoeuvres Darius in the confined space, slaughtering we are told 110,000 of his troops. Assuming control of the Persian camp, he notes its conspicuous luxury and, with a philosophical disdain worthy of a student of Aristotle, remarks “So this, it seems, is royalty”.16

A Game of Doubles But Plutarch’s portraits are not just single likenesses: they are paired, like diptychs. There was a precedent for this practice. In the first century before the Common Era, Cornelius Nepos, born in Cisalpine Gaul— modern North Italy—and an associate in Rome of the orator Cicero, wrote a work entitled De Viris Illustribus (Concerning Famous Men). According to Fronto, tutor and correspondent of Marcus Aurelius, Nepos also set up as a publisher.17 From the surviving fragments of his book, its overall structure—which set Roman alongside Greek and other lives— seems to have derived from a lost work by Varro called Imagines (Likenesses or Ghosts). Nepos in his turn seems to have anticipated Plutarch’s parallel arrangement, at least in part.18 In Plutarch, the determining factors in deciding who to pair with whom are personality and profession rather than place or time. The work covers a period of seven centuries and, though publishers have sometimes attempted to subvert his arrangement by dividing the series as a whole into discreet and specialised sequences of Greek and Roman lives, for Plutarch himself the comparative principle is essential, underlined by an essay at the conclusion of each pairing—a syncrisis—pointing out 15  For a balanced modern view of this episode, see Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great (Penguin, 1986), 161. 16  Alexander, 20. 17  The Correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto C.R.  Haines Ed (Heinemann, 1919), ii, 168. 18  See Edna Jenkinson, “Nepos—An Introduction to Latin Biography’ in Latin Biography T. A. Dorey ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 1–15.

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similarities or disparities of temperament between men—they are all men—widely separated by time and location. As a result, subjects are yoked together with little account being taken of context: a procedure that no authentic historian would employ. Thus Romulus and Theseus, both mythical, are grouped together as founders of their respective nations. Pericles (494–429) and Fabius Maximus (280–203) are spliced as statesmen and the tragic figures of Alcibiades (450–404) and the possibly legendary Coriolanus on grounds of their indecisiveness and purported treason. Aristides (530–468) and Cato the Elder (434–429) go together as generals and patriots, and Nicias (470–413) and Crassus (115–53) are compared as opulent citizens who each placed their wealth and advantages at the disposal of the nation in time of trouble. Alexander (356–323) and Julius Caesar (100–44) are distinguished as supreme commanders, and Demosthenes (384–322) and Cicero (106–33) as superb and persuasive orators. Phocion (402–318) and Cato the Younger (106–43) share a certain robust honesty and tenacity of purpose, while Dion (408–354) and Brutus (85–42) staged rebellions which tore the state apart. Despite the admiration of the French revolutionaries, they are all far from being heroes. There is a further passage where Plutarch drops clues as to his theory of biography, and it occurs towards the beginning of his Life of Demetrius, which in the symmetrical arrangement of his book is juxtaposed with Mark Antony’s. Like Alexander, these men were accomplished generals, but both died ignominiously, mostly owing to their own excesses. Plutarch wonders if their lives are worth the telling, but concludes the exercise to be salutary because “medicine, to produce health, has to examine disease, and music, to create harmony, must investigate discord”. In much the same way, our understanding of human nature is incomplete unless we confront its pitfalls. He then tells of the Spartans who at certain public festivals instructed their helots to imbibe gallons of wine at dinner so that young male citizens—soldiers in training—could observe what it was to be drunk.19 This is evidently a case of Plutarch the moralist putting in an appearance, but it is important that we do not misconstrue him. Plutarch is not just saying that people should avoid taking wine. As a matter of fact, he has used the story about the Spartan helots before, in one of his philosophical dialogues called De cohibenda ira, “On the control of anger”. Here Fundatus, who has recently learned to control his temper, speaks of how  Demetrius, 1.

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his life has improved since he took his temperament in hand. Apart from everything else, he says, his tantrums used to make him look ridiculous: quite as absurd as those inebriated helots lurching around over supper. He caps the story by recalling the Persian commander Xerxes who, frustrated in his advance into Greece by a combination of geography and bad weather, lashes the Aegean with whips and then pens a petulant letter to Mount Athos. Lastly, he spins a yarn about an unnamed traveller who, after a difficult ride by donkey, gives vent to his exasperation by cudgelling the owner. “But I’m an Athenian!” protests the unfortunate driver. “Well, at least he isn’t an Athenian”, replies the irate passenger and begins to beat the ass.20 These episodes are comedic, as are a number of the incidents Plutarch offers in the Lives. His point is less that such outbursts are to be avoided— though he evidently wishes to convey this lesson as well—than that they are practically inevitable, given the complexity of the human makeup and the stresses to which it is often exposed. Under certain circumstances it may even be prudent to give way. He amplifies this advice in another piece from his Moralia entitled “On Moral Virtue”. Human nature, he there explains, does not consist of a set of compartments labelled “virtue” and “vice”, “passion” and “reason” (this was an error into which, he thought, the Stoic philosophers had fallen). It is a continuum where a given impulse can be beneficial or harmful, depending on circumstances and judgement. In the Lives, for example, Cicero’s native wit causes trouble when it grows caustic, whilst the commendable courage of the Athenian commander Nicias eventually leads to military paralysis in Sicily. Or take Plutarch’s aforementioned bugbear: rage. “Anger”, Plutarch remarks, “if it be moderate, will assist courage, and hatred of evil will aid justice”.21 But we should not, for that reason alone, continually give ourselves the benefit of the doubt by calling every fit of grumpiness “righteous wrath”. Nor on the other hand should we—or can we—go to the opposite extreme by avoiding emotion altogether. That, he says—returning to his point about inebriation—would be like avoiding drunkenness by pouring good wine on the ground. The implication for biography is that Plutarch believes the art should include everything, even to the apparent disadvantage of those it 20  De cohibenda ira, 6. One thinks of Basil, the over-stretched hotelier in the television comedy series Fawlty Towers, kicking his Morris Minor in ill-directed fury. 21  De virtute morali, 12.

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portrays.22 In effect he anticipates the advice of Oliver Cromwell, who centuries later would implore the artist Sir Peter Lely, “I desire you would use your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark these roughnesses, pimples and warts”.23 So in the Lives, once Alexander has barnstormed the known world, Plutarch shows him slipping into depression and morbid religious mania. Julius Caesar, the companion portrait to Alexander, is wracked by doubts before crossing the Rubicon and moodily ambitious thereafter. Mark Antony, Caesar’s right-hand man, declines into the arms of Cleopatra and loses Rome in consequence. Cato the Younger, a vigilante whose sobriety recalls his great-grandfather Cato the Censor, becomes a risible figure, strolling along the Via Sacra in Rome without underclothes or sandals. Caius Gracchus, a patriot whose eloquence in the Forum has earned him golden opinions, turns into a megalomaniac whose road-straightening schemes may remind us of Mussolini’s. Timoleon, the Corinthian liberator of Sicily—a hero to nineteenth-­century nationalists everywhere thanks to Plutarch’s sketch—murders his elder brother, and then retreats into paralytic gloom ‘til roused by military opportunism. Brave Coriolanus abandons his country and, in the parallel study, Alcibiades—glamour-boy of Greece and Socrates’s pet pupil— betrays Athens over and over again, and then betrays his betrayal.

Plutarch as Priest, Moralist, Psychologist We have fifty of these linked lives: twenty-two Greek and Roman pairs, a rare quartet (Agis and Cleomones with Tiberius and Caius Gracchus) and—the odd ones out—a double sketch of the Caesars Galba and Otho which are all that are left of a lost sequence on early Roman emperors. Taken as a whole, they bring us forward in time from the very foundations of Athens and Rome, told via the mythical figures Theseus and Romulus, through the Macedonian and Sicilian wars, and right up to what in Plutarch’s youth was living memory. Most of his subjects are statesman and commanders, though two (Demosthenes and Cicero) are orators, and Dion and Brutus are combined for the unusual reason that, like Plutarch himself, they followed the teachings of Plato. Following nineteen of the couplings we have the comparative conclusion, the purpose of which is 22  For this aspect of Plutarch’s art, and for his insistence on the mixture of qualities in his subject’s personalities, see A. J. Gossage, “Plutarch” in Dorey, 45–77. 23  Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting (London, 1762–71), 444.

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less to eulogise, or preach about, the deceased than to assess their relative effectiveness as public figures. The relevance and pertinacity of these epilogues has long been a cause of scholarly dispute. Memorably defended by Hartmut Erbse, they were initially criticised by Pelling for their feebleness; more recently they have been defended by Philip Stadter and Duff.24 One constant theme in them is a re-iteration of Plutarch’s belief in the proximity of virtue to vice. In both Alcibiades and Coriolanus, for example, courage and resolve steer close to obstinacy and pride. A subordinate overall motive seems to have been to contrast the genius of Roman and Greek culture. When Archimedes is slaughtered by disorderly troops during the sack of Syracuse in 212 BCE, for example, the guilt-stricken general Marcellus covers his family in honours: Roman organisation appreciates Greek mathematics.25 Of Plutarch himself we know little apart from what he himself lets slip, or what his fourth-century biographer Eunapius of Sardis imparts in his Lives of the Sophists. He was born about fifty years after Christ in Chaeronia (modern Khaironia) in Boeotia. The city straddled one of the main southern approaches into Attica from Macedonia and had therefore witnessed the constant trudge of armies since Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander had beaten the combined forces of Athens and Thebes there in 338 BCE. When a boy Plutarch was shown the oak under which Alexander was supposed to have pitched his tent, and the mass grave of the Macedonian dead lay near-by.26 Herodotus held a poor view of the region and had given it a lousy write-up in his Histories, inciting Plutarch to get his own back early in life in his diatribe de malignitate Heroditi (The Malice of Herodotus). Despite this scepticism he followed Herodotus’s footsteps to Egypt, and even assisted later travellers to the Nile by producing a learned handbook to the cult of Isis and Osiris, one of his earliest works. Plutarch certainly roamed a lot when young, almost as widely as would the second-century travel writer Pausanias (whose entry on Chaeronia in his Description of Greece did something to make up for Herodotus’s lack of enthusiasm). Athens was a couple of day’s hike away, and we know that 24  Hartmut Erbse, “Die Bedeutung der Synkrisis in den Parallelbiographien Plutarchs’”, Hermes 84, 378–444; Philip Stadter, “Plutarch’s Comparison of Pericles and Fabius Maximus” in Barbara Scardigli ed., Essays on Plutarch’s Lives (Oxford University Press, 1997), 155–64; Duff (1999), 257. For a recent symposium, see Noreen Humble ed. Plutarch’s Lives: Parallels and Purpose (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2010). 25  Marcellus, 19. 26  Alexander, 9. For a later battle at Chaeronea, see Sulla, 17–19.

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Plutarch not only visited Rome but lectured there on philosophy—in Greek necessarily since, as he modestly informs us, he learned Latin late and with some difficulty. It is to a Roman citizen, Sossius Senecio, that Lives as a whole are addressed.27 Most commentators agree that Plutarch turned to biography late in life when, settled once more in his native city, he accepted a number of civic responsibilities: as Boeotiarch or local governor, as Priest of Apollo at Delphi (an arduous fifty mile trek to the south west, skirting the foothills of Mount Parnassus) and, as agonothete or chairman at the Pythian Games, appointed by the Emperor Hadrian. Despite a woodcut of him in pensive mood made by the Franciscan André Thevet in the sixteenth century—the most famous conjectural likeness—Plutarch was evidently no recluse. His interest in biography was a product of an intense and omnivorous curiosity—a quality he stoutly defends28—and a marked gregariousness. He is exceptional among ancient practitioners of the craft for his explicitness as to his methods, which seem to have been analogous to those biographers use today. Information (or, as we call it “research”) he derived from a combination of interviews, eyewitness reports, expeditions to absorb the atmosphere, archival work and the assiduous taking of notes. Among his interviewees were members of his own family: his great-grandfather Nicarchus had been archon in September 31 BCE at the time of the Battle of Actium, when he had been hired to hump provisions to the coast. When Mark Antony fled with his navy, Nicarchus had a day off, and the goods were distributed to the populace. Plutarch himself had walked over the field of the second Battle of Betriacum (69 CE) and had spoken to a war veteran who had seen bodies piled high as the temple gables after Otho’s unexpected rout.29 Bearing in mind the tangle of interconnected lives—and the broad expanse of time—that he covers, the range and detail of his documentation is quite astonishing. In a rueful passage in the Life of Demosthenes, he complains that Chaeronea is miles away from decent archives.30 Doubtless he had collected a personal library, but he supplemented this by notes taken on trips to Athens and elsewhere. Again, he fills us in on his techniques. There were two sets of notebooks: one containing hard facts ­jotted  Theseus, 1. See also Demetrius, 1 and Demosthenes, 1.  De curiositate, passim. 29  Otho, 14. The veteran’s name was Mestrius Florus. 30  Demosthenes, 2. 27 28

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down from a combination of sources and the other a sort of commonplace trove of sayings, apophthegms and snippets culled from classic or contemporary authors. It is to the second set that we owe Plutarch’s inveterate habit of quoting to the everlasting benefit of our knowledge of ancient literature. And to what effect did he quote? Chattiness and discursiveness (a habit adopted many centuries later by Montaigne) characterise his tone, along with frankness on many matters, and a disarming tolerance. Attend to his digressions and you will learn inter alia: the workings of the pulley system, the symptoms of bulimia, the origin of Philippics (first directed by Demosthenes against Alexander’s father), the meaning of “laconic” (as taciturn of speech as a Laconian or Spartan), and the origins of musical modes. Thanks furthermore to a touching episode in the Life of Demetrius, we find how one of Sappho’s most erotically charged poems may be deployed in medical diagnosis.31 His digressiveness, moreover, has another even more useful effect in that it enables Plutarch to saunter down sundry narrative bye-ways, in the course of which he is able to sketch in a number of secondary figures, some of whom surpass his principal subjects in interest. By this means he erects an alternative scaffolding of interstitial lives, some which have proved irresistible to subsequent ages. The revolt of the slave rebel Spartacus, eponymous hero of Stanley Kubrick’s film (1960), straddles the lives of Crassus and Pompey, where it features as an extraordinary irritant, a gadfly tormenting the body politic late republican Rome.32 Even if Spartacus himself dies on the field of battle and not, as the movie would have it, on a crucifix, the origins of Kirk Douglas’s sweaty defiance lie here, as well as of the oleaginous fop that Lawrence Olivier made of Crassus. Cleopatra, the wily Egyptian queen, enters as a girl in the Life of Julius Caesar; she has a child by him, and by the time of the Life of Mark Antony has grown into the nimble-witted opportunist portrayed by Shakespeare and enacted by Elizabeth Taylor for the screen.33 Many of these latter day interpretations extrude qualities merely latent in Plutarch’s original. But they also draw on an important countervailing aspect of his whole 31  Demetrius, 38. By comparing his patient’s symptoms to those described in Sappho’s “Ode to Anactoria” (“my speech fails, my tongue breaks” etc.), the physician Erasistratus determines that Antiochus, heir to the throne of Syria, is in love with his father’s wife. 32  Crassus, 9–11; Pompey, 21. For a further discussion, see Conclusion below. 33  Caesar, 50; Marcus Antonius, 26 sqq.

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e­ nterprise. For it is through these biographical interludes that Plutarch explores and sometimes advocates the existence of oppressed groups of people—slaves or women—that play little part in his official plan. They demonstrate too the frank humanitarian in him. Hence Plutarch’s open-mindedness, quite different in texture from twentieth-century permissiveness, flourishes not in spite of his twin vocations as Neo-Platonic philosopher and priest but in fulfilment of both. As a convinced Platonist he believes in the existence of the ideal—or as Plato puts it of “Ideas”—of which this gaudy side-show of a world is a mere reflection. Human behaviour, it necessarily follows, consists of illusion piled on top of illusion, cross-gleam refracted by cross-gleam in endless kaleidoscopic lights. Plutarch’s analysis of human psychology is conditioned by these beliefs, which in turn construct his morality. He is pleased when people behave well but, quite honestly, he does not expect it. His definitive statement on questions of right and wrong is contained in an essay entitled “Can Virtue be Taught?”, where he observes that “it is impossible to find any deed that is faultless as regards its virtue, or any character undefiled by passion, or any life untouched by dishonour”.34 We are wheat and chaff. A wise system of ethics- or a wise biographer—will accept this basic premise, and a well-organised state will provide for it. The most persistent illustration of human weakness in the Lives is envy. Plutarch shows us several leaders who rescue their societies from peril at some personal cost, and though he himself commends such sacrifice, their contemporaries invariably treat the men concerned with a mixture of insincere adulation and gall. Phocion, an efficient if sharp-tongued fourth-­ century Athenian general whose diplomacy has secured for his fellow citizens a spell of prosperous co-existence with their Macedonian conquerors, is eventually arrested, paraded through the streets and spat on. When executed in prison, he is required to pay for the hemlock. Phocion does not resent this flagrant ingratitude nor does Plutarch condemn it.35 It was from Plutarch that Shakespeare would derive much of his cynicism about the mob, but Plutarch’s own attitude is best expressed in a statement from the Moralia: wise legislators, he says “put into their constitutions the emotions of ambition and emulation as regards the citizens’ relations with one another”. In fifth-century Athens, for example, the inhabitants were annually invited to chalk on shards of broken pottery the names of a­ nybody  An virtus doceri possit, 1.  Phocion, 36.

34 35

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they would like to see banished for ten years. The shards or ostracoi were then collected and read, and—provided the votes of no confidence exceeded 6000—the most unpopular person in the poll was sent into exile. This “ostracism” frequently operated at the expense of individuals who had recently done the city state some service, and whose presence was resented in consequence. They include several of Plutarch’s most public-­ spirited subjects—Themistocles, Aristides and Cimon. When one voter is asked why he has written down Aristides, he replies “I’m sick of hearing him being called The Just”.36 Reporting this remark somewhat in the style of a modern television interviewer, Plutarch’s authorial reaction is to shrug. Ostracism, he comments, was a much-needed safety valve at the time. As for the justification behind the practice, people are simply like that.

Plutarch at Work Alert to flaws embedded deep in societies, Plutarch is also keenly aware of the paradoxical nature of individuals. Many of his subjects are bold, several are foolhardy, quite a number are generous, but few are entirely consistent. His treatment of the human personality in fact demonstrates a subtlety similar to that once epitomised for the Romans by the historian Sallust (86–35 BCE) who left behind an unforgettable portrait of that demagogue and rabble-rouser, Cataline. In the year 62 Cataline masterminded a conspiracy by mobilising the assorted malcontents of Roman society. He seems to have managed this partly through bribery since, though avaricious of other men’s wealth, Cataline showed a strangely liberal palm. He was, in Sallust’s words, alieni appetens, sui profusus: “covetous of the property of others, yet lavish with his own”.37 Whether in imitation of this precedent or not, this is just the sort of quirk of personality that energises Plutarch, who constantly draws attention to equivalent anomalies in his chosen subjects. There was, as he carefully points out, no rhyme or reason to the way in which Cataline’s adversary, the dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla, doled out punishments: sometimes he was lenient, at others almost sadistically strict.38 He had, in fact, a parti-coloured personality to go with his startling blue-grey eyes and notoriously blotchy  Aristides, 7.  Sallust, Catalina, 5. For a modern treatment, see Mary Beard, SPQR; A History of Ancient Rome (London: Profile, 2015), 21–52. 38  Sulla, 6. 36 37

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face. Cato the Younger, a younger contemporary of Cataline’s, appears as a veritable mass of contradictions, in Jungian terms almost an “ambivert”. Tight-fisted and self-controlled, he is overwhelmed by occasional fits of generosity, in one of which he gives away his wife Marcia. He then marries her again, to the complete bafflement of Caesar; “for why”, he asks, “should Cato give up his wife if he wanted her, or why, if he did not want her, should he take her back again?”.39 Circumspect in a manner that reminds us of his great-grandfather the Censor, Cato possesses nonetheless a flair for the melodramatic. When his ally Pompey’s fight against Julius Caesar is clearly lost, he stages a large-ditch stand at the town of Utica (in present-day Tunisia), during which he clumsily eviscerates himself.40 Closely consider almost any of these biographies, and the contradictions lie close to the surface. Demetrius, a Macedonian general who makes valiant efforts to re-unite Alexander’s empire, is also—as Plutarch does not hesitate to stress—a serial coward. Selfish and wilful, he is a devoted lover, especially of the lissom flautist, Lamia. Devious and cunning, his social gaffes are appalling. After re-taking Athens he takes up residence in the Parthenon. The grateful citizens raise 150 talents in tribute. He orders the money to be given to his concubines, “to buy soap”.41 This is just the sort of fly-on-the wall reportage that is Plutarch’s great strength. His observation of social minutiae seldom fails him, and his insight into human foibles is usually stronger than his sometimes run-of-­ the-mill thoughts. He has no fixed model of the personality as such. Towards sex—one element in the human psyche commonly regarded since Freud as a clue to the whole—he holds an attitude utterly of his own time. He is no Puritan; perhaps more importantly he has no inkling of that ubiquitous phenomenon of our own age, the reaction against Puritanism. Prurience is unknown to him, and he always calls a spade a spade. He strongly approves of abstinence but there is only one point at which he seems absolutely to draw the line: taking sexual advantage of the young. An ugly incident in the Life of Marcellus is significant in this respect. Marcellus, a senior Patrician, has a son named Marcus “of great beauty, in the flower of his age”. So desirably is he that Capitolinus, a colleague of his father, starts to importune him. At first the boy fends him off but, 39  Cato Minor, 52. Eventually Caesar works it out. Marcia was “lent by Cato when she was young and poor, so that he might take her back again when she was rich” 40  Cato Minor, 70. 41  Demetrius, 27.

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when the harassment becomes a nuisance, he informs his father of the state of affairs. Flying into a rage—a fine example of the justifiable use of anger—Marcellus impeaches the culprit in the senate. Of course the charge is naturally denied, so they bring the boy to the witness stand, where his self-evident shame and embarrassment speak volubly of the truth. His would-be seducer is found guilty and fined. The present-day echoes of this squalid episode are reinforced by the fact that a seventeenth-century English translation of the passage in question provides one of the earliest known examples of the verb “abuse” in a sexual sense.42 Despite such imbroglios, Plutarch is seldom lurid. It is the private face of his characters than interests him rather than their affairs of the heart. The two marriages of Alexander are mentioned almost in passing, the second only in connection with an unseemly quarrel that broke out among the general’s relatives after his death. What we would call Alexander’s active “sex life” features only tangentially in this, in other respects, probing biography, which devotes a lengthy passage to his pre-marital chastity, another to his mother, but very little to his wives. The more elusive matter of what we would call Alexander’s sexual orientation is of even less interest to Plutarch, who throughout his writing takes bisexuality for granted as a universal human condition, yet sets little score by its expression. He mentions that during a spectacularly successful campaigning life Alexander was offered both girls and boys as tribute.43 What impresses Plutarch is that this omnipotent and in other respects fairly ruthless commander turns down both, until that is he catches sight of Roxana, and marries her on the spot. Otherwise, Alexander’s mind is on the battle, considering sexual intercourse, morally and physically speaking, to be the equivalent of sleep.

Plutarch and Narrative Plutarch has a ready grasp of structure and, though he always works in miniature, he seems to have given a great deal of thought as to how to compose these various lives. The accounts of the emperors Galba and Otho are almost scrappy: perhaps because their reigns were short, perhaps because they represent the rump of a sequence of imperial mini-­biographies that are long since lost. In all other instances, there is—despite the digressions—an irresistible narrative drive, always chronological, always  Marcellus, 2 with the “Dryden” translation. However, see also Judges, xix, 25.  Alexander, 21.

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measured, invariably well shaped. Plutarch seems to have thought out each narrative tactic from scratch—there is no such thing as an identikit or typical form—but the Life of Julius Caesar illustrates well his strengths as a storyteller. Plutarch starts in medias res, not with Caesar’s birth or ancestry, but with that bully Sulla who is hounding the boy because of his blood relationship to his pet-hate, the consul Gauis Marius. Caesar escapes by sea, and the next time we meet him is playing and joking with some Cilician pirates who have kidnapped him. Already his loftiness is apparent: when his captors create a rumpus at night, he tartly instructs them to be quiet. Back in Rome he is soon embroiled in a series of law cases, making his name, impressing with his charm. To see him daintily re-arranging his forelock with one finger, says Cicero, you would not dream this man was ambitious. His Public Relations skills are closely watched. When his first wife Cornelia dies, he delivers a eulogy to her that touches everyone. And when the sly but politically useful Publius Clodius grows infatuated with his second wife Pompeia and steals into the women’s quarters in drag to seduce her, Caesar divorces the wife but will not indict her admirer. His debts mounting, he attempts to extricate himself with the help of Crassus, Rome’s richest man. When that fails, he withdraws to Spain, his home base, where he mopes for a while, whinging that compared with Alexander he is a flop.44 It is his nadir, his lowest point. He bounces back by marrying off his daughter to Rome’s up-and-coming man Pompey, who promptly confers on him the governorship of Gaul. At this point Plutarch alters his pace. He is simply not interested in giving us a detailed blow-by-blow account of Caesar’s Gallic wars. The protagonist had, after all, published his own brisk, soldier-like account and, besides, Plutarch knows we will be more entertained by snapshots of this now middle-aged general taken in revealing situations, “a spare man” who “had a soft and white skin, was distempered in the head and subject to epilepsy, which, it is said, first seized him at Corduba.”45 We see him during one of his long marches sleeping outside in a storm, leaving the one available cottage room to an ailing friend, Oppius. The expedition to Britain is dismissed in a few sentences, which commend this intrepid adventurer for “invading an island, the reported extent of which had made its existence a matter of controversy”. Just as soon as he has seen off the

 Caesar, 11.  Caesar, 17.

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Germans, and settled uprisings by the Suevi and Edui, two Gallic tribes, Caesar turns his sights on his ultimate prey: Pompey. Plutarch now launches on a deft drama of Caesar’s brief rise and fall that has burned its way into world literature. No wonder, because he contrives to see most of it through Caesar’s eyes: the graft, the careful out-­ manoeuvring of rivals, the lone moment of self-doubt by the river Rubicon ten miles north-west of Rimini before plunging ahead with the words anerriphthō kybos: “let the dice be cast”.46 More snapshots follow: Pompey, fretful in the capital, doubtful where to turn yet finally fleeing; Caesar following on so breathlessly that he leaves half his army behind in Brindisi and has to return across the choppy straits to fetch them, disguised as a slave. Again, there is a shift of focus. Plutarch turns aside from this rapid recital of cameo-like scenes, and concentrates on a climactic military set piece. His account of the Battle of Pharsalus (about 30 miles south of modern Larisa, in northern Thessaly) is so precise that present-day military historians can easily reconstruct it, troop movement by troop movement. Routed, Pompey flees to Egypt where he is horribly butchered and, ignorant of this fact, Caesar follows and meets Cleopatra. Back in Rome again, he institutes the Julian calendar. It is the apogee of his fortunes, and nemesis swiftly follows. The people predictably succumb to Caesar-mania, but the tribunes soon close ranks, followed by the conspirators. The assassination itself is a masterpiece of surreal, cinematic force with the victim wheeling hither and thither in a welter of dagger-blows and blood before lifting his sleeve in front of his eyes at the sight of Brutus, armed. Unlike Shakespeare, who from this point on in his play Julius Caesar draws on the Life of Marcus Brutus, Plutarch’s own Life of Julius does not dwell on the aftermath. It ends the story with Brutus, the most intelligent and possibly high-minded of the murderers, confronting his demons at Philippi.

The Structures of Plutarch’s Craft Thus analysed, Plutarch’s narrative strategy is fairly clear. At the macro-­ level there is a dramatic contour: a rise and fall with incidental dips or ripples. Within this overall pattern occur several shifts of scale, from the panoramic to the minuscule. At the micro-level, Plutarch’s technique resolves itself into a patchwork of closely worked scenes, some of which  Caesar, 32. For Suetonius’s differently nuanced account, see the next chapter.

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seem quite trivial, all of which contribute to a total impression of character: the sensorium of this individual life: the tune of it, if you like. It is this last element in his work, this instructive and sometimes magnificent informality, that successive ages seem to have considered so useful in him, and which has arguably had most influence on successive practitioners of biography, on imaginative writers such as Shakespeare, and on film-makers. True to his painterly ambitions, Plutarch is a pointiliste. Examine any of the Lives carefully, and it consists of numerous narrative microdots or pixels. Here is Calpurnia, Caesar’s third wife, delaying him setting out for the Senate on the day of his murder,47 here are the dogs unleashed by a gardener in the Life of Aratus to prevent Aratus and his fellow-marauders scaling the moonlit walls of Sicyon.48 (They kidnap the gardener but fail to muzzle the curs, who almost give the game away.) Some of the most vibrant moments, however, occur in less well-thumbed accounts of—to us—obscure figures. Take, for example, a minor incident in the Life of Pelopidas, a Theban commander whom Plutarch includes because under him Boeotia enjoyed one of its rare periods of political glory (like Plutarch himself, he once held the post of Boeotiarch, or governor of the province). It is the unusually severe winter of 379/8, three years after Thebes has been overrun by Sparta, and Pelopidas along with other prominent members of the Free Thebans is living in exile in Athens. When the coast is clear, they decide to enter Sparta by stealth in a sort of Boeotian Operation Overlord. But at the last moment Hipposthenides, a colleague in the local Theban Resistance, panics and tells a messenger to ride post-haste and warn his comrades to hold back. From the revision of the Dryden Plutarch by Arthur Hugh Clough: The messenger’s name was Chlidon, who, going home in haste and bringing out his horse, asked for the bridle; but, his wife not knowing where it was, and when it could not be found, telling him she had lent it to a friend, first they began to chide, then to curse one another, and the wife wished the journey might prove ill to him and those that sent him; insomuch that Chlidon’s passion made him waste a great part of the day in this quarrelling, and then, looking on this chance as an omen, he laid aside all thoughts of his

 Caesar, 63.  Aratus, 7–8.

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journey, and went away to some other business. So nearly had these great, glorious designs, even in their birth, lost their opportunity.49

There is a nutshell you have one highly significant, and lastingly influential, element in Plutarch’s method. The scene is domestic, the scale small, the people are behaving badly. The setting, the sulk could be in your kitchen, or mine. So truculent and petty is this soap opera couple that their tiff almost condemns the liberation campaign to failure. This is pure anecdote, but it is inspired anecdote. It is an intimate scene that corresponds to what the American Plutarchian Robert Lamberton has called the “home movie” aspect of Plutarch’s art.50 Where, one wonders, can Plutarch conceivably have gleaned the details of this risible marital squabble? By the time he is writing in the second century CE, this silly fracas has been over for five hundred years. And yet it possesses the undeniable ring of truth. Twenty-first-century biographers and readers can learn a great deal from Plutarchian interludes like this, all the more because part of our response to them is likely to be governed by a reaction the Greeks themselves termed anamnesis or recognition. Yet the textual feel of the episode, and of many passages akin to it, also marks one essential point of departure from the biographical sensibility, the general attitude to human life, of our time. The story has a sequel. Because of the messenger’s fit of pique, the expeditionary force does not receive its intelligence briefing; they arrive a few days later on foot. At the moment they reach outskirts of the city, however, the skies above central Greece yield one of their rare snowfalls. The watchmen withdraw in doors, the approach of the liberators is muffled. They enter the gates unnoticed and, once they are in the Theban streets, nobody observes them, nobody hears their footsteps. As soon as it has stopped snowing, the uprising occurs in the slushy town without difficulty. Thebes is set free, and the stage is set for Pelopidas’s career as warrior and statesman. This pattern of events, of which the contretemps in the Chlidon household forms one minor stroke of the pen, is an aspect of Plutarch with which we are already familiar: the ineluctable drama of politics and of 49  Pelopidas, 8. Plutarch’s Lives: The Dryden Plutarch Revised by Arthur Hugh Clough (London: J.M. Dent, 1951), vol. i, 439. 50  Robert Lamberton, Plutarch, (Yale University Press, 2001), 6. “Home video” now perhaps?

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danger. But it is one orchestrated at different levels, with some of which modern readers will be familiar, others of which are likely to seem quite strange. First, there is commonplace psychology and—yes—there is gender politics. There is luck too, the hazard of happenstance, the toss of the narrative coin. Third, there is morality: the sordid quarrel that nearly forestalled a revolution, imparting a valuable lesson in self-discipline all the more stinging because mingled with a sort of high-minded bitchiness; the latter quality is, I think, something that recommended itself particularly strongly to Shakespeare. Lastly, however—and this is where Shakespeare is still in tune with Plutarch where twentieth-century biography sharply distanced itself from the Plutarchian scheme—there is superhuman intervention by the climate or by the gods, the divinity that shapes our ends. In a word, there is destiny. Plutarch is an observer of the human scene, a moralist and a first-rate psychologist, but in the last resort we can never forget that he had become a priest. It is as a priest of Apollo that in the Life of Demetrius he upbraids the Athenians for their treating their un-consecrated “deliverer” Demetrius, as if he was an oracle.51 It is as a priest that he begins his double life of Dion and Marcus Brutus, those two neo-Platonists, by defending the belief in ghosts.52 Later in the Life of Marcus Brutus, Brutus encounters his own Evil Genius on daimon shortly before the fateful Battle of Philippi. Cassius, a disciple of the materialist Epicurus, chides him for his credulity, promptly to be reprimanded for his atheism by the full sacerdotal authority of Plutarch the narrator.53

Plutarch and His Legacy The transmission of this wealth, this album of brilliances, to the modern age is, of course, inseparable from the history of translation. It was the Renaissance that re-discovered the Vitae Parallelae. In 1559 Jacques Amyot rendered them from Greek into French; he was read by Montaigne who found a stylistic model; the Lives, he said, are “notre bréviare”, our breviary.54 In 1576 Amyot in his turn was translated into English by Sir Thomas North. The result is fluent, idiomatic and fashionably embellished  Demetrius, 13.  Dion, 11. 53  Brutus, 36–7. Compare Caesar, 69. 54  For a fuller discussion of Montaigne’s debt to Plutarch, see Chap. 1. 51 52

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with vivid Euphuistical flourishes. For North “nobility” is clearly a function both of status and of character; he is thus the perfect quarry for tragedians, and it is out of his The Lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes that Shakespeare’s Roman plays—Julius Caesar; Coriolanus; Antony and Cleopatra—are hewn. To render the whole of the Lives single-handed, however, was always going to be a considerable task. In the next century a team of translators collaborated with the publisher Jacob Tonson “at the Sign of the Judges’ Head, in Chancery-lane” to produce a translation “by Several Hands”. It was prefaced by a Life of Plutarch, the ancient biographer himself, written by the Poet Laureate, John Dryden. Dryden was manifestly much too busy to do any of the translating himself: the Life of Alexander, for example, was farmed out to John Evelyn, son of the diarist. Yet he clearly admired Plutarch, whom he had read in the library at Trinity College, Cambridge, when an undergraduate there in the mid-1650s, and his stylistic preference for “the harmony of order and the beauty of easiness” suffuses the collaborative text. More importantly for our purposes, it is Dryden in his Preface who first employs the nouns “biographia”, “biography” and “biographer”.55 His sense that they indicate a new direction in literature is transparent. A “biography”, avers Dryden, is like a magnifying or “burning” glass that concentrates the sunbeams of experience on one, incisive spot. The “Dryden Plutarch” as it soon became known remained in print until the nineteenth century. Meanwhile the eighteenth-century vogue for classical learning had produced a fresh surge of interest in the Lives. We have already observed the dramatic impact that this new wave of enthusiasm had in France but, as Martha Howard has plentifully demonstrated, the fresh cult of Plutarch was a pan-European affair.56 As a latish product of the Scottish Enlightenment, James Boswell (1740–1795) absorbed Greek as a young student at the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. In 1763, at the age of twenty-three he devoured Xenophon’s Anabasis, followed by Plutarch’s Lives. The effect on someone with a temperamental tendency towards hero-worship was dynamic and life-long. For the rest of his up-and-down existence, Boswell came to regard a succession of older

55  Plutarch’s Lives Translated from the Greek by Several Hands. To which is prefixt the Life of Plutarch (London: Jacob Tonson, 1683), i, 83, 88, 90, 92, and 96. 56  Martha W. Howard, The Influence of Plutarch in the Major European Literatures of the Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970).

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men, father-substitutes arguably (his own father he regarded as a monster), with eyes tinged by this early exposure. Since, not only in France but across Europe, Plutarch was regarded primarily as a eulogist of heroes, it was heroic figures whom Boswell now sought out. His first chance came in 1794 on the Grand Tour, when he intrepidly introduced himself to Voltaire and Rousseau. The following year, with Rousseau’s encouragement, he sailed for Corsica, then in full-­ scale revolt against the Genoese, and wangled a meeting with the head of the island’s maquis resistance, Pasquale Paoli. To Boswell he seemed a leader cut in an Aristidean mould, reporting “He just lives in times of antiquity. He said to me ‘A young man who would form his mind to glory must not read modern memoirs, but Plutarch and Titus Livius’”. Boswell returned to London with his head full of Corsica (a little too full, according to Samuel Johnson). In a letter to Rousseau he gushed “The voyage has done me a wonderful amount of good. It has affected me in the same way that Plutarch’s Lives would if they had fused in my mind.” When his Tour of Corsica, with its account of meeting the glamorous Paoli, was published in 1768, it was the making of his literary reputation. But Boswell, now twenty-eight, had already met Johnson, the subject for whom he seemed destined. At first sight, The Great Cham was a most unlikely hero: lumbering, scrofulous, ill co-ordinated, obsessive, riddled with facial tics. Boswell was able to transfigure him because he was alert to what, for any dedicated biographer—even nowadays—is Plutarch’s most precious bequest: his appetite for the telling detail, his openness to eccentricity, his magpie taste for conversation and obiter dicta. In his preamble to The Life of Samuel Johnson, the first edition of which was published in 1791, seven years after Johnson’s death, Boswell quotes Johnson’s own distrust of unadulterated panegyric. “The conversation of a celebrated man”, he goes on to say, “will best display his character. … If authority is required, let us appeal to Plutarch, the prince of ancient biographers.” He clinches the argument by quoting in Greek the second paragraph of the Life of Alexander on the significance of minor things: the casual gesture, the throwaway phrase, the jest. Johnson, he concludes, had been no subject for “vulgar greatness”. He was far too great for that. For those unable to read Greek, the challenge of Englishing Plutarch’s masterpiece had recently been taken up again by two East Anglian brothers, both minor poets: John and William Langhorne. Published in 1774 by the Dilly brothers (who were also Boswell’s publishers), this version was serviceable, in direct, antithetical prose. The “Langhorne Plutarch”

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enjoyed a long shelf life. In the 1890s, for example, several of its pairings—Alcibiades and Coriolanus; Aristides and Cato the Elder—were re-­ issued in octavo volumes as part of Cassell’s weekly National Library, at threepence-a-piece (sixpence in cloth). They carried introductions by Henry Morley, Professor of English at University College, London, and familiarised a generation of autodidacts, its curiosity aroused but half-­ satisfied by the provisions of 1870 Forster Education Act, with the ancient classics. Thus re-cycled, Langhorne might with justice be hailed as “the people’s Plutarch”.57 Meanwhile, in the 1850s, Matthew Arnold’s friend, the brilliant but excitable Arthur Hugh Clough, had been through a typically Victorian crisis of faith. His career and confidence broken, he abandoned his Fellowship at Oriel, Oxford, and eventually sailed for the United States, where he occupied himself in “correcting” and modernising the “Dryden Plutarch”. Clough was a poet who strove to achieve a kind of muscular colloquiality in all his writing. As a result, his Plutarch is confidential, even elbow-nudging; it does not, however, achieve a sufficient distance from the “Dryden” text to be considered much more than a revision. It remained in print in J.M.  Dent’s inexpensive but tastefully produced Everyman’s Library well into the twentieth century. Like its predecessors, it was essentially the product of polyglot amateurism rather than of classical scholarship in the modern sense. In the twentieth century by contrast, Plutarch rapidly acquired an expert apparatus of specialist interpretation and exegesis. The upshot was both loss and gain; gain in that we learned a lot more about him, loss in that for the general reader he often disappeared from sight, despite several attractive paperback re-printings. Above all, attention was increasingly directed to the context of individual Lives at the expense of the architecture of the work as a whole. Extracted from their context, and often shorn of their linking conclusions, the Lives came increasingly to be issued in self-standing, chronologically or thematically re-organised, Greek or Roman series. The author’s overall design, with its complex and comparative attitude to psychology, ceased to be taken very seriously. Scholarship gained, but appreciation of Plutarch’s artistic skill, the peculiar quality both of his didacticism and his human insight, the parallel and lateral qualities of his mind, dwindled in consequence.

57  For a fuller discussion of the democratisation of Plutarch’s appeal in the nineteenth century, see Chap. 7.

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Modern life-writers can learn much from Plutarch’s skills as biographer, especially from what we have called his “pointiliste” technique—his attention to detail, his ear for on-the-cuff remarks, his eye for body language (what in The Life of Alexander he calls “the signs of the soul”), his human understanding and tolerance of seeming contradiction. These permanently relevant attributes are too frequently disguised by published translations of the Lives that rend his careful couplings apart. As a result, his subtle understanding of human motive has too frequently been sacrificed to a focus on mere events, something that he vocally deplored. Plutarch is a strategically indispensable point of reference, without whom our appreciation of the long history of the biographical form is woefully incomplete. Many a crux that besets the modern biographer is pre-figured by him, and in his prolific output several can find a resourceful solution. When Boswell called him “the Prince of ancient biographers” what he seems to mean is that in him we meet an instructive combination of scale with insight, of intimacy with power. Plutarch recounts a marital squabble as readily as a pitched battle; he is a master both of the unguarded moment and the public dispute. In all of these respects—in his variety and his versatility, as well as in his scale he is—for all who strive to practice the arts of life-­ writing—one indispensable precursor.

Bibliography and Further Reading Primary Text

and

Translations:

Plutarchi Vitae Parallelae, Eds. Cl. Lindskog and K.  Ziegler (Leipzig: Teubner, 1914). Plutarque, Les Vies des Hommes Illustres Grecs et Romains, comparées l’une avec l’autre par Plutarque de Chaeronee translatées premièrement de Grec en François par Maistre Jacques Amyot, lors Abbé de Bellozane (Paris: Imprimerie de Michel Vascosan, Imprimeur du Roy, 1565). Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans Compared, Translated out of Greek into French by James Amyot, Abbot of Bellozane, Bishop of Auxerre, etc. and out of French into English by Thomas North (London: Thomas Vautroulier and John Wright, 1579). Plutarch’s Lives. Translated from the Greek by Several Hands. To which is prefixt the Life of Plutarch (London: Jacob Tonson, 1683). This is the so-called “Dryden” translation.

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Except when stated otherwise, the translation from which I quote for the Parallel Lives is that by the Yale classicist Bernadotte Perrin in the Loeb edition published jointly by Heinemann in London and Harvard University Press in Cambridge, Mass. between 1914 and 1923. For the Moralia I have cited the Loeb edition of 1939 by the same publishers translated by the Berkeley scholar W.C. Helmbold.

Selected Commentary: Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (London: Profile, 2015). James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. and introd. David Womersley (Penguin Classics, 2008). I have used this edition, which takes as its text the Third Edition of Boswell’s work edited by Edmond Malone and published by Charles Dilly in 1799. James Boswell, An Account of Corsica: The Journal of a Tour of That Island and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1768). Timothy Duff, Plutarch’s Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice (Oxford, Clarendon, 1999). Hartmut Erbse, “Die Bedeutung der Synkrisis in den Parallelbiographien Plutarchs’,” Hermes, 84, 378–444. A. J. Gossage, “Plutarch”, in Latin Biography, Ed. T.A. Dorey (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), 45–77. Olivier Guerrier Ed., Plutarque de l’Âge classique au XIXe siècle: Présences, interférences et dynamique (Grenoble: Editions Jérôme Millon, 2012). The Correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, C.R. Haines Ed. (Heinemann, 1919). Martha W. Howard, The Influence of Plutarch in the Major European Literatures of the Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970) Noreen Humble Ed., Plutarch’s Lives: Parallels and Purpose (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2010). Susan G.  Jacobs, Plutarch’s Pragmatic Biographies: Lessons for Statesmen and Generals in the Parallel Lives (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018). Robert Lamberton, Plutarch (Yale University Press, 2001). Christopher Pelling, Plutarch and History: Eighteen Studies (London: Duckworth and Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2002). Barbara Scardigli Ed., Essays on Plutarch’s Lives (Oxford University Press, 1997).

CHAPTER 4

Biography as Censure: Suetonius and Procopius

If, in the mind of late eighteenth-century Europeans, from Boswell to Charlotte Corday, the works of Plutarch served as an impetus for the worship of heroes, the writings of his near-contemporary Suetonius possessed a very different reputation and a different sort of resonance. In our opening chapter we looked at the scurrilous counter-revolutionary outpourings of the pseudonymous “H. Stewarton”, for whom the Corsican upstart Napoleon was a thorough rogue. To make this point, it was sufficient for him to drop Suetonius’s name. Nothing and nobody, he writes in volume two of his book, could possibly exceed the “ambition, intrigue, tyranny and ferocity of Napoleon Bonaparte”, not even the most lurid behaviour of the most debauched of the Caesars. To any reasonable person, he declares, “the reigns of Nero, Caligula, Domitian and Robespierre must appear less intolerable” than that of this particular French despot, guilty as he has proved himself to be of “deeds of atrocity at which Nero would have blushed, and which Suetonius would not have dared to impute to this monster”.1 For many in Enlightenment Europe, Suetonius had come to represent a sort of ne plus ultra of biographical denigration. So for some readers he has remained. As the British classicist Tristran Power has recently remarked 1  H. Stewarton, The Revolutionary Plutarch: Exhibiting the Most Distinguished Characters, Literary, Military and Political, in the Recent Annals of the French Republic. The Greater Part from the Original Information of a Gentleman Resident in Paris, 3rd Edition, in 3 vols (London: John Murray, 1805), ii, 218.

© The Author(s) 2020 R. Fraser, After Ancient Biography, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35169-4_4

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of his legacy, Suetonius appears to be the fount and originator of the still-­ popular “tell all” biographical style.2 If you confine yourself to his popular reputation, he is a muckraker: he is Julius Caesar’s epileptic fits; he is the Emperor Tiberius’s squalid old age in Capri; he is Caligula deflowering his sisters; he is Nero playing the lute whilst Rome burns. Suetonius, according to this view of him, is a gossip and a scourge. Scholarship, however, reveals a much more complicated picture. Scandal is indubitably present in De Vita Caesarum (Concerning the Life of the Caesars), his account of the lives of the first twelve emperors, and one does not have to look far to find it. The result, however, is a very selective reading, even of that one work. Look more deeply and one sees just how much Suetonius admired—nay revered—Augustus, how equitable is his treatment of the lives of some of the later emperors with whom he deals, Vespasian say. Suetonius, moreover, was a prolific author who produced works on all manner of subjects from games to whores, most of which are lost. What many scholars consider to be his most characteristic book—De Viris Illustribus (Concerning Famous Men)—is an account of the lives of celebrated authors, grammarians and literary scholars, which has survived in fragments. Foremost amongst those who have taken it as the clue to the rest of Suetonius’s work was the early twentieth-century German critic and scholar Friedrich Leo, on whom we touched in Chap. 2. Leo noted that Suetonius earned his living as a grammaticus, a man of letters and associate of Pliny the Younger who had served as an imperial librarian and, prior to his removal from office for causes unknown, the secretary responsible for the Emperor Hadrian’s correspondence. None of which, of course, is incompatible with prurience, but all of which suggests a personal commitment to discipline, order and method. Pliny once described Suetonius as a quiet man devoted to his studies, and that is the impression left by much of his work.3 The problem is that much of what he wrote has not survived, and that what we have mostly exists in partial form. Even in his history of the first twelve Caesars, the Preface and strategically important first section of the life of Julius Caesar describing the subject’s background and early youth are missing. Whole works, such as his history of dress, are absent; of his study of the famous courtesans, only 2  Tristan Power, “The Originality of Suetonius” in Tristan Power and Roy K. Gibson eds, Suetonius the Biographer: Studies in Roman Lives (Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–20. 3  See Tristan Power, “Pliny’s Letters 5.10 and the Literary Career of Suetonius”, The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 100 (2010), 140–62.

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a tantalising glimpse of Omphale kinkily dressing Heracles up in drag survives. Of the De Viris Illustribus, as Roy K. Gibson observes, only the section on orators and rhetoricians is “virtually complete”. Here, to give a flavour, is a fairly typical passage near the beginning describing the origins of the grammatical science in Rome: The foundations of the study were laid, and it was advanced in all directions, by Lucius Aelius of Lanuvium and his son-in-law Servius Clodius, both of whom were Roman knights and men of wide and varied experience in scholarship and statecraft. Aelius had two surnames, for he was called Praeconinus because his father had followed the occupation of a crier, and Stilo because he used to write speeches for all the great men of the day and he was so devoted to the aristocratic party that he followed Metellus Numidicus into exile. Servius stole one of his father-in-law’s books before it was published, and being in consequence disowned, left the city through shame and remorse, and fell ill of the gout. Unable to endure the pain, he applied a poisonous drug to his feet, which finally killed him, after he had lived for a time with that part of his body as it were prematurely dead.4

This seems sober enough, at least to begin with. It consists of a minute double-biography of two male relatives, both of whom made a recognisable contribution to their erudite calling. What is remarkable is the way that, towards the end, after touching on Lucius Aelius’s political sympathies, it passes unblushingly from the most public of matters to the most private and sordid. In the first two sentences, we are with the genesis of an honoured branch of scholarship; we then pass on almost seamlessly to book theft, discovery, shame, disease and death. This is almost a paradigm of what Suetonius achieves elsewhere: his priority seems to have been to be inclusive and fair, however extensive the evidence, or however scarce. It was Leo’s contention that Suetonius honed his craft by writing literary biographies of this kind and then applied a similar approach to emperors. According to this view, De Viris Illustribus served as pattern its author followed for the lives of the Caesars. What they share is this candour, this inclusiveness; above all, this determination to convey everything of interest in the most rational and unblinking of forms. Shifts of focus and level from elevation to degradation sometimes appear 4  Suetonius, De Grammaticis, 3 (1)-(3). The translation is that by J.G.  Rolfe (Loeb Classical Library, 1914), based on the Teubner edition of 1907.

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to be matters of indifference to him: what he desires above all is to be open and fair, whether to grammar books or to gout. In his life of Horace, one of the biographical sketches we possess from the section of De viris illustribus covering poets, Suetonius informs us about Augustus’s reaction to his work, then, after telling us that Horace was short and fat (“brevis atque obesus”) mentions that the poet liked to position prostitutes in a mirrored room so as to titillate his voyeuristic instincts in a literal act of pornography: “Ad res Venerias intemperantior traditur; nam speculato cubiculo scorta dicitur habuisse disposita, ut quocumque respexisset ibi ei imago coitus referretur”.5 The tone of voice scarcely fluctuates between the odes and the whores. Did this equality of treatment stem from literal attention to detail, from salaciousness, or from it even-handed detachment? In November 2014, Tristan Power published a book entitled Suetonius: A Guide for the Perplexed.6 The reaction is not hard to understand.

Plutarch Versus Suetonius There have been few starker contrasts in the history of biography than that provided by Plutarch and his junior contemporary Gauis Suetonius Tranquillus. About nineteen years younger than the sage of Chaeronea, Suetonius had witnessed many of the same events as his Greek elder and could draw both on the same written sources and on a similar fund of memory. His father, a colonel in a professional legion, had fought in the very battle of Betriacum across the field of which Plutarch once walked, described by both authors in their respective lives of the emperor Otho. Like Plutarch, Suetonius was a polymath, though his non-biographical interests tended towards custom and grammar rather than ethics. Again like Plutarch, he was fascinated by the lives of leaders, above all if they were flawed. He wrote a sequential account of the lives of the earliest emperors, covering the Julian and Flavian houses but, a younger man, was able to continue up to and including the reign of Domitian (81–96 CE). Both writers accepted posts of a kind under the Emperor Hadrian— though Plutarch’s as a procurator of Achaia was an honorary one, and Suetonius worked actively in several clerical and archival capacities. Plutarch kept his job until his death, whereas Suetonius was abruptly dismissed shortly after the emperor had returned from a tour of Britain or, 5 6

 Suetonius, Vita Horati, 4.  Tristan Power, Suetonius: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2014).

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according to some accounts, while he was there. And there the affinities end. To some extent the differences between them are an expression of personality, but they also reflect geographical and political circumstances. Where Plutarch was a provincial much engrossed by metropolitan life, Suetonius was a Roman city dweller through and through. He was very conscious of his ancestry and, though approaching sixty when he died shortly after 122 CE, seems seldom—apart from one trip to Bithynia in 111 with the energetic letter-writer Pliny the Younger—to have wandered far from the capital of the Empire with its grandiose huddle of palaces, villas, baths, temples and forums. Indeed, many of his most characteristic literary works seem to have been dissertations on facets of the city and its variegated social life. His Ludicra Historia (The Games Story) and his digest on the Roman year, if they had survived, might have added much to what we know of Latin feast days from the Fasti by Ovid. But Suetonius also expanded the science of biography in several directions. De Viris Illustribus possessed the same title as a work by Cornelius Nepos, and it embraced lives of the playwright Terence and of Horace as well as grammarians and rhetoricians. What we have now, however, are for the most part fairly corrupt abridgements appended at some stage as biographical notes to works by the authors concerned. It is especially regrettable, bearing in mind the twentieth-century take on Suetonius, that his Lives of the Famous Whores never made it down the ages. As it is, it is on his De Vita Caesarum that his fame and his interest largely depend. His theory of biography is quite distinct from Plutarch’s. Once again, it is encapsulated in a metaphor, which occurs half way through the first of his lives, Julius Caesar’s. He has just offered us a list of the great dictator’s virtues and goes on to say: praegravant tamen cetera facta dictaque eius, ut et abusus dominatione et iure caesus existimetur: “other deeds and words of his preponderated to such as extent that it was felt that he had abused his power, and was killed with just cause”.7 Praegravant means “weighed down” or “burdened” and can also be applied to the action of a pair of scales as one pan sinks beneath a heavier load. Robert Graves in his translation of 1957 renders the phrase as “set to the debit account”, alluding to Roman methods of book-keeping, and more particularly to business 7  Suetonius, Divus Julius, 76. Unless otherwise stated, the translation of De Vita Caesarum used throughout is Robert Graves’s The Twelve Caesars of 1957 (Harmondsworth: Penguin), in the revision by J.B. Rives (Penguin, 2007).

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l­edgers written in columns, either on a papyrus roll or on a wooden or wax tablet. As in the account sheet of any present-day company, the items in the credit and debit columns were added up, and a balance entered. This, in fine, is Suetonius’s model for writing a biography and though he varies the elements, he keeps to the same basic format, even when, in the case of Divine Augustus—as Rebecca Langlands has remarked—he wishes to set up his subject as some kind of an exemplary model of leadership.8 After recounting the basic facts of the life, he proceeds to analyse the behaviour of his subject by divisio, placing virtues first, vices second, followed by a summation or verdict, with clear textual indications as to where each of these exercises or sections begins and ends. “No other feature”, remarks G.B. Townend, “displays so clearly the method of the grammaticus turned biographer”.9 Since the vices invariably come after the virtues, several of the lives possess a kind of declining curve amounting in some cases almost to bathos. In the light of this impression, one wonders whether the graph of “disappointed expectation” that Paul Plass for one has detected as a recurrent feature of each of these lives is not a bye-product of Suetonius’s careful methods.10 Inevitably the vices listed towards the end serve to cast the preceding virtues in an ironic, deprecatory light, though the irony and the deprecation may sometimes dwell in the eye of the beholder, or reader. Be that as it may, it forms a recognisable element in the after-taste of the reading experience, and as such has become a significant aspect of Suetonius’s legacy and reputation. It has also coloured the way in which the lives of the earlier Caesars have been viewed ever since. Suetonius is viewed as a pessimist and cynic, though he may have been neither. And the popular imagination has seized on the idea of Tiberius and his successors as deeply degenerate, even though, as Suetonius makes perfectly clear, they possessed considerable redeeming qualities, not least in maintaining and expanding the empire. Suetonius’s devotion to method, his tidiness and devotion to detail remind us of his other professional activities for, as well as being a minor diplomat under Trajan—that Bithynia expedition again—he had held a 8  See Rebecca Langlands, “Exemplary Influences and Augustus’s Pernicious Moral Legacy” in Power and Gibson (2014), 111–29. 9  G. B. Townend, “Suetonius and His Influence” in Latin Biography ed. T.A. Tolley, 86. 10  Paul Plass, Wit and the Writing of History: The Rhetoric of Historiography in Ancient Rome (Madison, Wisconsin, 1988), 18.

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series of important desk jobs: as secretary a studiis, a bibliothecis and ab epistulis. He had thus been responsible for the imperial library, as well as official court correspondence. It was Hadrian who had appointed him to the last of these posts. To begin with, in fact, this emperor seems to have got on well with his employee, who once gave him a bronze statuette of the Emperor Augustus as a boy; he carefully placed it among the lares in his bedroom.11 Why shortly after returning from Britain in 121/2 Hadrian sacked his friend we do not know, but the Empress Sabrina may have found Suetonius surly. In any case, the dismissal, which probably happened when he was half way through the Lives, coloured his mind set thereafter. Ovid—removed from office and exiled by Augustus in 8 CE because he was privy to the serial adulteries of his daughter Julia—spent the drab remainder of his life pleading to be re-instated. Suetonius was able to stay in Rome, maintaining there a distance from events, and a slightly vengeful calm evidenced in his writing by its steady coolness of judgement. We can speculate about the date of his fall from professional grace, since in the early lives he quotes from manuscripts to which he then had access; then the quotations cease. But the librarian’s concern for order never left him, and bibliography was in his blood. A distinction is sometimes mistakenly drawn between classical biography, with its haphazard and credulous working methods, and the source-driven approach of the moderns. This point is marginally applicable to Plutarch who, as we have already seen, on occasions fleshed out legend and hearsay; applied to Suetonius, who— even if he gives us no footnotes or bibliographies in the formal sense—is often very informative as to the sources of his material, it is well short of the mark. When giving a date, he checks it with the Official Gazette, and then, just to make sure, cross-refers to other printed sources. He interviews eyewitnesses and records both memories of his own and those handed down by his father and grandfather. Not only does he quote from official letters in the archive but from private correspondence as well— from Augustus to his adoptive son Tiberius, and from Tiberius to various family members. He consults both published authorities—Cicero; Pliny— and manuscripts. He has read Tiberius’s “brief and sketchy autobiography”, and has pored over the unpublished poetry of Nero, noting its drafts, deletions and amendments.12 Other official documents at his  Divus Augustus, 7.  Nero, 52.

11 12

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­ isposal are the regular Proceedings of the Senate, the annual imperial budd get and military bulletins. He is careful to note, for example, that Julius Caesar was the first Roman commander to submit his dispatches from the front “ad paginas”, that is in columns as in a book-style roll or codex.13 He gazes at coins for likenesses, and lovingly describes statuettes he has handled or seen: including one of Germanicus’s third son, Caligula’s younger brother, who died in infancy. His reliance on quotation in the early lives is often copious and instructive, preferring to present his imperial subjects in their own words. With this in mind, the American classicist Cynthia Damon has compared Suetonius to a ventriloquist, speaking through the voices of his successive human subjects. Not every present-day biographer is this versatile or this conscientious.

Two Versions of Julius There is no more revealing means of conveying the quality of Suetonius’s individual method than to examine his life of Julius Caesar (“subsequently deified”) and to place it alongside Plutarch’s. The reading experiences are so dissimilar that it is as if the same figure is being viewed through two differently coloured filters. The exercise is slightly hindered by the fact that we have lost the first two or three paragraphs of Suetonius’s text. They dealt with Caesar’s ancestry, a matter about which Suetonius, bureaucrat as he is, was always curious. But we are soon into Caesar’s career and confronted by Suetonius’s characteristic judiciousness. On the one hand, he wishes to make clear that from the outset that the founder of the Julian house has eyes firmly focussed on ambition. Offered the hand of a girl called Cossutia, he turns her down because her family are of the class of equites (or “cavalrymen”), second of the Roman social orders whose property qualification of 400,000 sestertii was about half that required to enter the senate. This was, far from irrelevantly, the very caste to which Suetonius himself belonged. On the other hand, at the age of seventeen Julius chooses instead to marry Cornelia, whose father Lucius Cornelius Cinna had been an inveterate opponent of the dictator Sulla. As a result, Caesar incurs Sulla’s wrath, but in the face of official pressure refuses to divorce his young wife. The point Suetonius obviously wishes to make is that, in Julius’s nature, ambition is tempered by strong feelings of loyalty. The same sort of reticence and tact are evident in his treatment of  Divus Julius, 56.

13

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an early near-scandal. Dispatched to Bithynia (in the north-east of present-­ day Turkey) to fetch some ships for the siege of Mytiline in 81 BCE, the nineteen-year-old Julius spends week after week hanging around the court of King Nicomedes Philopator, non sine rumore prostratae regi pudicitiae “not without a rumour spreading that his chastity had been prostituted to the king”.14 This is supposed to have happened two centuries before Suetonius’s own mission to Bythinia. Whilst there, he might have got wind of the allegation, and the slander would have seemed all the more likely to him since, on his death six years after the young Caesar’s visit, Nicomedes made a gift of his country to the Romans. Characteristically, though, Suetonius merely drops a hint at this point, so that he can return to the subject later on. Back in Rome, Caesar continues to balance family loyalty and self-­ promotion. When his aunt Julia dies closely followed by Cornelia, he is called to the Rosta in the Forum to deliver eulogies to them both, but uses the opportunity to boast of his ancestry and hence, implicitly, his fitness for high office. He is appointed Pontifex Maximus and then Governor of Gaul, but instead of drawing on Caesar’s account of his own military campaigns as he well might, had he been a military historian like Tacitus, Suetonius summarises the Gallic wars in one paragraph, then concentrates on the biographer’s business of evoking character. Confronted on his travels with a statue to the long-dead Alexander, Julius laments the fact that at his age Alexander had already conquered much of the known world. And when it comes to describing the famous moment when Julius crosses the Rubicon, Suetonius’s Latin is more resolute than Plutarch’s Greek: iacta alea est: “the die has been cast”.15 Even the civil war against Pompey does not arrest him for long, and the Battle of Pharsalus, Plutarch’s great set piece, detains him for a third of one sentence. It is only when we reach the triumphs Caesar mounted on his return to Rome that the pace slows. These were lavishly staged processions from the Campus Martius up to the Capitoline hill, and Caesar performed five of them, four within the space of a month, and one for each of his successful wars. Suetonius dwells on the element of pageantry involved, including the boast “VENI, VIDI, VIC1” emblazoned on one of the waggons at the Pontic triumph.16 Caesar  Divus Julius, 2.  Divus Julius, 32. 16  Divus Julius, 37. According to Plutarch these words originated in a letter that Caesar wrote home announcing his victory at Zela at the climax of the Pontic campaign. But the 14 15

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is made dictator, but refuses the crown. After a compendious and typically systematic account of his subject’s administrative reforms—including the revision of the calendar and a relatively humane reform of the gladiatorial games—and of his public works—including extending the Circus Maximus—Suetonius then pauses. It is at this juncture, poised as he is between Caesar’s elevation and fall, that Suetonius the moral accountant brings his scales or ledger sheet out. He is going to tell us what manner of person Caesar was, and he is going to do so by divisio: that is, in themed sections. He starts with the emperor’s appearance—“tall, fair, and well-built”—and then with his villa. After glancing at his taste for pearls and at his dining habits, we arrive at one of Suetonius’s favourite subjects: sex. Again, we are back in Bithynia, and Caesar is reputedly on King Nicodemes’s couch. Suetonius repeats the rumour including the homophobic quips and lampoons made at Caesar’s expense. According to Marcus Brutus—who, as Suetonius will soon demonstrate, had every reason to be privy to Caesar’s doings—a blabbermouth called Octavius once entered a gathering where Caesar and Pompey were sitting side by side. He saluted Pompey as “the King” and Caesar as “The Queen”.17 Suetonius imparts this, less because there anything necessarily true about the slur—it may indeed as he implies have been no more than malicious nonsense—but because rumour is a fact possessing intrinsic social importance. Rumours tell us as much about the rumour-mongers as they do about their victims. Suetonius now progresses to Caesar’s better-documented heterosexual involvements, and again there is rumour in the air, but of a different kind. Half this section is devoted to just one of Caesar’s entanglements: with Servilia, mother of Marcus Brutus, who was born during their affair. Suetonius has an ulterior motive for telling us this now, but again, with the apparent discretion of a civil servant, he does not divulge what it is. He passes swiftly on.18 It is now that we get flash-like glimpses of aspects of the Julius’s myriad personality quite invisible to Plutarch: Caesar the autobiographer; Caesar the cryptographer (his chosen code, of course, being minutely described); Caesar the juvenile dramatist and amateur poet; Caesar the stylist; Caesar stories are far from incompatible: the slogan quoted the letter, which in any case Suetonius would have seen. 17  Divus Julius, 49. 18  Divus Julius, 50.

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the athlete and endurance artiste; Caesar the swordsman; Caesar the disciplinarian and manager of men. One anecdote in particular is earmarked to make this point. The Tenth Legion is in Rome and desperate for leave, but Caesar needs them to fight in North Africa. Taking the stand, he addresses them not as milites (soldiers) but as quirites (citizens). The purpose seems to have been to sting them into action—“we are soldiers!” they respond— though for Suetonius, quirites is regarded as a morale-boosting compliment.19 In any case, no sooner has he gained the troops’ vocal support than Caesar abruptly disbands them. Which leads Suetonius to his final divisio: Caesar’s bad manners. As Suetonius narrates the various slights Caesar gave to well-placed people—he will not, for example, rise to greet the tribunes—we realise why he is brandishing his scales now, half way through the story. He is about to tell us all about the assassination, and the question he is posing is this: was the conspiracy justified; did Caesar deserve to die? His answer— diplomat as he is—is not straightforward. It amounts to this: that Caesar was imperfect, but a god. To a Christian, even a post-Christian, readership this seems paradoxical, but in the Graeco-Roman system, of course, it makes perfect sense. Jupiter was temperamental, Mars violent, Neptune unaccountable: all were lustful. Imperfect though divine, Caesar is cast in their mould. But Suetonius has one more surprise to spring. As Caesar stumbles in the Pompeian Assembly Room amid a rain of dagger-blows, he addresses the assassin Brutus in the Greek language that they share: kai su teknon, “even you, child?” And now we can recall the stories about his liaison with Servilia and Brutus’s birth. Caesar is slain by his son.20 19  The Emperor Augustus apparently decided that the equivalent compliment commilitones (“comrades”) was too good for the troops (Divus Augustus, 25). For an alternative interpretation of the episode with the Tenth Legion (Divus Julius, 70), see Georges Dumézil, La Religion Romaine antique (Paris: Pagot, 1966), pp 258 sqq. Quirites is cognate both with the god Quirinus, and with the Quirinal Hill. 20  Divus Julius, 82. Shakespeare’s punning “Et tu, brute?” in Julius Caesar, III, i, 71 is closer to “And you, foolish child?”, though where he got the question from has never exactly been clear. It may have been from a lost tragedy, Caesar Imperfectus, the author of which had read Suetonius in the original, with a Latin gloss on the Greek line. Philemon Holland’s The Historie of Twelve Caesars (London, 1606), an English translation of De Vita Caesarum, appeared seven years too late for Shakespeare to use. But, as David Daniel remarks (Arden edition 2002, p. 92) other translations were available to him in French, Italian and Spanish. Shakespeare’s Latin may in any case well have been up to the Suetonian mark. Holland (p. 33), interestingly, is quite clear about the implications of Caesar’s words, construing them as “And thou, my son?”

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To Be a Caesar The careful balance between divinity and humanity struck in Divus Julius influences the perspectives throughout the rest of the lives. It also anticipates a political and philosophical question hovering over the series as a whole. In a spirited and eloquent essay, the Cambridge classicist John Henderson has asked “Was Suetonius’ Julius a Caesar?”21 This is a meaningful query since, although technically the first of the Julian line, Julius did not in fact found the dynasty, nor was he ever Emperor. Both of those honours go to his great-nephew Augustus. The overarching question is thus: what did it mean to be a Caesar, and what were the expectations surrounding the office? It is conceded by David Wardle among others that Suetonius intends us to regard Augustus as the exemplum with reference to whom the remaining ten emperors are to be judged; over the effects of this comparison, however, there is wide-spread disagreement. Erik Gunderson, for example, has illustrated quite efficiently the centrality of the notion of exemplarity to Suetonius’s vocabulary and entire conception.22 In vivid contrast, Rebecca Langlands has maintained that, so disastrous is Augustus’s behaviour as portrayed by Suetonius, his legacy can only be regarded as “pernicious”. Augustus displays much callousness as a young man. After his victory at Philippi he causes a father and son to play the finger-game of morra to determine which of them is to die.23 When the father gives his life for his son, the boy commits suicide with Octavius (as Augustus was then known) looking on. He orders a journalistically minded soldier who is taking down one of his speeches to be stabbed there and then. Set against these peccadilloes are his frugality—he often survives on a diet of figs and dry bread— his passion for order, his modesty and his longevity. It is Augustus’s private life however that damns him in the eyes of Langlands. In 44 BCE, as Suetonius cryptically informs us, Augustus stole Livia Drusilla, then pregnant with the future Germanicus, from her first husband Tiberius Claudius Nero. This nefarious act, it is claimed, cast a long shadow over her marriage to Augustus, over her relationship with her son Tiberius—child of her first husband—and over the whole Julian house. Both Caligula and  Power and Gibson, eds. (2014), 81–110.  Erik Gunderson, “Augustus: exemplum in the Augustus and Tiberius”, in Power and Gibson, eds. (2014), 130–45. 23  Divus Augustus, 13. Morra was a game in which contestants guessed which finger their opponent would point with next. 21 22

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Domitian were to cite it as a precedent when they in turn stole other men’s wives. The more public impact was on Augustus’s marriage laws, which went seriously astray when the poacher turned game keeper. In view of his own adultery, Augustus simply lacked the moral authority to maintain such laws. This is Langland’s firmly held view. The question remains, is it Suetonius’s? The reservation is a serious one since, by the strictest logic of exemplarity, if Augustus is rotten, so is his house. In practice, Suetonius’s technique of divisio enables him to avoid any such explicit judgement, even if he embraces it implicitly. He seldom if ever assesses an emperor’s public or historical significance by referring to his private conduct. In this he is true to the example of Julius, always insistent that soldiers should be judged, not by the probity of their private lives but by their efficiency as fighters. The over-riding prerogative is that, despite his private peccadilloes, and the possible knock-on effect on his civil legislation and the conduct of two of his successors, Augustus governed the empire well. Arguably the disparity had not been as blatant as it might seem. Inconsistency only becomes glaring when Suetonius passes on to consider the reign of Augustus’s adoptive son, Tiberius. Tiberius has always been a hard nut to crack. Both Suetonius and Tacitus had a shot at him, and both strain to make him credible. Seventeen centuries later, the problem they faced was encapsulated by the classically educated English Whig historian, Thomas Babington Macaulay. He is speaking primarily of Tacitus, but the same challenge faced them both. How do you get to grips with a man singularly dark and inscrutable—with a man whose real disposition long remained swathed up in intricate folds of lascivious virtues, and over whose actions the hypocrisy of his youth and the senility of his old age threw a singular mystery. He was to exhibit the special qualities of the tyrant in a light that might render them transparent, and enable us to perceive the covering and the vices that it concealed. He was to trace the gradations by which the first magistrate of the republic, a senator mixing freely in debate, a noble associating with his fellow nobles, was transformed into an Asiatic sultan. … He was to trace the gradual effect of advancing age and approaching death on this strange compound of strength and weakness; to exhibit the old sovereign of the world sinking into a dotage which, though it rendered his appetites eccentric, and his temper savage, never impaired the powers of his stern and penetrating mind—conscious of failing strength,

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raging with capricious sensuality, yet to the last the keenest of observers, the most artful of dissemblers, and the most terrible of masters.24

It is a challenge to which Suetonius rises. When Tiberius retires to Capri, he shows him creating a sad fantasy world of live nymphs and cupidons— spintriae—performing for his pleasure. He is cruel and sexually insatiable; the crunch is that he is also pathetic. In Robert Graves’s translation: Imagine training little boys, whom he called his ‘minnows’ [pisciculos], to chase him while he was swimming and get between his legs to lick and nibble him. Or letting babies not yet weaned from their mother’s breast such at his breast and groin—such a filthy old man he had become! Then there was a painting by Parrhasius, which had been bequeathed him on condition that, if he did not like the subject, he could have 10,000 gold pieces instead. Tiberius not only preferred to keep the picture, but hung it in his bedroom. It showed Atalanta performing fellatio with [ore morigeratur] Meleager.25

Titbits like this have fed the minds of decadent Europeans for centuries. No wonder Suetonius was so popular in the nineteenth-century fin-de-­ siècle, especially with the young Swinburne, who quotes this very passage in a poetic tribute to the Marquis de Sade.26 In such latter day realisations the horrors are torn out of context. What makes them so effective in the original is the trembling of the judicial scales. The more depraved the emperor, the more scrupulousness grew Suetonius’s account-making techniques, the more overt is his seeming fairness. The prime instances are Gaius (Caligula) and Nero. Readers familiar with the misdeeds of these rulers, but ignorant of Suetonius’s style, are amazed to read of Caligula’s concern for civic probity, and Nero’s care for buildings. Gaius obeys his predecessor Tiberius’s will to the letter, is a more than competent consul, pursues an extensive programme of public works, and appears warmly appreciative of the efforts of army and of people. When a woman is tortured unfairly, he makes sure that she is compensated. At one of his public shows he notices an audience member of the equites class tucking enjoyably into his food, and sends him over an  Macaulay, Essays and Biographies (London: Longman and Green, 1898), i, 197.  Tiberius, 44. 26  In Swinburne’s French poem “Charenton en 1810” de Sade is inspired by Tiberius’s example, as “all of vicious Capri blazed before his eyes”. (Elizabeth Gitter, “Obsessional, idolatrous: Swinburne’s imaginary encounter with Sade”, TLS, October 10, 2003, 15–16.) 24 25

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extra, heaped plateful. Can this paragon be the Caligula of legend: the nihilist of Albert Camus’s drama, the bitter sensualist of Gore Vidal’s screenplay for the Bob Guccione film?27 There is a pause, followed by a single, barbed sentence. Hactenus quasi de principe, states Suetonius, reliqua de monstro narranda sunt: “So much for Gaius the Emperor; the rest of this history must needs deal with Gaius the Monster”.28 It is one of Suetonius’s great pivot sentences. The scales are trembling, their two pans held in equal balance. How we read depends crucially on our estimate of Suetonius’s tone at this point. Specifically, it depends on how we hear the gerundive “narranda sunt”, “ought to be explained”. This is a dilemma perfectly illustrated as late as 2007 by the archaic awkwardness of the translator’s “must needs deal with” (in 1957, Graves had contented himself with the balder “must deal with”). Exactly how reluctant is Suetonius? Depending on one’s temperament and orientation— depending even on one’s view of the biographer—the sentiment could add up to “Those were his achievements but, to be entirely fair I ought to give you the downside” or else—rubbing his ink-stained hands—“so much for the official line; now for the dirt”. There follows the Caligula of notorious legend: the man who makes his horse a consul, sleeps with his sisters, kills for mere amusement, erects a statue of himself in the temple at Jerusalem where he can be worshipped in his lifetime as a god, and ruins the public exchequer with outlandish architectural schemes—including the construction of a footbridge from the Palatine across to the Capitol. How much of this can be believed? Since Suetonius was writing this particular life after he had been removed from office and had lost access to the state archives, the documentation is far less thorough than it is for say Augustus. Several recent classicists, including Cambridge’s Mary Beard, have cast doubt on the verdict, citing the fact that, following Caligula’s assassination, the murderers needed to justify their intervention, and that it is their version of events that has passed down to us. From our point of view, the more relevant question is the effect that Suetonius intends to create.29 The French classicist Jean Gastou put one possibility particularly well: “Impeturblement, Suétone 27  Made in 1979, and much re-issued. The actor Sir John Geilgud, who played Nerva, was so dismayed by some scenes required by the directors that reportedly he walked off the set. See Chap. 8. 28  Gauis Caligula, 22. 29  Mary Beard’s revisionist Timeline documentary on Gaius may be accessed at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaMF4WN3nZQ

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énumère de faits qui sont souvent en eux-mêmes d’une atrocité insoutenable, l’uniformité stylistique tend à anethésier le lecteur”: “Impeturbably, Suetonius enumerates facts that are insufferably atrocious in themselves: the uniformity of his style tends to anaesthetise the reader”.30 The question remains: how deliberate is this effect? Is Suetonius, as some writers of the nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle liked to suppose, an immoralist?

Biography in The Round If Suetonius leaves much to the disposition and judgement of his readers, it is an effect enhanced by his rigorous separation of narrative from commentary, the story coming first and the commentary afterwards, just before his account of his subject’s death, with a simple list of his physical characteristics usually placed near the end. And yet, beyond the divisiones and the topoi, something else is at work that raises Suetonius from a tiresome pedant to the gifted biographer he undoubtedly is. Strange to say, there is a remarkable unity to each of his depictions. If Plutarch sometimes seems to view his subjects in revealing snatches, each with an appropriate generalisation attached, Suetonius looks three-dimensionally, and in depth. So vivid is his evocation of these twelve ungovernable despots— none of whom would escape being flayed alive by the media today—that we enjoy the splendid illusion that we have understood them as a result of this author’s unmistakeable, cumulative hints. Tiberius may finish as a disreputable and revolting geriatric, but he starts as an emotionally damaged child. His boyhood is spent fleeing from place to place with his parents, since Augustus is erotically obsessed with his mother Livia, and determined to wrest her from her husband, Tiberius Claudius Nero. When his plan succeeds, Tiberius loses what security he had, a position made worse when Augustus, minded to adopt the youth, orders him to divorce his wife Vipsania, of whom he is dependently fond, so that he can marry his nymphomaniac daughter, Julia. There is one unforgettable snippet: Tiberius catches sight of the now estranged Vipsania walking in the marketplace; he follows her in tears and is ordered never to see her again. The marriage to Julia breaks down, and Tiberius sails alone for Rhodes, avoiding official contacts and disclaiming any aspiration to 30  Jean Gascou, Suètone historien (Rome: Bibliothèque des Ecoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 1984), 255.

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high office. The death in Gaul of his adoptive son Germanicus completes his desolation. Called to throne unwillingly at the age of fifty-four, he completes two years of decent service and then escapes once more, this time for good: to Capri where he sulks for the next twenty-one years. Suetonius’s account of this period may contain details of Tiberius’s vices and bouts of sadism, but it is more memorable for his afflictions: his shyness, unwillingness to give offence in minor situations, his distaste for flummery and officialdom, his morbid fear of thunder and concern for his personal safety, his bouts of depression, his shame. It is a very internalised portrait, and when we are finally treated to his physical description—the hangdog expression, the solemnity and oh-so-evident dejection—it is as if we have been handed a photograph we instantaneously recognise as the physical concomitant of the person to whose assorted sufferings we have just been made privy. One feels like averting one’s eyes. Gaius, of course, is Germanicus’s child, and that is where the trouble starts. With proper emphasis Suetonius dwells on his father’s death in Antioch on October 15, 19 CE. This was an event the ripples of which reached every corner of the known world, for Germanicus—handsome, moderate and a capable commander—was the greatest Emperor the Romans never had. His little boy, travelling with him on his campaigns in Gaul, had been the darling of the camp. Cutely kitted out in a dinky uniform and miniature military boots, he earned the nickname Caligula or “Little Bootikins”. And on Germanicus’s death the worst possible decision is taken. Newly pubescent, the now heir-presumptive is called to Capri to observe Tiberius’s vices. He becomes emperor at the age of twenty-four and embarks on a career of rampant exhibitionism. For if Tiberius’s principal instinct is always to hide, Caligula by contrast is a flaunter and a publicist. Perverted he certainly is, but few of his excesses— few even of his occasional manifestations of virtue—occur outside the gaze of spectators, be they the populace or the court. As Suetonius follows him, one notices how reticent his mode of narration actually is. Even in the “debit” section, were he was to pile outrage upon outrage, the attention— and the indignation too—would soon pall. Instead we have a series of ghastly vignettes: Caligula whispering to the statue of Jove the Thunderer on the Capitoline Hill, asking him not to let him down; Caligula morbidly aware of his own baldness, ordering any man he sees with a decent crop of hair to be shorn. Reading in Plato’s Republic that poets were not allowed within the Commonwealth, he seriously considers destroying the works of Homer to demonstrate this prerogative of banishment. Caligula is the

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only one of the emperors to attempt to deify himself. Learning that the Rex Nemorensis, the Priest of the Wood at the sacred grove by Lake Nemi, stands vigilant to defend his title against all-comers, he sends a strong man along the Appian Way to put the miscreant down.31 The incest and the murders that besmirch this short life are cognate with the myth, but the lasting impression is of a man desperate to prove himself worthy: of a crown, a woman’s love, of life itself, but mostly of a father now way beyond reach. He is, for example, obsessed with the question of his origins, wishing to strike from the record any reference to his mother’s side of the family, whom he considers unworthy of the Julian inheritance. In his closing paragraphs, abandoning for once his symmetrical accumulation of evidence for and against, Suetonius takes us fully into his confidence. The real clue to this man’s character, he says, lies in the disastrous sway of his moods between ecstatic self-assurance and cringing collapse. Suetonius’s treatment of Claudius is typically even-handed. On the one hand, he is portrayed as a victim of family contempt. “Livia”, he remarks, “never failed to treat him with the deepest scorn”; his great-uncle Augustus regards him as an idiot.32 Claudius’s four marriages are unfortunate, and his fourth wife, his niece Agrippina, manipulates him in order to secure the succession of her son Nero, whom he obediently adopts. These are the unsavoury facts of which Graves’s Claudius novels make much, as they do of Claudius’s physical afflictions, his twisting and stammering; Momigliano, as we saw earlier, chose to ignore them. But Suetonius also leaves ample testimony of Claudius’s achievements, of which Momigliano avails himself: his programme of public works, his generosity to the people, the habitual dignity of presence, either standing or sitting, his re-organisation of the army, his expansion of “matters of religious ritual, civil and military customs, and the social status of all classes at home and abroad”. When he appears before the Senate to announce that his career and life are drawing to a close, they cry one and all “The Gods forbid!” Nero is a contrasting study drawn across a narrower emotional range. His reign begins impressively. He gives the deceased Claudius a state funeral, hands out generous bounties to the troops, and introduces new standards of equity in the courts. Peculation is put down and commerce 31  Gaius Caligula, 35. For an explanation of this episode, see J.G.  Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd Ed. (London: Macmillan, 1906–15), i, 11. 32  Divus Claudius, 3.

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regulated, taxes are lowered and Christians prudently punished. Nero’s improvements to the city of Rome include a scheme linking Lake Avernus with the harbour town of Ostia and provision for porches at the front of civic buildings and private dwellings to assist the fighting of fire. Then again, there is a judicious pause, followed by another of his pivot sentences. “I have separated this catalogue of Nero’s less atrocious acts— some deserving no criticism, some even praiseworthy—from the others”, observes Suetonius. “But I must begin to list his follies and crimes.” Crippled as he is with many of the complexes that cumber his freakish uncle, Nero’s pre-eminent failing is almost comically straightforward: he is a mediocrity who wishes to be thought a person of talent. In delineating him, Suetonius draws on unsuspected wellsprings of farce. There is the band of cheerleaders whom Nero employs to applaud his amateurish performances on the lyre. They are divided into three groups: the “bees” who hum their approval, the “roof-tiles” who clap with cupped hands and the “bricks” who just slap their palms together. Their praise is not sufficient. Nero pits himself against the ancients and heads for Greece, where he manages to re-schedule the traditional games so that they coincide with his arrival and he can collect all of the prizes. His attempts to knobble the judges, whether in Greece in Rome, are both effectual and inept, since the resulting victories are worthless in the eyes of the spectators and his own. His sex life is risible. Erotically obsessed with his mother Agrippina, he eventually murders her and, in a scene of macabre theatricality, paws over her stiffening limbs, groping and assessing each one. There is no point in attempting to hide this enormity, and soon Nero is the scorn of Rome. The “Golden House” that he builds between the Palatine and Esquiline Hills, the fire that he stages for the sheer hell of it, the marauding and mugging escapades by night, are all attempts to up the odds, to clinch a coup-de-grace. Nero runs out of time and money, and the Romans and their allies out of patience. The Parthians threaten and, with characteristically inefficient bombast, Nero stabs himself in the throat. Watching his grave being dug in advance, his parting salvo is pure camp: Qualis artifex pereo: “Dead! And so great an artist!” 33 Suetonius’s equitable treatment of his subjects is salutary, but has often been disregarded. If, in the jaundiced eyes of posterity, Tiberius has come to be viewed primarily as sociopath, recluse and fantasist; Caligula as spoiled child and exhibitionist; Nero as megalomaniac, it is because for  Nero, 49.

33

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hundreds of years they have informed the collective imagination of Europe and, in so doing, have nourished the stereotypes we reach for in order to explain them. Whenever a biographer grapples with an unhinged dictator, general or king—even a power-mad minor official—these ghosts stir in the mind and insinuate themselves into the vocabulary. Even nowadays, it is via Suetonius that we choose to read excess. This long-term effect, of course, belongs to Suetonius’s afterlives, and yet the origins of it lie deep in his work. Rebecca Langlands argues that indeterminacy was implicit in his design from the start. Just as successive Caesars were unable to shape their ultimate destiny, so their biographer is unable to determine the ways in which later generations have interpreted him. Augustus, for example, “is represented by Suetonius as a man whose legacy is, after all, not within his control. It might be claimed, correspondingly, that Suetonius is a biographer whose legacy—and whose control over subsequent biographers in particular—was not under his control.” Attentively or laxly, corruptly sometimes, perversely often, we read and echo him at will.

A Secret History Well, then, this emperor was dissembling, crafty, hypocritical, secretive by temperament, two-faced; a clever fellow with a marvellous ability to conceal his real opinion, and able to shed tears, not from any joy or sorrow, but employing them artfully when required in accordance with the immediate need, lying all the time. … A treacherous friend and an inexorable enemy, he was passionately devoted to murder and plunder; quarrelsome and subversive in the extreme; easily led astray into evil ways but refusing every suggestion that he should follow the right path; quick to devise vile schemes and carry them out; and with an instinctive aversion to the mere mention of anything good.34

It is an unforgettable snapshot of the emperor Domitian in the way Suetonius describes him: the youth “sexually abused by his successor, the emperor Nerva”; the ruler who, crazed with boredom and power, spent “hours alone doing nothing but catch flies and stabbing them with a pen”.35 Here is the Domitian who once summoned his steward to join him 34  Procopius, Anecdota, 8. The translation, here and elsewhere, is that by G.A. Williamson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). 35  Domitian, 3.

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on his couch “and crucified him the following day”; the anti-semite and the pervert who delighted in depilating his favourite catamites hair by hair. The cruelty, the self-centredness and double-dealing are all too dismally recognisable. The problem is that this diatribe is not by Suetonius at all, but a link-­ passage in a work written by Procopius of Caesarea in 550 CE, two centuries after the capital of the Roman Empire has shifted east to Constantinople. Unpublished in its author’s lifetime, it was known to the compiler of the tenth-century Suda Lexicon as Anecdota. Later ages know it as Arcana Historia or The Secret History, and in it Procopius damns Domitian roundly, though in passing. His central subject and victim is the reigning emperor, Justinian: promulgator of legal codes, re-conqueror of Italy and instigator of the basilica church of Hagia Sophia which stands within sight of the Bosporus to this day. The remarkable property of the passage in question is that it is designed to be read two ways. Taken in conjunction with the paragraph before it, it is an indictment of the long-dead Domitian whom, with a little help from Suetonius, Procopius has just been describing. Coupled with the ensuing paragraph, it represents a sonorous condemnation of all-too-alive Justinian, burden of the book and, incidentally, Procopius’s employer. The jury, it has to be said, is still out on Procopius. Gibbon found him unreliable, Steven Runciman thinks of him as “principally a military historian”, Graves calls him “a classically well-informed, judicious writer”; John Julius Norwich dismisses him as “a sanctimonious old hypocrite”, and Procopius himself apologises in advance at the beginning of one of his books for his “lisping and thin-voiced tongue”.36 In his History of the Wars of Justinian, an account of the campaigns conducted on the empire’s behalf by the general Belisarius, Procopius describes his emperor as a prudent monarch who has rationalised a muddled legal system and integrated the empire; his consort and wife Theodora meanwhile is commended for her loyalty and steadfastness during the Nika riots of 532.37 In the later De Aedificiis (The Buildings) Procopius offers a detailed inventory of the emperor’s architectural projects in Constantinople, Greece, Asia and 36  Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: 1776–88), Chapters 17–40; Steven Runciman, Byzantine Civilization (London, 1933), 137; Robert Graves, Count Belisarius (London: 1938), vii–viii; John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: The Early Centuries (London, 1988), 192; Procopius, De Aedificiis, i, 1.3. Gibbon’s verdict that Procopius was “a fabulous writer” is not, of course, to be taken in the modern sense. 37  Procopius, History of the Wars, iii, 6.26.

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North Africa. And he introduces his survey by comparing Justinian to Odysseus and to Nestor, whom Telemachus and Menelaus severally bless in Homer as a “kind” or “good” father.38 Procopius then adds meaningfully, “the Emperor’s achievements have been described by me in my other writings”.39 If, as is generally thought, this is a covert reference to The Secret History it is boldly sarcastic, for in that work Procopius goes veritably into reverse, portraying in semi-biographical form an Emperor and an Empress of whom Nero would have been proud. Two years previously the empress had died; Procopius asserts at one point that it is apprehension of her that has previously stopped his tongue. Whether his motivations are those of even-handedness or of deferentially stored venom is a matter of background psychology. The existence of the book was clearly unknown to the emperor, and its vilifications evidently did Procopius no professional harm, since twelve years later he was to occupy the prestigious post of Prefect of the city (562–3 BCE). The result, however, is one of the most sustained pieces of character assassination in world literature. As a work of biography, moreover, it is experimental, and justice has seldom been done to its form. Procopius’s own term for it is “a joint life”: he is interested, in other words, in painting a double portrait of Justinian and Theodora, behind whom stand two other figures in half shadow: Belisarius—whom Procopius himself had accompanied on his campaigns as paredros or assessor—and his wife Antonina. The general effect is of a group picture, in which each of the principal figures adopts a pose dependent on the others. Generically, therefore, we have an early example of that sub-genre, the portrait of a marriage. There are, however, two marriages and two complementary kinds of psychological scenario. Procopius starts out with a frank resumé of the damage inflicted on Belarius by Antonina and her toy boy, a Thracian youth named Theodosius, with the effective connivance of the Empress, who ensures that the lovers go unpunished. How, he wants his readers to ask themselves, has such a state of affairs been possible? He then looks at the problem from the point of view of family history. As the marshal and his wife withdraw from the scene, a trio composes itself: Justinian; his ineffectual and illiterate uncle Justin—nominal ruler of the Empire during the early years of Justinian’s “reign”; and Theodora, whom the besotted nephew married in 522,  Homer, The Odyssey, ii, 47; xv, 152.  Procopius, De Aedificiis, i. 1.

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remaining devoted to her until her death in 548. It is a study in corrosive symbiosis: the uncle is pathetically reliant on the nephew, the nephew on the wife. In an effort to prove that Theodora was an unworthy spouse for any monarch, Procopius pulls out all the stops. Certainly she had once been an actress and a performer in erotic cabaret. According to Procopius, who perhaps had no certain way of knowing, she had also been a child prostitute, a successful courtesan, and even a street hustler. More than that “Often she would go to a bring-you-own-food dinner party with ten young men or more, all at the peak of their physical powers and with fornication as their chief object in life, and would lie with all her fellow-diners in turn all the night long: when she had reduced them all to a state of exhaustion she would go to their menials, as many as thirty on occasions and copulate with every one of them; but not even so could she satisfy her lust”.40 It particularly offends him that, in an effort to avoid the consequences of her debauchery, Theodora has frequently submitted to abortion. The question remains—and it is the very query that this author wants us to entertain—how could the emperor, a capable and forceful character in other respects, put up with such a partner, still less abjectly love the practitioner of such wantonness? As for the husband, Procopius supplies him with all of the accoutrements of demonology, including a mock-annunciation in which his mother is visited by demons before his birth, the implication being that Justinian was fathered by an incubus. He frequently sports a demon-like head and, when a monkish petitioner visits him in the palace, transmogrifies into the king of all devils, to the alarm of his priestly guest. A Byzantine seer standing on the Anatolian shore has a vision of the emperor as a thirsty giant drinking up the entire contents of the Bosporus: salt water, mud and sewage. In a strident passage Procopius then compares his regime to the plague that hit the city of Constantinople in the year 542 (Albert Camus was far from the first to compare the effects of despotism to pestilence). Tyranny, however, is not the worst of the emperor’s faults. What Procopius, a fan of military might, deplores most of all is the man’s feebleness. In an effort to buy off successive ways of invaders, Justinian hands out annual bribes to the Goths, the Huns, anybody who asks him, so long as they keep away from his borders. As a result, he is importuned by threatening supplicants from every side.

 Anecdota, 9.

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Yet Justinian’s pusillanimity in the face of his enemies is nothing compared to his cravenness before his wife. The Theodora of Procopius’s tirade, as opposed to the Theodora of history—even of Procopius’s own official history—is a middle-aged slattern who sleeps all morning, eats a late breakfast and then retires “for a rest”. She keeps petitioners hanging round in an outer court all afternoon and, when she admits them to her presence, will not permit them to speak. Her ways of extracting humiliation from her suppliants are devious and painful. When a needy patrician turns up to complain about his debts, she has notice in advance and prepares her staff for the interview. The wretched petitioner enters and flops down before her in compulsory obeisance. No sooner has he finished speaking than eunuchs crowd round his recumbent form, repeatedly crowing “You’ve a big rupture! You’ve a big rupture!” He retreats in confusion; epicene laughs ring out. Justinian lets Theodora do anything she pleases—promote whom she will, demote whom she will—less vocally approving than passively allowing her to get away with it. In several passages he reminds one far less of the sort of power-mad psychopath found in Suetonius than of Bishop Proudie in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers, staring vaguely into mid-distance as his bossy spouse lays waste the diocese. It is the price of love, particularly perhaps of a particular sort of mawkish Christian love. Procopius cannot abide it. And yet his mordant assault is a remarkable study in marital psychology and in public relations. Whether through instinctual cunning or prior arrangement, Emperor and Empress publicly disagree about everything: theology (he is an orthodox Christian, she an heretical Monophysite); politics; the art of management. The effect, however is to ensure that the purposes they concur about in private are carried out with the minimum of fuss, and without anybody in the court suspecting that they have been duped. Temperamentally husband and wife are opposites, yet they make sense as a team. Procopius is a loner, or in the words of the Oxford Byzantinist Dame Averil Cameron, a “sceptic”.41 He observes the deadly chemistry between this man and this woman; he is powerless to do anything about it; he has himself been used. How many absorbed couples do you know like that, and how many bitter loners?

 Averil Cameron, ‘The “Scepticism” of Procopius’, Historia XV, 1966.

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Scepticism and Tradition Suetonius bequeathed two gifts to literary tradition, which have not always been in step: his methodical treatment of his subjects and his judicious (or maybe judicial) tone of voice. In Western Europe it is thought that one— and one only—copy of the Vita Caesarum made it into the Middle Ages, kept in the library of the Benedictine monastery of Fulda in Germany, and that from this all subsequent manuscripts were copied.42 There it was consulted by Einhard (770–840), a senior official in the Carolingian court, member of the scholarly circle surrounding the British-born theologian Alcuin, and trusted servant of the Emperor Charlemagne.43 Within a few years of Charlemagne’s death in January 824, Einhard composed a biography of his late master, the Vita Caroli, set out by divisio in accordance with a recognisably Suetonian scheme with sections covering the Carolingian emperor’s ancestry, his rise to power, his conquests in Italy, Spain, Germany and Scandinavia, his wives, concubines and children, the buildings he caused to be erected, his personality, his appearance, his death, and his will, which is quoted verbatim and in full. With the exception of the last, all of these items have equivalents in Suetonius’s lives. In some instances, whole phrases are lifted from one document to the other. The Vita Caroli remains an indispensable source for Carolingian history, and has often been treated simply as a chronicle of the period. (It was a set text for the Preliminary examination for History degrees in Oxford up until the 1960s.) Regarded as a biographical exercise, however—one of the very few from the period in question—it raises problems, some of which are unique, others of which reflect dilemmas faced whilst reading Suetonius. Charlemagne famously had himself crowned Emperor by Pope Leo III in Rome on Christmas day, 800, and ever afterwards regarded himself as the rightful heir to the Roman imperium. To some extent Einhard’s work seems to have been undertaken to vindicate that claim, and it is therefore no surprise that parallels with Suetonius’s lives of the first three Caesars are prominent. The affinities with the life of Augustus are particularly marked, since Charlemagne liked to regard himself as a second Augustus. But they do not end there. Charlemagne’s physical appearance seems to be an assemblage of Caesarean echoes: “The eyes are  Townend in Dorey ed., 98.  For which see Jamie Wood, “Suetonius and the De Vita Caesarum in the Carolingian Empire” in Power and Gibson (2014), 273–92. 42 43

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a mixture of Julius’ and Tiberius’s, the beauty of the grey hair comes from Claudius; he has an authority and dignity standing and sitting, like Claudius (who possessed these qualities even when lying down); his fat neck is Nero’s, his somewhat projecting belly is both Nero’s and Titus’s, his good health comes from Julius, Tiberius and Nero, but his limp is from Augustus, and his avoidance of medical advice is fairly closely copied from Tiberius.44 These affinities in the appearance and behaviour of his chosen subject to the Roman originals, however, only serve to accentuate the differences in the author’s attitude and tone. Einhard is selective just as Suetonius is, but his judgements all fall on the side of flattery. Charlemagne is a virile soldier, a resourceful strategist, a just ruler, a model husband (despite the concubines), a considerate father, a magnanimous patron, a faithful Christian. There is little sign of personal failing, let alone of vice, anywhere to be seen. There are several possible reasons for this. Einhard, after all, was writing under the watchful eye of Charlemagne’s heirs, and he was anxious to validate the holy empire that his master had created and to secure the dynasty as well as his own position at court. Unlike Suetonius and Procopius, after all, he had never fallen from grace. The relative felicitousness of Einhard’s circumstances, though, led him to recast the Suetonian legacy as one of straightforward celebration and panegyric. In practice, it had been no such thing. Suetonius’s more lasting bequest has been one, less of balance than of tone. In the sixteenth century he was translated into English by Philomen Holland, in the twentieth by Robert Graves. Together with Procopius, a royal servant with a grudge, he has served as prime mover in the long history of biographical scepticism. Both, as such, have appealed much to post-modern times. The twentieth century, which sometimes neglected Plutarch, re-discovered them both, and revelled in their work. It is far from coincidental that the most distinguished twentieth-century translator of Suetonius was Graves, who employed De Vita Caesarum as the principal source for both his imperial-age fictional “autobiographies”: I, Claudius and Claudius the God (1934). Graves’s Caligula is Suetonius’s Caligula writ large. Claudius the stammering narrator represents an exaggerated version of one aspect of Suetonius’s many-faceted ruler. In the heyday of Fascist dictatorships in Western Europe and, on the eve of the Munich Agreement, Graves turned to the age of Justinian in his fictionalised biography Count Belisarius (1938). Procopius was the book’s  Towend in Dorey, 103.

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predominant source, and throughout the narrative, while taking his facts from The History of The Wars of Justinian, Graves adopted—via his mouthpiece, the Eunuch Eugenius—the mordantly disenchanted note of the Anecdota. In Graves’s historical fiction we sometimes enjoy the impression of ancient biographers stirring and speaking to us again in confidence, almost as if their words were intended principally for cynical modern ears.45 It is an illusion, of course, conditioned partly by Graves’s use of his Silver Age sources, and partly by his private attitude. As a former soldier in the First World War he had his own reasons for distrusting mercurial leaders. Not for nothing was his own post-war autobiographical essay entitled Goodbye to All That; in 1955, whilst translating De Vita Caesarum, he even tried his hand at writing his own mock mini-life in the style of the useful Suetonius.46 It was only one possible model, of course, as already we have observed alternatives branching out. Ancient biography has supplied later writers with a range of possible models. There are differences, firstly, of scope: individual biography, parallel or comparative biography, group biography, the “portrait of a marriage”. And there are differences in tone and bearing: representational biography, inquisitorial biography (as in Suetonius) and inculpatory biography as in Procopius. It is Procopius, strictly speaking, who is the ancestor of that tendency sometimes known as “dishing the dirt”, of the peremptory hatchet job. These variegated tendencies will all go underground now and again, and then unaccountably reappear, creating as they do so sequential mirages of a biographical revolution. Already, though, we seem to have travelled some distance from the calm realism and curiosity of Plutarch. In place of philosophical detachment, we have engagement, a style of address that occasionally scarifies its subjects or settles old scores. Suetonius in particular appeals to us because he strikes us, not merely as impartial, but as cold, objective and hard. These are qualities very much in tune with our age, and there is something in them that persuades us that this is how, as biographers, we ourselves ought to write.  For a further discussion of Graves and ancient life-writing, see Chap. 8 below.  Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That: An Autobiography (London: Cape, 1929); Robert Graves, The Life of the Poet Gnaeus Robertulus Gravesa. [From Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus’s “Lives of the Britannic Poets”. Translated by W.Waddington Postchaise. Deià, Mallorca: The New Seizin Press, 1990]. For more on Graves’s use of ancient sources, see Chap. 8. 45 46

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But, when it comes to Procopius something unexpected seems to have happened to the narrative focus as well. Why does Procopius feel a need to equip his portrait of Justinian with so many mythic episodes: with visions, with metamorphoses, an annunciation of sorts? To place these particular developments in context, we need to take a closer look at some texts from later antiquity which demonstrate that Momigliano once called the subordination of the lesser to the greater truth.

Bibliography and Further Reading Primary Texts

and

Translations

C. Suetoni Tranquilli De vita Caesarum libros VIII et De grammaticis et rhetoribus librum. Ed. Robert A. Kaster (Oxford University Press, 2016). Philemon Holland, The historie of twelve Caesars emperors of Rome. Written in Latine by C. Suetonius Tranquillus and newly translated into English by Philomen Holland Doctor of Phisick. Together with a marginall glosse and other brief annotations thereupon (London: Humphrey Lownes and George Snowdon for Matthew Lownes, 1606). The first English translation. Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars. Trans. J.G.  Rolfe (Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), based on a Teubner edition of 1907. Unless otherwise stated, the translation of De Vita Caesarum from which I quote above is Robert Graves’. The Twelve Caesars (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), in the revision by J. B. Rives (Penguin, 2007). Procopii Caesariensis opera omnia. Ed. J.  Haury; revised by G.  Wirth. 3 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1962–64). Procopius. Ed. and Trans. H. B. Dewing and G. Downey, 7 vols. (Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914–40). Procopius, The Secret History. Trans. G. A. Williamson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). This is the edition that is quoted above. It was re-issued by Penguin in 2007 with a revised translation and notes by Peter Sarris. Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni/The Life of Charlemagne. Ed. Evelyn Firchow and Edwin Zeydel (Saarbrüken: AQ-Verlag, 1985) Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two Lives of Charlemagne. Ed. D.  Ganz (London: Penguin, 2008).

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Selected Commentary Michael Angold, Byzantium: The Bridge from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (London and New York: The St Martin’s Press, 2001). Mary Beard’s revisionist Timeline documentary on Gaius Caesar may be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaMF4WN3nZQ Averil Cameron, Byzantine Matters (Princeton University Press, 2014). Averil Cameron, “The ‘Scepticism’ of Procopius”, Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Vol. XV (November 1966), 466–482. Cynthia Damon, “Suetonius the Ventriloquist”, in Suetonius the Biographer: Studies in Roman Lives, Eds. Tristan Power and Roy K.  Gibson (Oxford University Press, 2014), 38–57. Thomas Allen Dorey, Latin Biography (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967). Gilbert Dragon, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Georges Dumézil, La Religion Romaine antique (Paris: Pagot, 1966). Jean Gascou, Suètone historien (Rome: Bibliothèque des Ecoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 1984). Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1776–88). Robert Graves, Count Belisarius (London: Cassell, 1938). Elizabeth Gitter, “Obsessional, idolatrous: Swinburne’s imaginary encounter with de Sade”, TLS (October 10, 2003), 15–16 John Henderson, “Was Suetonius’s Julius a Caesar?” in Tristan Power and Roy K. Gibson, Suetonius the Biographer: Studies in Roman Lives (Oxford University Press, 2014), 81–110. Rebecca Langlands, “Exemplary influences and Augustus’s pernicious moral legacy” in Power and Gibson (2014), 111–129. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Essays and Biographies (London: Longman and Green, 1898). Cyril Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome (London, 1983). John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: The Early Centuries (London, 1988). Paul Plass, Wit and the Writing of History: The Rhetoric of Historiography in Ancient Rome (Madison, Wisconsin, 1988). Tristan Power, “The Originality of Suetonius” in Power Gibson, 1–20. Tristan Power, Suetonius: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2014). Peter Saris, Byzantium: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2015). G. B. Townend, “Suetonius and His Influence”, in Latin Biography, Ed. T. A. Dorey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 79–111. David Wardle, Suetonius’s Life of Caligula: A Commentary (Brussels: Latona, 1994). David Wardle, Suetonius’s Life of Augustus: A Commentary (Oxford University Press, 2014). Jamie Wood, “Suetonius and the De Vita Caesarum in the Carolingian Empire” in Power and Gibson, 273–292.

CHAPTER 5

Biography as Persuasion: The Christian Gospels

To move from the secular biographies of the early Common Era to the four canonical Christian gospels is immediately to encounter, less a set of facts than a cluster of questions that have been the subject of urgent debate for two millennia, and which still invite widespread discussion and disagreement. Are these striking works really biographies, and if so in what sense? If biographies, do they pertain to recognisable classical modes of biography? For whom, and by whom, were they produced? When, and in what order, were they written? Can they be considered as true accounts, and if so, again in what sense true? To revert to Pilate’s question, echoed by Francis Bacon and addressed here in Chaps. 2 and 3, what exactly—in this rather special connection—is truth? Other problems face us when we consider the ramifying trajectories of their afterlives. In what manner were they originally read and how, over time, have reading practices regarding these founding documents of the Christian tradition changed? Bearing in mind that, after the very few early centuries, these books have mostly been absorbed in translation—from koine Greek into Syriac, into Latin, German, French, Russian and English, into Arabic, Urdu, Yoruba, Chinese and Korean, to mention just a few of their many destinations, in what way has this influenced their reception? Before entering the forest of their afterlives, however, it may be useful to take a look at the debates surrounding the origin of these puzzling and inspiring texts, however artificial it may be to separate these two fields of inquiry. For not only have the gospels partaken in—and been influenced © The Author(s) 2020 R. Fraser, After Ancient Biography, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35169-4_5

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by—history. They have actually made history to an extent very few other texts have. And, if reactions to the canonical gospels attributed to the saints Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have been mixed, theories as to their provenance, authorship and generic classification have been no less rich and varied.

What Are the Gospels? Speculation still rages as to whether each gospel can be attributed to a community or to a single author. These are not strict alternatives, since a single scribe may well have given written form to a narrative consensus which had cohered in a particular Christian grouping or church. In that case, the local consensus will have developed by word of mouth, to which the scribe then gave written shape. In the mid-twentieth century the influential school of biblical exegesis known as Formgeschichte or “form criticism”, pioneered by Rudolf Bultmann, devoted itself to envisaging the sorts of oral material the evangelists incorporated in their books, probably consisting of teaching exercises employed by, and drawing on the shared memories of, the earliest converts.1 The kind of exercise locally favoured would have depended on the orientation of each Christian cell and the atmosphere of each gospel has come to reflect the location in which it had textually cohered. Tradition has it that the gospel “according to” Mark was especially cherished in Rome, Matthew in Northern Palestine and, John—who is manifestly addressing a scholarly Greek, or at least a Hellenised Hebrew, audience—maybe in Ephesus. On this view, the ambiance of these communities influenced the atmosphere of each gospel narrative and was in turn shaped by them. Even if each gospel is attributable to a single author, it is not known for certain in which order they were produced. The sequence in which they appear in the New Testament almost certainly has less to do with chronology than with tradition. The twentieth-century consensus was that Mark came first and John last, but in 1984 John Robinson, one of the most distinguished of that century’s New Testament scholars, made a strong case for John having been written contemporaneously with—though independently of—the other three,2 and in 1994 the elderly Enoch  See especially Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and The World (New York: Scribners, 1934).  John Robinson, The Priority of John Ed. J.F. Coakley (London: Wipf and Stock, 2011). The book was edited after Bishop Robertson’s death from the text of his Bampford Lectures, 1 2

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Powell—student of Greek and controversial politician—made a late, and rather opinionated, argument for Matthew being earlier than Mark.3 Both views remain eccentric in the face of Mark’s more solid claims to priority. The fourth-century church historian Eusebius records a beautiful legend to the effect that the Christian we call Saint Mark copied his narrative verbatim from the halting reminiscences of the ageing apostle Peter, for whom he acted as interpreter in Rome.4 If he is right, this might account for Mark’s Greek style, unpolished and repetitive compared to say Luke’s. Exactly when “Mark” wrote we do not know, but since he includes a prophetic lament by Christ over the ruins of the temple, it is sure to have been after the destruction of the Jerusalem under Titus in 70 CE, forty years or so after Christ’s crucifixion.5 Like the other evangelists, and like the author of Revelations, he is also aware of the persecutions under Nero referred to by Suetonius.6 Mainstream source scholarship has reliably established that ninety per cent of Mark’s works are repeated by Matthew, and fifty-one per cent by Luke.7 This has widely been taken as substantiating what Canon Streeter of Hereford in an influential book once called “the priority of Mark”.8 Subsequent research into the first three—known as the “Synoptic”—gospels has mostly concerned itself with the question of whence the remainder of Luke and Matthew’s texts derive. In the closing years of the nineteenth century German critics suggested that both authors had access to another document they dubbed “Q”, quelle or source; if so, it probably contained a digest of Christ’s teaching, much of which is absent in Mark’s shorter account. Streeter also speculated that Luke had by his side a delivered in the University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Oxford in 1984. See also Robinson’s Re-dating the New Testament (London: Wipf and Stock, 1976). 3  Enoch Powell, The Evolution of the Gospel (New Haven Con. and London: Yale University Press, 1994). 4  Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, iii, 39. The legend is indirect, by word of one Papias. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (Adversus haereses, iii, 1.1), also claims Mark owed his account to Peter. 5  Mark, 13, 1–4; arguably too 5–37. Compare Josephus’s account in Bellum Judaicum, Books 5–7. 6  Suetonius, Nero 16. 7  See Frederick C.  Grant, The Gospels: Their Origin and Growth (New York: Harper, 1957), 117. 8  Burnett Hillman Streeter, The Four Gospels: A Study in Origin (London: Macmillan, 1924). Streeter was responsible for introducing the co-called “four document” hypothesis into England. He remains a lucid guide to the composition of the synoptic gospels. He is far less reliable on John.

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papyrus containing a number of Christ’s parables. And Matthew seems to have used a fourth document either in or translated from Aramaic—the dialect from North Palestine and Syria Jesus himself spoke—re-enforcing Jesus’s life and teaching with Old Testament parallels. In 1927 the American scholar Henry Cadbury published an influential book claiming that The Gospel According to Luke and The Acts of the Apostles, telling of the achievements of the early church and containing potted biographies of the apostles Peter and Paul, are not only by the same hand and addressed to the same man but are in effect two halves of the same work that has got split into two.9 This theory has since been disputed: they may be two halves of the same book, or Acts may be a sequel.10 By almost universal agreement, John is a case apart. Usually thought to have been completed towards 100 CE, his gospel may, if Robinson is to be believed, have been commenced fairly early in Christian history.11 In any case it seems to have been composed without recourse to the others and to have been conceived in quite a different spirit: as a theological prose-poem, and a highly mystical one at that. But are these texts, as Ernest Renan contended, biographies? There are several different ways of phrasing this question: are they what you and I would recognise as biographies; are they what Hellenised inhabitants of the Roman Empire in the first century AD would have thought of as biographies; are they acceptable as such to present-day theologians or, indeed, present-day biographers? These are distinct perspectives, but they are often muddled up. In Chap. 2 we saw in what measure the recent expansion in the critical understanding of what biography entails has affected the ways in which classicists like Thomas Hägg have read ancient biography from Plato across to Plutarch. The broadening of perspective this exercise has entailed has led to an understanding of the biographical art arguably generous enough to accommodate at least the synoptic gospels. Indeed, in an influential book Richard Burridge, latterly Dean of King’s College, London, has identified a tradition of Graeco-Roman biography to which, he believes, all of the gospels belong. Published in 1992, his What Are The Gospels? takes a sample of ten ancient biographies, five  Henry Joel Cadbury, The Making of Luke-Acts (1927) (London: S.P.C.K, 1968).  For a summary of the evidence on both sides, see Justin Taylor, “The Acts of the Apostles as Biography” in The Limits of Ancient Biography Eds Brian McGing and Judith Mossman (Swansea; The Classical Press of Wales, 77–88.) 11  John Robertson, 2011. 9

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written before the gospels and five after them, and subjects them to a statistical analysis of their titles, characterisation, focus, form and style. His conclusion is that there existed in the ancient world at least a “flexible set of expectations” that the gospels adequately fulfil. Burridge’s thesis has since been magnificently debunked in a swashbuckling essay by Mark Edwards.12 Whether the authors of these four peculiar documents were aware of, or had read, the secular biographical literature of their time may indeed never adequately be ascertained. Indeed, considering the social and educational background associated with the early apostles, it seems a little unlikely. Nonetheless, that they absorbed—perhaps subliminally absorbed—the expectations surrounding biography, seems quite likely. Whatever else they might be doing, the gospels assuredly recount the course of Christ’s earthly existence, just as Lucian recounts the life of Demonax, or Plutarch that of Cato. Despite this observable fact, fundamentalist theologians like Tom Wright have argued that it is precisely this “whatever else” that constitutes the essential evangelism of these texts.13 Thus, whilst it is true enough to state that many of the key and recurrent features of Graeco-Roman biography feature in the gospels, there are also striking elements, especially in the gospel attributed to John, that appear nowhere else. Whilst many of the ancient lives that Burridge examines have preambles, setting out the significance of the life that follows, you will search in vain elsewhere for a prologue that identifies the subject of the narrative that follows with the creator of the world, as John does at 1, i–xiv. And you will also look in vain for a prolonged discourse such as that constituting chapter seventeen of this gospel, in which the subject addresses his Father—who, according to some exegeses is also coterminous with himself—not simply as if this addressee were God, but because he is God. Whether you consider this passage a soliloquy, a monologue or a dialogue depends on your theology. The fact is that, however regarded, it is unique. Perhaps this is the nub of the matter. All four gospels, but especially the last, represent spectacular exemplars of what Momigliano once called the prevailing of the “greater” over the “lesser” truth. In this respect they go a lot further than the Socratic dialogues or, say, Philostratus: Saint John  Mark Edwards, “Gospel and Genre: some reservations”, in McGing and Mossman, 51–62.  N.  T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is (Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2000.) Saint Paul, though, is a different matter. See N.T. Wright, Paul: A Biography (New York: HarperOne, 2018). 12 13

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insists on the divinity of Christ, and no Socratic philosopher ever believed Socrates the man to be divine, still less portrayed him addressing the deity as if the maker of the universe consisted of an aspect of his own person. This extraordinary ontology of being has extreme repercussions for the structure of these texts and their approach to the fundamental problem of truth. As the modern biographer A.N. Wilson remarks, there are certain features common to both ancient and modern biography which are notably absent from these texts.14 They make no effort to satisfy certain rudimentary kinds of curiosity: over the physical appearance of their subject, for example, or over his emotional life; Plato and Xenophon, by contrast, inform us about Socrates’s lack of physical comeliness, and about his wife and two sons. Compared to classical lives we have been considering what is more, the didactic procedures of the gospels are startling. Plutarch and Suetonius, and most of the ancient biographers discussed by Burridge, deliver events, and then interpret them. The evangelists construe before they show: they pre-interpret in a manner that determines all that follows; in this respect at least, they are closer to Philostratus. Considered as works of literature, the gospels are thus peculiar: not so much didactic narratives as narrative lessons in four contrasted timbres. What they tell of is unlikely, and what they teach provocative, invoking less verisimilitude than a reaction desired. In a literal application of a now much over-used term, they propose agenda: concerns to be acted upon. Perhaps the best way to describe the gospels is as biographies plus.

Reading Lessons It is easy to fall into the trap of visualising the audience for whom the gospels were intended as reading them in the same way as we do now. But how exactly did people read in the first century CE? We can get some help with this quandary from a passage, drawn not from the gospels themselves, but from The Acts of the Apostles, which as we have already seen was probably written by Saint Luke. It describes the very earliest activities of the emerging Christian church, and conventionally it has been attributed to Luke largely on the grounds that, like his gospel, it takes the form of a 14  A.N. Wilson rightly observes, “No one has left us a physical description of what Jesus looks like. Nor do we possess any of the biographical information that would furnish a modern ‘life’.” (A.N. Wilson, Jesus, London: Pimlico, 2003), xvii. Wilson’s statement, however, raises as many questions about modern biography as about the gospels.

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long letter to a man named Theophilus, whose identity is disputed. (John Wesley thought he was a wealthy Alexandrian Jew, but he may have been Paul’s lawyer at his trial in Rome, and some authorities identify him as Theophilus ben Ananus, whom the historian Josephus identifies as chief priest of the Temple in Jerusalem between 37 and 41  AD.) In chapter eight of this work there occurs a story about Saint Philip, one of the original twelve apostles, who is leaving Jerusalem by a southern road that led across the desert towards Gaza, where he comes across a stranger. In the words of the New Revised Standard translation: Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candice, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. Then the spirit said to Philip, “Go over to the chariot and join it”. So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked “Do you understand what you are reading?” He replied “How can I unless somebody guides me?” And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this: “Like a sheep he is led to the slaughter and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice is denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.” The eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself, or about somebody else?”15

For a modern reader, the most striking thing about this passage is a question that Philip never thinks to ask. It is the very first query many of us would put to anyone we saw immersed in a book. Naturally we would inquire “What are you reading?” Philip does not ask this, first because the Ethiopian is reading aloud (though to himself) and second because Philip recognises the text instantly: it is from the fifty-third chapter of the Book of Isaiah in the Hebrew bible, and it describes the predicament of a mysterious figure known as “The Man of Sorrows”, often taken as a personification of the Hebrews themselves. In response to the Ethiopian’s inquiries, Philip proceeds to give this ancient passage a revolutionary Christian twist (it is about Jesus’s patient attitude during his trial and crucifixion), and then to baptise his companion in a conveniently placed wayside spring. But the whole episode has a lot to tell us about the climate of reception in which early Christian  Acts, 8, xxxii–xxxiv, quoting Isaiah 53, vii–viii.

15

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evangelisation was offered. First, the mode of rendition is oral, from the treasurer’s voiced but solitary reading to the urgent discussion that follows. Second, though Philip is a cradle Jew, the Ethiopian is not; he is apparently a convert to Judaism who needs the passage from Isaiah interpreted for him, whereupon he converts again, this time to the new religion of Christianity. Third, the message is conveyed to him via a quite unprecedented (and, from an orthodox Jewish standpoint, criminally blasphemous) construction of piece of scripture which he has been reading in Hebrew, though Luke translates it into Greek. The passage is thus intertextual and depends at least partly for its effect on the reader’s (or hearer’s) familiarity with Isaiah. Did Theophilus too, when he received Luke’s letter, read it to himself out loud? The Gospels are placed at the start of the Christian New Testament, but were almost certainly written—or at least collated—after the books that follow them: epistles (called by C.S. Lewis “Letters to Young Churches”) written by the apostles Paul, Peter and John to recently founded communities of Christians (almost uniformly Greek-speaking, though partially illiterate) around the Mediterranean basin. These letters must have been read aloud, whether on the quayside once the boat carrying them had arrived, in a church building or at home to devout, enthusiastic family groups, including the household slaves. An inevitable inference is that these too are the kind of circumstances in which the Gospels themselves may have had their first hearing. And hearing is the operative word. The practise of reading these texts aloud was to remain the norm for a very long time. In the year 384, the young man who was later to become Saint Augustine of Hippo was living and working in Milan. One day, according to his account in the Confessions, he entered the chamber of the archbishop Ambrose, later Saint Ambrose: noticing that the bishop was reading he expected, like Philip in Acts, to overhear the text. Ambrose’s manner of reading, however, astonished him: When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, though his voice was silent and his tongue still. Anyone could approach him freely, and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.16 16  St Augustine, Confessions, Book 6, Chapter 3. See also Alexander Lucie-Smith, “St Ambrose—the man who invented silent reading, The Catholic Herald, 8 December, 2011.

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Augustine’s surprise at this spectacle also tells us a lot about the manner in which he personally read: aloud even when alone (since otherwise Ambrose’s silent reading would not have struck him as anything peculiar), and—since, as his biographer Peter Brown tells us, he was personally resistant to Greek—in Latin, in one of the old Latin texts that preceded the Vulgate. I will return to Augustine in my next chapter, but in the meantime let’s pause at this moment in time, because reading aloud in Latin was to be the common practice for the next thousand years. It was to be the mainstay of the monastic tradition—in chapels, cathedrals and in monastic refectories—and would remain a staple of Christian practice until the Protestant Reformation of the fifteenth century, and the flood of translation that followed it, re-introduced silent reading as the norm, with drastic interpretative and theological repercussions to which we will turn in due course.

A Sacred Quadriptych Whether we regard gospels as the handiwork of four individual authors, or a set of traditions handed down by Christians in one particular place—or else in a combination of these scenarios—there is no doubt that each of these accounts has its own personality. Each is distinctive, not simply in tone and style but in its view of Christ’s mission, its emphases and even the understanding offered of the itinerary and chronology of Christ’s brief preaching career. John, for example, places the scourging of the temple at the beginning of his ministry whereas all the other evangelists put it towards the end, just before the Last Supper and arrest. Nor is there total agreement as to date of the supper itself; the three authors of the synoptic gospels make it a Passover feast, whilst John places it during the lead-up to the Jewish festival. Such discrepancies of fact may well have caused embarrassment when the New Testament was collated by the wider church to set beside the Old. The local pride invested in each version ensured nonetheless that all survived and, after one forlorn attempt at an identikit version,17 they were placed together as they stand, with the patriotically Jewish Matthew at the head, since his gospel was then supposed to be the oldest. The ancient tradition according to which the four gospel-writers correspond to the four-faced “living creatures” seen by Ezekiel and to the 17  It was called the Diatessarion. Compiled by Tatian, it remained the version read aloud in Syriac churches until about 430 CE.

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four beasts standing before the throne of God in The Book of Revelation— Mark the lion; Luke the ox; Matthew the man; John the eagle—is highly fanciful, but it indubitably enshrines an interesting insight. In another recently re-issued book, Richard Burridge has defended this ancient approach as a means by which even modern readers can get a handle on the individual character, less of the evangelists themselves, whose identity remains uncertain, than of the texts as they have come down to us and have been received by successive generations.18 Through this tradition over the centuries the Church has expressed its feeling for the contrasted qualities of these writings: their atmosphere and the varying perspectives that they offer on their common subject matter.19 In effect therefore the Christian community over time has originated a new kind of comparative portraiture. Rather than Plutarch’s diptyches of contrasted temperaments, this consists of a polyptych of the same figure as viewed from four different angles. Each panel is a world unto itself and, although when we stand back common features become clear to us, when we examine each panel individually we will if we are wise forget the others for a little while. We can then move back again and make comparisons, mindful as we do so that these likenesses are by diverse hands. At first sight Mark’s gospel seems uncouth, biography without frills. It wearies us with no opening genealogy and omits Christ’s birth and childhood entirely. Instead it introduces his theme with a fanfare from the prophet Malachi,20 then leads straight into John the Baptist and the early wanderings of Jesus in Galilee. An equivalent economy of method is evident towards the end of this book. The later evangelists close with an account of Christ’s resurrection and ascension; the earliest codices of Mark end with the opening of the tomb and the disciples’ confusion and fear.21 18  Richard Burridge, Four Gospels: One Jesus? (London: SPCK, 1994, second ed., 2005, 3rd ed. 2014). 19  Ezekiel 1; Revelation, 4,7. A number of different interpretations of the symbolism were offered, by Irenaeus among others: “The lion signifies the royalty of Christ; the calf His sacerdotal office; the man’s face his incarnation; and the eagle the grace of the Holy Ghost”. 20  Mark, 1, 1–3. 21  The fact was noted early. See Eusebius, Church History, 335. For an inventory of sources, see The Greek New Testament eds Kurl Aland et al., (Germany: United Bible Societies, 1966), 195–6. The two earliest codices end half-way through Chapter 16, verse 5 with the words efobounto gar, “for they were afraid”, or as the King James Bible (1611) puts it, “for they were affrighted”. Other manuscript sources and editions add the remainder of that verse, and end with the words kerygma tes aioriou soterias: “message of eternal salvation”. Others add a further eleven verses (9–20), and thus end with the words diaton epakolouthounton semeion:

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Various reasons have been adduced for this lacuna: (a) Mark, or whoever the author was, died before he could finish his work; (b) The end of the papyrus roll on which the original manuscript was written broke off through overuse; or (c = the version preferred by sceptics) At the time at which this text cohered, the Church had not yet fabricated the resurrection story. A tantalising, though less frequently aired, alternative is that the author always meant to end here, with a feeling of suspense, a question, a possibility of transcendence. If this is true, the compiler of Mark’s gospel is a far more artful biographer than has commonly been supposed. “Mark” is certainly a master of scene setting. His style is colloquial, shaggy, leonine, but for the everyday context of remarkable events he is without rival. And, though his chronology is often indefinite and even locations are sometimes left vague, not even Plutarch can surpass him for an evocation of a personality operating within—and inter-reacting with—a social and temporal space. His account of the raising Jairus’s daughter early in his narrative is a case in point.22 It takes the form of a single, structured episode with one interlude. No sooner has Jesus disembarked from a boat carrying him across the Sea of Galilee that a ruler of the local Synagogue falls at his feet and implores assistance in treating his terminally ill daughter. The gesture is a simple act of trust by someone in authority, and it is told with equivalent directness. Jesus begins to walk towards the house, hemmed in by an excited mob. Concealed by the crowd and hoping for anonymity, a woman pushes forward; she plucks at his clothes and then shrinks back, aware that some kind of power has arrested the blood disease—probably a form of haemophilia—from which she has suffered for twelve distressing years. Jesus turns and, to the despair of his followers, asks which of the dozens of people jostling within reach has touched him. There is a pause as he scans their faces, and then the patient appears and prostrates herself, embarrassed by her own silent gesture of appeal. He heals  her with a blessing, but the delay has proved costly, and Jairus’s daughter lies dead. Leaving the multitude behind, Jesus approaches the house with a small, named group and makes the matter-of-fact announcement “She is not dead but sleeps”. Then he leads Jairus, his wife and their “miracles that followed”. Here for once King James is both more accurate and punchier, rendering semeion as “signs “(as in Semiology). Both supplementary endings, the so-called long and short, are attempts at re-construction. For sheer, cliff-hanging flair, though, the palm must surely go to the original ending with its tremor of apprehension and fear. 22  Mark 5, 21–43.

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companions into the bedchamber and instructs the girl to get up with the words talitha cumi, which Mark quotes in the original Aramaic  before translating it into Greek.23 When to general amazement he appears outside the house leading the bewildered twelve-year-old by the hand, Christ’s instructions are twofold: to keep the cure confidential and to give the child something to eat. How one reacts to this local wonder will partly depend on one’s beliefs, though it has to be said that a naturalistic explanation is just about possible: the haemophiliac was hyper-suggestible, Jairus and his family had mistaken a coma for death. If, however, as is clearly the case, Mark wants to persuade us of the actuality of these twin manifestations of unusual power, he could not have set about his task more effectively. One medical intervention—the less surprising but equally decisive relief of the woman with a blood disease—is set inside the other. The geographical location, even the chronology, is uncertain—which village exactly is this? Should not the rejection at Nazareth that follows this scene come before it? But the inner structure of the double sequence itself possess an undeniable feeling of authenticity: the disembarkation; the unexpected appearance of Jairus; the difficult progress uphill towards the house; the temerity and confusion of the woman; the interruption; the delay. Christ’s question to the crowd is a masterstroke, for if he is as gifted as the incident suggests he would know precisely who had touched him, yet he evidently wishes to give the sufferer a chance to declare herself. The sequel is distinguished—both on the part of the central figure and the narrator—by its lack of fuss. It is domestic, but world altering. The words given to the healer have a truly down-to-­earth ring. And then, like any decent family doctor, he tells the girl’s parents to feed her. Tolstoy would have been proud to recount such dramatic events in these informal, under-stated terms, and many a biographer can learn from it. When Luke re-works the sequence, he does the sick woman’s confusion to perfection, but he makes of the curing of Jairus’s daughter a more doctrinally loaded miracle.24 Matthew is even more drastic: he edits Marks’s text to omit Christ’s questioning pause and his words up at the house; the homely instruction to give the girl a snack disappears altogether.25 It is just these touches, however, that bring the episode home to the average reader  For the Aramaic underlay to Mark’s text, see E.P. Saunders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Allen Lane, 1993). The fact that Mark sees a need to translate argues a non-Galilean audience. 24  Mark , 8. 40–56. Contrast John, 9, 1–12. 25  Matthew, 9, 18–26. 23

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by grounding them in circumstances. Mark is full of such observations, many of which the later synoptic gospels drop. Mark tells, for example, how Christ met a blind man in the village of Bethsaida on the extreme north-eastern shore of the lake.26 Jesus stoops down, adds spit to the earth and applies the sticky mixture to the stranger’s eyes. The sufferer looks about him and, either because he has never seen his fellow creatures before or because the cure is not yet complete, remarks “I see men walking around like trees”. Jesus touches him again and lifts his chin, whereupon the afflicted “saw every man clearly”. The intervention by degrees, the optical disorientation and astute similes of the sufferer, are all superbly placed. Compared to John’s, the simplicity of Mark’s account is admirable. For modern readers such incidents represent a questionable element in the gospel narrative, which, however, would be very incomplete without them. For early Christians by contrast they constituted an important— perhaps the most important element—in the new sect’s apologia. We might call such episodes persuasion by “miracle” but, since the evangelists themselves rarely use that word, persuasion by sign is perhaps the better term. All of the gospels feature this technique; John, for example structures his whole account around a series of such manifestations of power. Of course, miraculous interventions, premonitions and auguries abound in classical biography: in Plutarch in his superstitious moments or in a work such as Philostratus’s life of Apollonius of Tyana.27 In most instances, however, they are presented as endorsements of the status and power of a subject otherwise endowed with material or social advantages. Within the tradition of Christian biography initiated by Mark, however, these turning points are essential to a manifesting argument: this life begun and ending in obscurity is somehow exceptional. For well over a thousand years this kind of reasoning, and the signs supporting it, were to become a recurrent feature in hagiography, especially when it concerned the lives of lowly born saints: Bede’s life of the one-time shepherd Saint Cuthbert springs to mind. Nor does it stop there. In the nineteenth century individual achievements of a formidable, is less unaccountable kind, were still being cited by biographers as evidence of their subject’s moral or of its post-Romantic equivalents, artistic or intellectual, power. Fanny  Luke, 8, 22–26.  See, for example, Philostratus, Vita Apollonii, iv, 45. For a thoroughgoing discussion of this aspect of the gospels, and its connections with classical biography in general, see Vincent Taylor, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition, (London: Macmillan, 1933). 26 27

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Kingsley in her 1873 biography of her husband, the priest, novelist and social reformer Charles, talks of the transforming effect of his ministry among the villagers of Eversley in Hampshire. George Otto Trevelyan in his Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay would have us believe that his precociously gifted subject had learned the whole of Milton’s Paradise Lost by heart by the age of nine.28 The mundane social context of these feats is an aspect of the biographical argument. * * * Luke’s gospel is more ornate, of all the four the most literary. Where Mark’s language is translucent, in Luke we are suddenly into a world of self-conscious pastiche—biography as a series of exercises in style. Like Plutarch he opens with a formal dedication,29 and his is the longest account of the nativity, which both Mark and John omit. It includes the double annunciation—to Zacharias, the father John the Baptist and to Mary— with their respective canticles in response. Luke’s Greek at this juncture is archaic, echoing the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures with which Hellenised converts would have been familiar. But the individual flavour of his version lingers most in his deployment of parables, some of which—the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son—are unique to him. The biographical function of such stories-within-a story is vividly exemplified in the relatively short parable of Vineyard and the Tenants, sometimes called The Wicked Husbandmen.30 Christ is in Jerusalem immediately prior to his arrest and trial, and as usual his movements are being shadowed by his arch-critics the Pharisees, who have just asked him by whose authority he teaches. In response he tells them about a landlord who sends three servants in an increasingly desperate attempt to collect arrears of rent on his vineyard. The tenants, who have no intention of paying up, beat the unfortunate messengers, so the vintner decides to send along his son, whom he feels they will respect. Instead they kill him in the illogical hope 28  George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (London: Longman, 1889), 37. 29  Luke 1, 1–4. The identity of Theophilus, to whom The Act of the Apostles is also dedicated, is uncertain, though like Plutarch’s Sosius he was clearly a well-placed Roman citizen, and one curious about the growing Christian sect. For the evidence see N.T. Wright, Luke for Everyone (London: SPCK, 2001). Compare Plutarch, Theseus, 1; Demetrius, 1; Brutus, 1.  30  Luke 20, 9–18.

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that they will inherit the estate. What will the landlord do now, Christ rhetorically asks, and answers his own question: he will turf out the tenants and give his property to others. His hearers seem dismayed, so Christ quotes from Psalm 118, verse 22: “The same stone that the builders refused has become the head-stone in the corner”. And he ends with two warnings: anyone stumbles against this stone will be badly hurt; if it falls of him, he will be crushed. Occurring just before the Passion narrative, there is an element of prolepsis in this strange tale; taken in the framework of the gospel as a whole, its implications are obvious. God is the landlord; his tenants are the Jews. The hapless messengers are the prophets whom the Hebrews frequently ignored; the son is the narrator, Christ himself, who is also represented by the rejected stone. The parable looks forward to his trail and crucifixion, but it also serves as an epitome of the surrounding mega-narrative. This procedure is characteristic of Luke, but all of the evangelists employ it, for there is in these documents little distinction between interpretation and event. Many of the so-called miracles, for instance, are parables in action: the Miraculous Draft of Fishes, which Luke also relates, is a parable of mass conversion, and the Feeding of the Five Thousand is a parable of dispersion.31 The part thus echoes the whole, but different parts also echo one another. It is a sounding-chamber of significance: persuasion by example. Anybody who argues that biographers as a profession have little in common with the evangelists should take stock at this point. As a literary trope, a sort of mise-en-abîme, parabolic episodes are typical of the way in which the narrative imagination works. This is clear enough in fiction: the gate-crossing incident in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park as a parable of transgression, the breaking of the wine casket at the beginning of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities as a parable of bloody revolution. But the gospels, I think, initiate—or at least massively reinforce—an allied process in biography whereby individual incidents come to reflect, microcosm-like, the outer life. This too enters into the evolving tradition, since all biographies teach lessons, however remote from religious orthodoxy they might seem. In Vasari’s Life of Michelangelo the frustrating episode of Pope Julius the Second’s Tomb is a microcosm of a flawed but brilliant career. Every anecdote and riposte Boswell reports is a mini-version of the Greater Conversation that is the life of Dr. Johnson. In biographies of the poet  Luke, 5, 1–11; 9, 10–17.

31

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Dylan Thomas each completed lyric is a miniature of the poem Thomas wanted his life to be, each collapse into depravity a premonition of the final drunken self-immolation in New  York. If the gospels have left an indelible mark on biographical writing—whether of saints, generals or plain sinners—this is it. You cannot abstract meaning out, and the better scored the biography, the more deeply integrated will be the significance. The evangelists themselves, however, are often overt, and the most explicit of all is Matthew. It is he who carries to extremes a tendency present in all the other evangelists to group episodes according to theme: from the didactic content of “Q”, for example, Matthew has concocted the rhetorical sequence known as the Sermon on the Mount.32 Matthew also enhances the humane playfulness of his subject: his wit, his tenacity, his sublime scoring of points. Nobody could be further than the Christ of his account from the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” of the Victorian Sunday schools, or of Dickens’s affectionate biography for his children.33 If we wish for an impression of the tangy, humorous, resistant personality of Jesus, it is to Matthew that we must turn. Matthew’s Jesus is nobody’s fool, and he has a genius for repartee. Witness his treatment of an individual who occurs in two other gospels, whom one might call the Inquirer. In Mark he is a plutocrat with too great an attachment to his wealth. In Luke there are two Inquirers: the rich young ruler again and a crafty lawyer attempting to catch Jesus out. In Matthew the Inquirer is above all an over-enthusiastic convert with an infirm grasp of essentials.34 Not content with a mere ten commandments, he seeks perfection instead. It is in this context that Christ requires him to give up all his possessions: to show him the arrogance of his assumptions, the limits of his commitment. A camel no less, squeezing through a needle’s eye. The author we know as Matthew furthermore is a deeply pious Jew convinced that Christ is the Messiah predicted by the Old Testament prophets, and profoundly disappointed that his fellow countrymen have by and large failed to recognise this momentous fact. Just before his highly dramatic passion narrative, Matthew depicts Christ wailing over the walls of Jerusalem that lay newly in ruins as he wrote.35 Well before that, he has  Matthew, 5–7. For Luke’s shorter “Sermon on the Plain”, see Luke 12.  Charles Dickens’s The Life of Our Lord was first published in serial form in March 1934. Its tone is set by the opening paragraph: “No one ever lived, who was so good, so kind, so gentle, and so sorry for all people who did wrong, as he was”. 34  Mark 10, 17–31; Luke 10, 25–37; 18, 18–30; Matthew 19, 16–30. 35  Matthew, chapter 23. Compare this to Mark’s shorter, less insistent, account. 32 33

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tediously traced Christ’s descent from Abraham via the royal house of David,36 and at every turn he underscores his story with parallels or quotes from the ancient Jewish scriptures. These elaborations are often referred to as midrashim or scholarly glosses on the text. Biographically considered they represent, I think, something a lot more interesting. One passage especially rich in such allusions is Matthew’s description of Christ’s ordeal on the cross.37 Highly dramatic, it exemplifies nonetheless the touching pedantry of Matthew the man, his all-too human labouring of his case. Before the crucifix is set up, Jesus is given “vinegar mixed with gall”, the very drink forced on the dejected writer of Psalm 69. Then the soldiers at the foot of the cross play lots for his discarded clothing “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet”, or rather by the despondent poet of Psalm 22, who also describes his tormenters wagging their heads in malevolent exultation, just as the complacent onlookers do here. In his last moments Christ lifts his head and with one last effort cries out “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani”,—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me”. It is the opening of the same Psalm, and it gives a clue to this particular evangelist’s methods of composition. Mark, who is Matthew’s principal source for this scene, quotes the same verse, but does so in Christ’s own Aramaic.38 Matthew has translated the exclamation back into Hebrew, partly to reinforce his literary allusion and partly for a moment of grisly humour: the onlookers—their mockery unforgettably evoked—mistake the cry for an appeal to the prophet Elija. After taking one last biblically anticipated sip of vinegar, Christ gives up the ghost. The passage is a tissue of echoes, but one that raises interesting possibilities, for Matthew is not simply reeling off quotations from the Psalms. The clear implication is that David—or whoever scripted these penitential songs—had experienced Christ’s agony in advance. He had been a kind of actor who had gone through Christ’s motions before him, providing in the process a template, or to use the technically appropriate terms, a type or figura of what was to come. Much of Matthew’s story is backed up by typologies of this sort, and they involve a host of different Old Testament figures. According to a conceit expressed in the seventeenth century by 36  Matthew, 1, 1–16. Illogically so, since the idea that Christ was descended from David through Joseph, husband of Mary his Mother, flies in the face of the insistence in the Doctrine of the Incarnation that his Father is God. 37  Matthew, 27, 33–50. This, of course, is the version set by Bach in the St Matthew passion, responding more to its pathos than to its pedantry. 38  Mark, 15, 34.

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the Roman Catholic English poet Richard Crashaw in a Corpus Christi hymn to the Eucharist, itself based on a Latin hymn by Thomas Aquinas, these early figurae were half-conscious of what they were doing: Lo, the full, finall, SACRIFICE, On which all figures fix’t their eyes. The ransom’d ISACK, & his ramme; The MANNA, & the PASCHAL Lamb.39

The official Christian view has always been that, since Christ was the fulfilment of all the prophecies, the process of prefiguration came to an end with him. As Aquinas put it in his hymn Pange, lingua: “Et antiquum documentum/Novo cedet ritui” or as the high church Anglican John Mason Neale translated it: “Types and shadows have their ending,/For the newer rite is here”. Literary critics, however, know that this not to be the case, since the literature of the west is scattered with references back to and—on the human level at least—re-enactments of Christ’s career, which thus establishes a typology of its own. In the realm of fiction the argument was put long ago by Erich Auerbach40; Heather Henderson has also made out a case for autobiography.41 There is I think an even stronger argument for New Testament typology as a ground plan for biography. All ­hagiographies are based on the pattern book of Christ. And when we pass beyond hagiography we are forever coming across secular instances of gospel scenes: temptations in the wilderness; public ostracism; repudiations of authority; clashes with the law; ritual humiliations; even—if we take the reviving reputations of certain neglected figures into account—earthly resurrections. It is an aspect of the biographical process that you might call persuasion by archetype, and certain biographers such as Carlyle with his procession of heroic figures are especially rich in it. Not only did Christ fulfil the visions provided by earlier figurae; he himself became a type for tragic living and its transcendence through the spirit or art. * * * 39  Richard Crashaw, “Lauda Sion Salvatorem: The Hymn for the Bl. Sacrament”, translating Aquinas’s Eucharistic hymn “Lauda Sion Salvatorem”. Richard Crashaw, The Poems English Latin and Greek, L. C. Martin ed. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1957), 296. 40  Erich Auerbach, “Figura” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays Trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Meridian, 1959). 41  Heather Henderson, The Victorian Self: Autobiography and Biblical Narrative (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989).

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Lastly there is “John” who may or may not be one of the original disciples, the one “whom Jesus loved”. The fact that this disciple appears prominently and flatteringly in the crucifixion narrative and that the closing verses of the last chapter identity the source of the narrative as an eye-­ witness strongly suggest that he was. Undeniably, though, he is the odd man out, and if there is an argument to be made against the gospels as biographical texts, his gospel supplies the strongest evidence. The other evangelists mostly make sense on the human as well as the divine plane. Luke, Canon Streeter once went so far as to claim, “differs hardly at all … in his conception of biography … from Plutarch”.42 This is a salient—if overworked—point. Since the time of Thomasius of Enlargen, such a view has also possessed a supporting theology in the notion of kenosis, according to which Christ emptied himself at birth of the godly attributes of omnipotence and omniscience and lived a life within human limits. In the words of Donald Baillie, “He lived a man’s life, His mind worked as a man’s mind, His knowledge was limited to human knowledge”.43 This is a helpful idea, but in John it more or less breaks down. Here we have a Saviour who not only conceives of himself as God but addresses himself as such, who can see both past and future, who holds the whole of history in his hands. How could you, in any recognisable sense of the term, conceivably write the biography of such a being? And yet, of course, this gospel does. It is full of moments of human immediacy: the Wedding Feast at Cana; the meeting with the Samarian woman by Jacob’s Well in the city of Sychar; the encounter and cure of the crippled man by the poolside at Bethesda, so poignantly rendered you could almost be there watching the disturbance of the waters.44 Such episodes are integral to the argument in John’s opening prelude: Christ is flesh as well as Word. If, in refutation of the Gnostic heresy that he was divine through-and-through, Jesus is to come across as a living, sentient being, John must counterbalance the spirituality of Christ’s thought with a tactile, breathing presence.45 But John is also full of mystical passages in which the central figure expounds his own nature and purpose through certain governing metaphors: the Bread of Life; the Light of the World; the True Vine; The Good Shepherd. There are also surreal moments such  Streeter, op. cit., 365.  D.M.  Baillie, God Was In Christ: An Essay on Incarnation and Atonement (London: Faber, 1961), 95. 44  Respectively, John 2, 1–12; 4, 5–45; 5, 1–10. 45  John 1, 1–14. 42 43

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as Christ’s soliloquy—or is it an internal dialogue?—immediately before the Passion.46 The other evangelists talk of Christ communing with himself as God. John enters his subject’s mind as it happens: like an eagle, he soars. The effect is unparalleled in world literature: part-soliloquy, part-­ confession, part-prayer. It is also a veritable dramatic illusion, since no biographer is ever privy to these kinds of inner epiphany. To attempt to dissever the connections, to work out who precisely is talking to whom at such moments, is to plumb inextricable depths of Christology. Theologians have quite properly insisted on the absolute uniqueness of these episodes. Biographically viewed—on the level of the flesh—one fact is manifest, however: in the long discourses imagined by John, Christ is acting as the interpreter of his own existence. This, it has to be said, is a considerable—even a revolutionary—leap in the biographical tradition. It seldom happens in Plutarch or Suetonius or Procopius, all of whom in very different ways regard their subjects, however empathetically, from the outside. In later biographies it happens more and more often, and the vehicle of such self-exposition, the secular equivalent of the Johannine soliloquy, is an increasing reliance on—an almost sacred significance occasionally vested in—diary entries and in correspondence, in the letter. In the mundane sphere you and I inhabit, only in the diary and the letter does one encounter that sense of eavesdropping on the thoughts of another, that privileged access to an individual’s joy or sorrow, one finds in John’s carefully scripted monologues. Even when destined for publication, a diary is an act of self-communion. A letter is a private communication with an individual, occasionally with a group, but it is also a vehicle for self-analysis, self-justification or self-criticism; in all such respects it acts much like those speeches in which, in the last of the gospels, two “persons” of the Godhead take counsel with one another. And in the construction of a secular biography, it is the diary and the letter that allow the reader access to the private world of the subject, those glimpses beyond the curtain or mask which John supplies in his doctrinal context. Journals and letters supply the third dimension of biography, the means by which the author seeks to persuade us, as John seeks to persuade us, that his or her take on the subject is in touch with the subject’s own view. Persuasion, you might call it—to redeploy a term that Cynthia Damon has applied to Suetonius47—through a disguised ventriloquism.  John, chapter 17.  Cynthia Damon, “Suetonius the Ventriloquist” in Tristan Power and Roy K Gibson eds, Suetonius the Biographer: Studies in Roman Lives (Oxford University Press, 2014). 46 47

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Lives and Afterlives At the conclusion of Chap. 2 I spoke of the “infinite recession” of interpretation to which biography, among literary genres, seems particularly prone. Lives are lived and then recounted through the eyes of a biographer or a succession of biographers. The biographies are then absorbed by readers each of whom possesses a unique background, proclivities, needs and prejudices, in the light of which the biographical act and, through it, the life of the subject or subjects comes to be construed. If the readers happen to be critics, then their work is imbibed by a further generation of readers who then filter it through their own life experience, and so on, potentially an infinitum. Of no set of life narratives is this truer than of the four canonical Christian gospels. Nothing has remotely equalled the intervention into biographical history of these short works, and beyond biography their influence is writ large: in literature, painting, oratorio, popular iconography, jokes and daily speech. Parochially considered, these are the foundation texts of the west (a rather large parish, to be sure); in some senses, indeed, they constitute its core tradition. So familiar have they been until comparatively recently that each age, each faith or interest group, each tradition of commentary, each scholar and translator has had its way with them. Any account of the gospels is thus necessarily a kind of testimony that tells us as much about the recipients as about the puzzling things received. Five examples must suffice to illustrate this process of over-­ interpretation: an early medieval example, three nineteenth century ones (since biblical criticism in that century changed our view of these texts forever) and one late twentieth century one. The principal fact that these widely spread stories have in common is that in each case a reader or researcher can be seen to be modelling his or her life and outlook on the gospels (something that seldom happens with Plutarch or Suetonius), or—more drastically—modelling their reading of one of more of the gospels on his or her life, prejudices and views. The “influence” of a text, or set of texts, could scarcely reach further than this. Not simply of a text, but sometimes indeed of a single copy of a text. Probably no single bound volume has become more enmeshed with the development of one portion of the western world than the set of gospels kept in the British Library as BL, Cotton Ms. Nero iv. Written in Latin— St Jerome’s Vulgate—interlineated with an Old English gloss of later date—it is at one and the same time a communal treasure—but of which

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community: Irish, English, Roman Catholic Christian?—and a multicultural, multilingual product of extraordinary, ramifying diversity. On the reverse of its twenty-fifth folio is an image of St Matthew as the eighth century liked to imagine him. Halo-ed, grey-bearded in Byzantine style, clad in two layers of robe against inclement weather, he writes with a plain stylus onto, not a scroll, but a codex. His mouth is closed, his eyes intense, while to his right an enigmatic figure clasping a closed volume shaped like that on which he works peeps from behind a curtain—is it his muse, as some have supposed? Is it even Jerome? Above him, an angel trumpets his task in probable reference to Revelation 1. 10–11 with its evocation of a voice “as of a trumpet” instructing the author to “write in a book”. With these indicators and clues, f.25 v. depicts the evangelist as a scribe in a long scribal tradition that includes by extension the person or persons who compiled this very manuscript. The Lindisfarne Gospels provide evidence of infinite recession of a very particular and impressive kind. So who compiled them, and where? The location of the book’s creation has long been the topic of dispute, but Michelle E. Brown, the leading present-day student of the manuscript, has confirmed the established tradition that associates the book with the island of Lindisfarne off the coast of Northumberland. Though many hands collaborated to create this unique artefact—scholars, scribes, illustrators and binders—the Latin text appears to be the work of one eighth-century monk—the evidence pointing to Eardfrith, who was Bishop of Lindisfarne between 698 and 721— and the interlineated gloss of another, tenth-century individual. And, just as the four evangelist miniatures invite us to imagine Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (the latter two being clean-shaven in the Roman style) as they set about their divinely prompted work, so modern scholarship invites—or most certainly compels—us to imagine the scribe of Lindisfarne in his solitary cell, within the sound of the sea, cut off from the mainland twice daily, shrouded against the bitter wind and cold in winter, shaded from the fitful northern sun in summer. What is certain is that this dedicated priest strongly identified with the evangelists, and regarded himself as carrying on the work. They were scribes; he was a scribe. The last of the miniatures—that of Saint John, whom Eardfrith probably thought to be identical with John of Patmos—shows the saint holding “a scroll without writing upon it”; a figure who seems simultaneously to represent “Christ in majesty”. In total, as Brown declares, “The Lindisfarne evangelist-­ scribes therefore form a vital link between Christ himself, with the various

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guises of his ministry, the transmitters of his Word and his people”.48 Could self-identification with a biographical text, or set of complementary texts, and with both the authors and the subject of these texts, go further? In the early seventeenth century the Lindisfarne Gospels came into the possession of the antiquarian and bibliophile Robert Cotton. In a supreme act of irony, Cotton placed the manuscript in a bookcase in his library topped with a bust of the Roman emperor Nero, who had done his level worst to supress the nascent religion to which the gospels bear witness. Yet, in the history of the reception of these works, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, belief and non-belief, have always existed in a tense opposition or balance. In 1863 the Brittany-born orientalist and philologist Ernest Renan, who had received the education of a Catholic priest but had decided instead to devote his life to scholarship and “science” published a Life of Jesus—the first volume of a projected history of Christianity—that was to resound massively throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond. The book was based on a critical reading of “the documents which, presenting themselves as biographies of the Founder of Christianity, must naturally hold the first place in the life of Jesus”,49 combined with thorough research into Talmudic and other sources, and travels in Palestine. No longer was Renan dependent like Eardfrith on Jerome’s Latin: Erasmus’s collation of the Greek text had been printed in 1516, and long since been corrected by Theodore Beza, whose “textus receptus” of 1633 was fully available to scholars. Armed with  this version, and the Hebrew Old Testament, Renan attempted to make rational, humanistic sense of Christ’s life, a narrative he endeavoured to sever from the clutter of Trinitarian doctrine he regarded as the accretion of later ages. Though respectful to Christ, his book—avowedly a “biography”—reduces him to the level of a charismatic and highly intelligent wandering sage, perspicacious in his teaching but scarcely original. Renan is very careful, for example, to point out that every one of the Beatitudes, and every observation in the Sermon on the Mount they introduce, has a precedent in earlier Hebrew literature. He places Christ’s birthplace in Nazareth, attributes the effect of—and contemporary belief in—the miracles to the credulous mind-set of a rural people and omits the Resurrection and the Ascension altogether. The whole work, though intensely scholarly, is shot through 48  Michelle E. Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe (London: The British Library, 2003), 349. 49  Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus (London: Trübner, 1864), 7.

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with a race-consciousness highly characteristic of the time. One of Renan’s chief contentions is that, though Jesus Christ was raised as a law-abiding Jew, he gradually grew away from this inherited faith so that by the time of his trial and crucifixion he was no longer a Jew in any effective sense. So anxious is he to put a distance between Christ and his background, so keen to separate “the sublime Founder” of Christianity from the expectations of his people that, noticing Isaiah had prophesied the promised Messiah would be unprepossessing in his appearance—“he had no beauty that we should desire him”—he observes that the historical Christ must surely have been good-looking, “accompanied” as he was “by one of those lovely faces which sometimes appear in the Jewish race”.50 Needless to say, not a single contemporaneous image of Jesus has come down to us, nor do any of the gospels describe him. The religious art of Renan’s own time, whether in England or France, had a strong tendency to depict him as handsome in somewhat non-Semitic way. Renan’s verbal portrayal fell in with this consensus, on negligible scholarly grounds. In it he had remade the human subject of the gospels in the image of his own humane scepticism and passionate mood of inquiry. The nineteenth century is undoubtedly one epoch in which competing attitudes to the Gospels frequently found individuals, and more tragically, whole communities, on collision course. In secular France, Renan had the ear of an anti-clerical movement that had held Catholic doctrine to account since the Revolution; in Britain meantime an Evangelical Revival disposed towards a fundamentalist view of the scriptures reached its climax at the very time at which sceptical ideas stemming from the “Higher Criticism” started to percolate into the universities from Germany. In Presbyterian Scotland the potential for disagreement proved especially acute as the gospel-­fed faith of John Knox locked horns with liberal tendencies trickling through from the universities. In 1887 William Robertson Smith, Professor of Hebrew, Oriental Languages and Exegesis of the Old Testament at the Free Church College in Aberdeen was publicly arraigned for heresy, the charge being that in the current edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica he had published various articles, including one headed “The Bible”, that brought the divine origin of the scriptures into question. Acquitted of the main accusation, he was nonetheless dismissed from his  Renan, commenting on Isaiah, 53.2.

50

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post for the too-open attitude he had adopted towards “critical speculation on the integrity and authority of scripture”.51 To see the Higher Criticism as necessarily and inexorably detrimental to a fundamentalist devotion to the gospel writings, however, was arguably a form of simplification. On a more sympathetic view they were potentially complementary, based as both were on close attention to the precise wording of these inherited and enigmatic texts. From the first of these vantage points, the Higher Criticism could be regarded as the nemesis of the Protestant religion; yet there were those in Protestant communities who regarded scholarship and faith, not simply as mutually beneficial, but potential fulfilments of one another. Might not the new academic attitude in its almost microscopic focus on textual detail, serve to reinforce, rather than undermine the integrity of scriptural truth? Released from his position in Aberdeen, Robertson Smith moved to a Readership in Arabic in Cambridge, where he encountered two remarkable women who held this more hopeful attitude. Recently widowed, Presbyterians of a similar foundation to his own, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson were twin sisters from Irvine on the west coast of Scotland who, though excluded from formal participation in the university by their gender, possessed between them a range of linguistic accomplishments that put some tenured academics to shame. In the early months of 1892, lured by talk of undiscovered Syriac manuscripts in a “dark closet” in the Orthodox Convent of Saint Catherine in Sinai, they journeyed to this remote monastery across the desert from Cairo and were eventually shown a thick wad of vellum pages “very dirty and its leaves … nearly all stuck together”.52 Agnes had equipped herself with basic Syriac in the nine months prior to their departure—“not difficult if you know Greek and Arabic” she briskly explained— and soon recognised the object as a palimpsest consisting of lives of female saints superimposed on a much earlier text of the four canonical gospels. Seeing as the saints’ lives were dated 697, she realised that the text of the  For Smith’s trial and subsequent career, see Robert Fraser, The Making of the Golden Bough: The Origins and Growth of An Argument (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 27–32, 45–9, 84–104. 52  Janet Soskice, Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Found the Hidden Gospels (London: Chatto and Windus, 2009), 135. 51

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gospels must date from the fourth century, which made it the earliest Syrian copy of the gospels known. Having photographed as much of the document as they were able, they left on March 8, after forty days. The following year they returned to the monastery with two professional orientalists and, between them, carefully transcribed the lion’s share of the document which, after Robertson Smith had introduced them to the university press, was published in Cambridge under joint editorship with a spirited introduction by Agnes.53 Reading the scintillating account of these adventures by the Canadian Philosophical Theologian Janet Soskice, it is difficult to avoid interpreting the journeys across the desert and the forty days sojourn the sisters spent in the monastery on their first visit—which coincided with Lent—as self-imposed tasks of biblical proportions—certainly with biblical echoes—in the service of a very distinctive conception of the truth. Indeed, for these courageous and dedicated women the gospels did not just embody truth; they were truth in a very palpable sense, and their own labours to recover an early text couched in a language philologically akin to the Aramaic spoken by Christ represented in their eyes a mission in his image. But in that fraught fin-de-siècle, there were very different ways of imaging, or perhaps following, Christ. Witness cell three, corridor three, Reading Gaol in the early Spring of 1897, where by “the light that comes down through the thickly-muffled glass of the iron-barred window”, Prisoner C.3.3 is poring over the original Greek of the “four prose poems that constitute the life of Christ”. The experience, he wrote to his former male lover, is “like coming out into a garden of lilies from a dark hall”: Of late I have been studying with diligence the four prose poems about Christ. At Christmas I managed to get hold of a Greek Testament, and every morning, after I have cleaned my cell and polished my tins, I read a little of the Gospels, a dozen verses taken by chance anywhere. It is a delightful way of opening the day. Everyone, even in a turbulent, ill-disciplined life, should do the same. Endless repetition, in and out of season, has spoiled for us the freshness, the naïveté, the simple romantic charm, of the Gospels. We hear them read far too often and far too badly, and all repetition is anti-spiritual.

53  Bensly, R.L., J. Rendel Harris and F. Burkitt, The Gospels in Syriac, with an introduction by Agnes Smith Lewis (Cambridge University Press, 1894).

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When one returns to the Greek, it is like going into a garden of lilies out of some dark and narrow house.54

He has been paying particular attention, in his own “dark and narrow house”, to the closing chapters of John and takes peculiar comfort from the fact that the last word there attributed to Christ is tetelestai, “it is finished”.55 With a fine fin-de-siècle flourish, Oscar Wilde renders it as “my life has been completed, has reached its fulfilment, has been perfected”. And he had made discoveries. First, Wilde tells Lord Alfred Douglas, he has been reading Christ’s very own words, his ipsissima verba, since he is newly convinced that Christ spoke Greek. His second discovery is that Christ was a “supreme artist”. Needless to say, the historical Christ, insofar as we understand him, would not have had a clue as to what a “supreme artist” is, or was. Moreover, though the region around the Lake of Galilee where Christ grew up possessed more than its fair share of Greek speakers, Christ was almost certainly not one of them: he spoke and preached in Aramaic.56 Even Renan, on whom Wilde in other respects places much reliance, had concluded “It is not probable that Jesus knew Greek”.57 But Oscar Wilde prior to his imprisonment had been a prominent exponent of Art for Art’s Sake, of which he had come to regard himself as a supreme exemplar: I was a man who stood in symbolic relation to the art and culture of my own age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it acknowledged. It is discerned, if it is discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.58 54  Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, Hesketh Pearson Ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 174. 55  Wilde, De Profundis, 174. John, 19, 30. 56  Galilee = Gelil haggoyim, “Circle of the Gentiles”. 57  Renan, 54. 58  Wilde, De Profundis, 151. The title of Wilde’s work is a quotation from the opening of the Vulgate’s Latin translation of Psalm 130, a favourite of miscreants and internees. Partquoted in Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (New York: Viking, 1988), p. 482.

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Thanks to his education at Trinity College, Dublin, and Magdalen College, Oxford, he was, moreover, a first-class Greek scholar. Moreover, Christ had been publicly disgraced and humiliated after his trial, as in 1895 had Wilde after his. It goes without saying that Wilde was reading Christ’s life by the light of his own. There was, after all, enough about the Jesus portrayed in the gospels (especially, as we have seen, in Matthew) to provide points of self-reference for the author of The Importance of Being Earnest: the proverbial wit, the unanswerable put-down, the flair for analogy. Of course, there is a strong element self-justification, even of hubris, about De Profundis from which any decent biographer needs to distance himself.59 The Jesus of Wilde’s tormented, proud, chastened book is a doomed poet, one who loved not wisely but too well, and whose mode of loving has landed him in trouble with the authorities. It is a very partial reading, but that is the whole point. In drawing these analogies Wilde forces his biographers’ hand: he obliges us to read his life as a parable of suffering, punishment and redemption, with Reading Gaol as the Garden of Gethsemane. Or at least to ponder that possibility, even if like Richard Ellman we then reject it. If, basing its inferences on the canonical gospels, the nineteenth century demonstrated a tendency to aestheticise Christ, the twentieth century was equally inclined to de-prettify him basing its conclusions on the same documents. In 1994 the British writer A.N.  Wilson published a well-­ publicised biography  entitled Jesus. Wilson had been raised as a Broad Church Anglican and had as a schoolboy passed through a brief Roman Catholic phase. Coming up to Oxford he had reverted to Anglicanism of a High Church complexion, and on graduation had trained for the Church of England ministry before dropping out after a year. At the age of 38 he had then lost his faith, announcing his “atheist conversion” in the newspapers. In 2009, he was to announce his re-conversion to Christianity in a piece in The New Statesman headlined “Why I Believe Again”, above an image of Wilson looking prayerfully up in church.60 Jesus, published mid-­ way between these two events, was a statement of his—as it happened, temporary—emancipation from an inherited faith he had come to regard as superstitious. It was a kind of counter-gospel, iconoclastic as far as 59  Ellman op.  cit. p.  484: “the adulteration of simplicity by eloquence, by an arrogance lurking in its humility”. 60  For Wilson’s own account of his continually changing religious views, see his Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her (London, Hutchinson, 2003), 200.

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church doctrine is concerned, though residually respectfully towards the person of Christ, whom it portrayed as a Hasidic Holy Man. But Wilson had no truck with any of the myths that had grown up around this personage, least of all such as featured in the sort of wishy-washy Sunday school Christianity which he, along with many Middle Class children of our generation, had been raised. When it came to the Christmas narrative, he was ruthless. Well before Renan, it has been recognised that Christ was highly unlikely to have been born in Bethlehem, this being a detail that Matthew and Luke added to their accounts to lend weight to the notion of Christ as the long-awaited Messiah, whom the prophet Micah had foretold would be born there. But Wilson goes further than this, picking Luke’s account to its bare bones. When Luke, in the resonant King James version read aloud at many seasonal carol services, informs us that Mary “brought forth her firstborn son, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn”, he dispatches the fairy tale scene fairly crisply. The Greek word kataluma translated as “inn” entails, for Wilson, “a room more usually than an inn”. So a manger has no place there, the Greek word implying “a portable feeding box for animals”, nor do the ox and the ass of Mrs. Alexander’s hymn “Once in Royal David’s City” fit in.61 It has to be said that even the more up-to-date English translations—such as the Revised Standard Version of 1952 and the New English Bible of 1963—translate “kataluma”, a term frequently associated with a military quarters, as an inn. Bent on his iconoclastic mission, Wilson will have none of it. The inn must go and so must the manger, along with the piously imagined ox and the ass not, one suspects because their hold over the imagination has slackened, but precisely because, in defiance of reason and realism, they still retain their grip. This is a work, less of disillusionment, than of disenchantment. Those are five quite individual reactions by authors of very different backgrounds and orientation, but any account of the afterlives of the canonical gospels must necessarily include their role in popular culture. To recover a sense of the quality of these books is very difficult partly because for centuries they have been subjected to a plethora of selective, and largely over-determined, reading practices. They have been divided into sections for liturgical and proselytising purposes; read or chanted aloud in churches in heterogeneous chunks; set alongside Old Testament or epistle portions and then sermonised upon; mulled over at early morning or late in the  A.N. Wilson, Jesus, 80 commenting on Luke 2.7.

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evening by adepts; treated to devout or seditious commentary. Ripped from their supporting context, snippets have been posted outside chapels as invitations to worship and subscribe; they have been daubed on the back of dust-blown Ghanaian trotros, quoted in love and reproof; mocked at in pubs; cited by irate parents or pompous, self-seeking politicians. Reading any of these works straight through has always been a far less common practice. Yet to do so, to this extent at least to treat each gospel—in Benjamin Jowett’s famous phrase—“as though it were any other book”,62 is one indispensable condition for testing in the mind its integrity and power. The ubiquity of these practices is indicative of the central place occupied by the gospels in the way individual lives have come to be interpreted in the west. This has been the case for twenty centuries, but of none was it truer than the nineteenth. Even as Dickens sentimentalised the story for his family, developments in the culture around him were transforming the ways in which authors felt able to expound Christ’s life, and by extension all lives. David Friedrich Strauss with his eschatological prophet, Ernest Renan with his wise and humane teacher, Albert Schweitzer with his misunderstood genius, all re-positioned Jesus in history.63 With every change of emphasis a shift occurred, not simply in Christology but in the art of biography itself. Among the legacies of the biblical tradition, with its ­disparities and gaps, is a charter of freedom the gospel-writers have handed to their successors. It is a tribute to their power if whilst reading their accounts, or those by later  authors unpersuaded of their theology, we glimpse now and then—as if from a broken mosaic pavement—a face staring up at us.

 From his essay “The Interpretation of Scripture” in Essays and Reviews (1860). The editors of this compilation, notorious in its day, were found guilty of heresy in the “court of the arches”—the ecclesiastical court of the diocese of Canterbury—but acquitted on appeal. 63  David Freidrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu (1835–6); Ernest Renan, La Vie de Jesus (1863); Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1906). 62

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Bibliography and Further Reading Primary Text

and

Translations

The Greek New Testament eds Kurt Aland, Matthew Black, Carlo M.  Martini, Bruce M.  Metzger and Allem Wikren, 3rd Edition (Stuttgart: United Bible Societies, 1983). The Bible and Holy Scriptures Conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testaments (Geneva: John Crispin, 1560). This is “Geneva Bible” that was available to, and probably read by, William Shakespeare. The Holy Bible Conteyning the Old Testament and the New Testament Translated out of the Original tongues and with the former Translations diligently compared and revised by His Majesty’s Special Commandment. Appointed to be Read in the Churches (London: Robert Barker, 1611). This is the “King James” or “Authorised” version that held sway over the following three and a half centuries, instilling itself in the memories of successive generations and being liberally quoted, both in literature and in popular speech. The New English Bible: The New Testament (Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, 1961). Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version: containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2015.)

Selected Commentary, Etc Sean A. Adams, The Genre of Acts and Collected Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Erich Auerbach, “Figura” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays Trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Meridian, 1959). D. M. Baillie, God Was in Christ: An Essay on Incarnation and Atonement (London: Faber, 1961). R. L. Bensly, J. Rendel Harris and F. Burkitt, The Gospels in Syriac, with an introduction by Agnes Smith Lewis (Cambridge University Press, 1894). Michelle E.  Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe (London: The British Library, 2003). Richard Burridge, Four Gospels: One Jesus? (London: SPCK, 1994, second ed., 2005, 3rd ed. 2014). Richard Burridge, “Reading the Gospels As Biography” in The Limits of Ancient Biography eds Brian McGing and Judith Mossman (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2006), 31–50. Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and The World (New York: Scribners, 1934). Henry Joel Cadbury, The Making of Luke-Acts (1927) (London: S.P.C.K, 1968).

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Richard Crashaw, The Poems English Latin and Greek, L. C. Martin ed. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1957). Charles Dickens, The Life of Our Lord (posthumously published, New York: Simon & Shuster, 1934). Mark Edwards, “Gospel and Genre: some reservations”, in McGing and Mossman, 51–62. Robert Fraser, The Making of the Golden Bough: The Origins and Growth of An Argument (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). Sean Freyne, “Mark’s Gospel and Ancient Biography” in McGing and Mossman, 63–76. Dirk Frickenschmidt, Evangelium als Biographie. Die vier Evangelien im Rahmen antiker Erzählkunst (Tübingen: Franke Velag, 1997). Frederick C.  Grant, The Gospels: Their Origin and Growth (New York: Harper, 1957). Heather Henderson, The Victorian Self: Autobiography and Biblical Narrative (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989). Craig S. Keener and Edward T. Wright Eds, Biographies and Jesus. What Does It Mean for the Gospels to Be Biographies? (Lexington, Kentucky: Emeth, 2016). Paul Laffan, The Fabricated Christ: Confronting What We Know About Jesus and the Gospels (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2019). Michael R. Licona, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography (Oxford University Press, 2017). Alexander Lucie-Smith, “St Ambrose—the man who invented silent reading”, The Catholic Herald, 8 December, 2011. Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (London: HarperCollins, 1996). J. Enoch Powell, The Evolution of the Gospel (New Haven Con. and London: Yale University Press, 1994). Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus (London: Trübner, 1864). John Robinson, Re-dating the New Testament (London: Wipf and Stock, 1976). John Robinson, The Priority of John Ed. J.F.  Coakley (London: Wipf and Stock, 2011). E. P. Saunders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Allen Lane, 1993). Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus trans. W. Montgomery (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1911). Janet Soskice, Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Found the Hidden Gospels (London: Chatto and Windus, 2009), 135. David Freidrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet (Tubingen: 1835). George Eliot’s translation appeared anonymously in three volumes in 1846 under the title The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Burnett Hillman Streeter, The Four Gospels: A Study in Origin (London: Macmillan, 1924).

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Charles T. Talbert, ‘The Acts of the Apostles: monograph or “bios”?” in History, Literature and Society in the Book of the Acts (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 58–72. Justin Taylor, “The Acts of the Apostles as Biography” in McGing and Mossman, 77–88. Vincent Taylor, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition, (London: Macmillan, 1933). George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (London: Longman, 1889). Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, Hesketh Pearson Ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). A. N. Wilson, Jesus, (London: Pimlico, 2003). N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is (Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2000). N. T. Wright, Luke for Everyone (London: SPCK, 2001). N. T. Wright, Paul: A Biography (New York: HarperOne, 2018).

CHAPTER 6

Biography as Inner Drama: Athanasius’s Life of Antony

In June 1960, the BBC transmitted a television interview with the fifty-­ seven-­year-old Roman Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh, perhaps the most distinguished British writer of satirical fiction then alive. Waugh was diffident, wary, tweed-clad and definitely on his guard against his interviewer John Freeman, world war hero (as Waugh was not), former Labour politician and left-wing-inclined editor of the radical weekly, The New Statesman. After some conventional opening gambits, Freeman asked Waugh which, among the many books he had written, was his favourite. He obviously expected a reply featuring the novels Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, Scoop or some other of Waugh’s better-known works. Instead the conversation went like this: Waugh: One called Helena. It’s awfully good. Freeman: Tell me why you like that the best. Waugh: Well, it’s by far best, you know. It’s the best written. Has the most interesting theme. Freeman: What in particular fascinated you about Helena? She’s an unusual saint. Waugh: Yes, that’s one of the most fascinating things: that practically nothing is known about her. Upon which, an embarrassed Freeman tried to change the subject. Helena, published in 1950, is a fictionalised biography of the Roman © The Author(s) 2020 R. Fraser, After Ancient Biography, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35169-4_6

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empress of that name, mother of the Emperor Constantine who established the city of Constantinople and made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.1 According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, by birth she was British. Other accounts of her life state that, quite late in life, she visited the Holy Land where she dug a hole, at the bottom of which she recovered the remains of the cross on which, three centuries before, Jesus Christ had been crucified. She has for long been revered as a saint by both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Little wonder then that the resolutely secular John Freeman attempted to brush aside Waugh’s high estimate of his book about her, which he seems to have attributed to Waugh’s notorious social snobbery. Waugh would have none of it: Waugh: She happened to be the Empress. It wasn’t the fact of her rank that made her interesting. It’s the fact of her finding the True Cross that made her interesting. The fact of the True Cross was that there was an actual piece of wood, an historical fact, behind the Gospel. Whether or not the wood that she found was the True Cross is open to doubt, but at that time all those Asiatic cults—the Gnostics and people—were trying to theoryize [sic] and symbolize and file away the simple facts of an actual crucifixion on a piece of wood, and she I represented as being a simple English gal, thrown greatly to her disgust into the imperial life, not in the least enjoying the high position, and putting her finger at once on what was wrong with Imperial Rome, which was that they were losing the sense of actuality. That, you might well say, is a didactic book. Upon which, Freeman finally succeeded in steering the conversation back to more congenial concerns. Then, as now, Helena was widely regarded as one of Waugh’s minor and marginal works. He had evidently intended his remarks on the TV to be controversial, and ever since they have been regarded as typically perverse. For our purposes here, what is interesting is, first, the fact that in 1960, at the turn of a racy decade, a preference for a “didactic” account of a saint’s life—albeit a fictionalised one—over satirical and topical masterpieces, had become a cause for such embarrassment. Very near the beginning of his career, Waugh had authored a hagiographic account of the life and death of the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion 1

 Evelyn Waugh, Helena: A Novel (London: Chapman and Hall, 1950).

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(1540–1581),2 and he had recently completed a commissioned, and almost equally hagiographic, biography of his friend, the Catholic convert, priest, scholar and detective novelist Ronald (“Ronnie”) Knox (1888–1957), who had died three  years previously.3 Striking therefore were the terms in which he now chose to defend hagiography as a practice, as well as the need to defend it. After all, saints’ lives had been written in the west for one-and-a-half millennia: at least since the time of Constantine’s own biographer, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea. Much was therefore at stake in this televised conversation: not simply the validity of what had widely come to be regarded as a superannuated literary mode but a radical confrontation between two points of view: one avowedly modernist in tone, sceptical and concentrated on the turn of topical events, the other mystical, believing, taking its cue from verities supposedly eternal. This confrontation and stand-off need examining further, since they were the products of almost two millennia of cultural, religious and literary history. * * * Few rulers in history invite the caustic pen of a Suetonius or a Procopius more obviously than Constantine the Great (272–337 AD), first Christian emperor, convenor of the Council of Nicaea and ultimate architect of the Nicene Creed, the Church’s traditional statement of faith. In 325  AD, probably to secure the succession of his own children, he ordered that his brother-in-law and rival Licinius be strangled whilst on a mission to Thessalonica, having personally guaranteed the man’s safety a few months before.4 The following year, acting on a vexatious accusation of impropriety by the Empress Fausta, he had Crispus, his son by his first marriage— already titled Caesar and one-time governor of Gaul—executed at Pola in Istria. When the still-to-be-canonised Helena, the boy’s devout grandmother, reproached the Emperor for his gullibility, he confronted his wife with her lies. Fausta was required to enter the overheated baths of the

 Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Campion, Jesuit and Martyr (London: Longman, 1935).  Evelyn Waugh, The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox (London: Chapman and Hall, 1959). 4  Christopher Scarre, Chronicles of the Roman Emperors (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012), 42–3. 2 3

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palace. In the words of the ancient historian Timothy Barnes, “She suffocated in steam, and was carried out a corpse”.5 Admittedly most of these lurid details are culled from Constantine’s anti-Christian detractors. Nobody, it is true, disputes Licinius’s death, not even Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea (260/265–339/340 AD), the emperor’s biographer and apologist who, nevertheless, accuses the victim of insubordination. The rough disposal of Crispus, the stifling of the unfortunate Empress, however, derive from Eunapius of Sardis, heathen historian and devotee of Emperor, Julian the Apostate, who had temporarily reversed Constantine’s reforms. Around 500, in the reign (491–518) of Anastasius—the only Byzantine emperor to be named after the Resurrection—the pestiferously pagan historian Zosimus (460–520) reinforced both charges.6 Many centuries afterwards Edward Gibbon, writing in an age of biographical revival, seems at a loss to decide between the competing accounts. “By the grateful zeal of the Christians the deliverer of the church has been decorated with every attribute of a hero, and even of a saint”,—thus with typical judiciousness Gibbon sums up the problem—“whilst the discontents of the vanquished party has compared Constantine to the most abhorred of those tyrants who, by their vice and weakness, dishonoured the imperial purple”.7 Be that as it may, it is Christian piety that has created the ordinal myth of Constantine, patron and defender of the universal Church. Its proponent and founder was that prolix cleric, Eusebius. Eusebius left his Vita Constantini unfinished, but it merits attention as an early experiment in that highly influential genre, Christian hagiography, a much richer form—and a much more varied one—than many modern commentators have allowed.8 In Eusebius himself, writing at the dawn of 5  Timothy Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Harvard University Press, 1981), 220. Barnes disputes many aspects of Eusebius’s Life of Constantine, including the pre-eminent part the Emperor purportedly played in the establishment of Christianity, legalised by the Emperor Gallienus, more than a dozen years before Constantine was born. 6  Zosimus, Historia Nova, 2, 38. The claims made in Eunapius’s Universal History survive only in fragments cited by Zosimus. 7  Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), Chapter xviii, first paragraph. Gibbon had, of course, fleetingly been a Roman Catholic. His account of the early years of the Christian church in the Empire was widely resisted at the time, notably by Richard Porson. 8  On the complex evolution of Eusebius’s text, its connections with his Historia Ecclesiae, and the contribution of both to the hagiographic form, see Averil Cameron, “Eusebius’s Vita Constantini and the Construction of Constantine” in Portraits: Biographical

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the Byzantine Age, hagiography is part-oriental in feel, and recognisable post-classical. This learned Prelate and metropolitan of Palestine, who wrote histories of the church and of local martyrs as well as commentaries on the Old Testament, was highly conscious of existing Greek and Roman models of biography. In the Vita Constantini he compares his task to a painter’s, an almost certain reference to a passage in Plutarch’s Life of Alexander at which we have already looked. But the sort of portraiture he has in mind resembles the meditative, appreciative, prayer-induced painting of an Orthodox church icon rather than the representational art of a Praxiletes or an Apelles. Besides, in his clearly stated opinion, a Christian emperor presents a far more dignified candidate for biographical treatment than an overstretched general: From the among Macedonians Alexander, so the sons of Greece relate, overthrew countless tribes of diverse nations, but before he reached full manhood he died an early death, carried off by revelry and drunken orgies. … For such deeds he is hymned in choruses; but our Emperor began where the Macedonian ended, and doubled in time the length of his life, and trebled the size of the Empire he acquired. With mild and sober injunctions to godliness he equipped his troops, then campaigned against the Britons and the dwellers at the very ocean where the sun sets. … Illuminating with beams of the light of the true religion the ends of the whole inhabited earth, he held in subjection all the toparchs, ethnarchs, satraps and kings of barbarian nations of every kind. These spontaneously saluted and greeted him, and send their embassies with gifts and presents, and set such store by his acquaintance and friendship, that they honoured him at home with pictures of him and dedications of statues, and alone of emperors Constantine was recognised and acclaimed by them all. For his part he used imperial addresses to announce his own God openly and boldly to the people of those lands.9

What a pity it would be, Eusebius continues, if accounts of that notorious pervert Nero survived to instruct posterity, whilst Constantine languished for lack of a Life. At this point readers will recall Suetonius on Nero: seditious inscriptions had already appeared on monuments Representation in the Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire eds M.J. Edwards and Simon Swain (Oxford University Press, 1997), 145–174. 9  Eusebius, Vita Constantini, Book II, 7–8. The edition that I have used is Eusebius Life of Consantine, introd., trans. and commentary by Averil Cameron and Stuart G.  Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).

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comparing the two emperors. To make it clear that no such confusion is to be tolerated, Eusebius drums in an essential distinction: men like Alexander and Nero may be fit for literary portraiture; in depicting Constantine he can draw one further strength: the assistance of Christ himself, who in this respect is his co-author. “As our fellow-worker”, Eusebius humbly proposes, “let our inspiration be the eternal Word”.10 This being the case, it is unsurprising to see the human member of this writing team drawing on those resources of advocacy found in the gospels. Here is Markian persuasion by sign: the appearance shortly before the Battle of Milvian Bridge outside Rome—at which Constantine defeated his imperial rival Maxentius, a ruler not sympathetic to the church—of a crucifix suspended across the sun with an accompanying message in Greek, en toutō níka: “by this, conquer”, retained in popular memory in the Latin form “in hoc signo vinces” (By this sign will ye conquer).11 The following night, or so Constantine told his biographer, he had a dream in which God validated the vision, and showed the dreamer the two opening letters of Christ’s name in Greek “chi” and “rho”. Eusebius had already narrated the Roman campaign in his History of the Church, an account in which there is no mention of a vision or a dream. Now he claims that the Emperor himself once confided the episode to him during a break in the Council of Nicaea, informing him that the whole army saw the cross, and describing the interlinked letters vouchsafed in the dream, later to form the basic design for the Christian labarum. Here too is Luke’s favourite technique: persuasion by example, the operative factor being Constantine’s symbolic treatment of ancient sites. Pagan strongholds—emblems of the old order like the famous shrine to Adonis at Aphaca near Byblos in the Lebanon or the temple to Asclepius in Cilicia—are demolished or converted to Christian use. Places associated with the Judaeo-Christian tradition on the other hand—the oak at Mamre in Palestine where Abraham reportedly met Yaweh, the newly identified site of the Lord’s Sepulchre in Jerusalem— become objects for expensive building programmes proclaiming their new importance. All these projects are related to Christ’s various parables of architectural destruction and renewal, microcosms of the conversion of the Empire. Of persuasion by typology or archetype, Matthew’s standby, Eusebius makes even more ample use. Constantine is the new Moses,  Eusebius, Book I, 11.  Eusebius Book I, 28–31. A different version is given by the Africa-born Christian apologist Lactantius in his De Mortibus Persecutorum, 44.5. 10 11

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beginning his life in exile from power and leading his people home in triumph. In this typological re-reading of history, constantly underscored, the vision before Milvian Bridge becomes the Burning Bush, the Tiber the Red Sea, and the labarum the Arc of the Covenant. Like Moses the Emperor is praos, gentle and meek; he is God’s servant or therapon; Maxentius is his Pharaoh; before confronting his enemies he prays in his tent like the “ancient prophet of God” in his tabernacle in the desert. At death his body’s, like the patriarch’s, is untouched by corruption.12 Here as well is St John’s innovation, persuasion via ventriloquism. Letters and other documents in Constantine’s own hand abound in Eusebius’s text, keen to let us know that, on all important matters of doctrine and policy, his and the Emperor’s mind are at one. His enthusiasm on this score is motivated by disquiet of several kinds. It is not, for example, entirely clear just how well biographer and subject knew one another. Certainly they met for the first time at Nicaea in 325, where Eusebius attended a great assembly of church dignitaries summoned from every quarter. When, shortly afterwards, the Emperor celebrated the twentieth anniversary of his reign, Eusebius made a flattering speech. He delivered a further panegyric at Constantine’s thirtieth anniversary of power; it survives as In Praise of Constantine. By selected quotation in the biography he gives the impression that he was not simply the Emperor’s supporter, but his friend and confidant as well. In actual fact, when Eusebius had arrived in Nicaea, he had been under a temporary edict of excommunication for his reported views on the principal subject of debate: the heresy propounded by Arius of Alexandria that Jesus was a creature of Almighty God, rather than his son. During the conference Eusebius managed to clear his name, but the stigma of Arianism had never quite left him. In the biography he barely mentions the Arian controversy. Instead he treats us verbatim to a series of confidential communications from his revered subject on matters civil and theological, mostly addressed to himself and others, occasionally to himself alone. The most important private communication from Emperor to Bishop occurs after Eusebius, who was much attached to his diocese in Palestine, declines the far more prestigious see of Antioch, whereupon Constantine pens his admirer a letter congratulating him on staying put in far-off Caesarea.

 On the typological parallels with Moses, see Cameron, 158–161.

12

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Over other vital matters, a similar vagueness prevails. Crispus and Fausta do not appear; Licinius is referred to as “a wild beast threatening the church of God”; Maxentius is “a tyrant”. The simplifications seem egregious, but Eusebius, who had grown up under the comparatively tolerant regime of the post-Antonine emperors, had then lived through ten years of persecution under Diocletian to see Constantine release, renew and officially establish the Church. Under these circumstances, gratitude determines everything that he says. The impression he leaves is of static figures emblazoned upon an eikonstasis placed midway between the congregation—the captive readership—and the Holy of Holies of immutable truth. * * * Through the lens of Eusebius’s biography we can observe the recrudescence of an evolving literary mode with distinct characteristics. First, there is an inversion of the objective and the subjective, and of the “real” and the “unreal”, a demotion of the parade of mere “facts”, and an assumption that what is unseen alone is authentic. Few writers of hagiography, for example, describe their subjects’ physical appearance, as Plutarch and Suetonius, so different in most other respects, always do. We know what Julius Caesar looks like; Constantine’s appearance is assumed to be an irrelevance. Then there is the liberation of the imagination from a subordinate to a supreme role: visions, by this token, are evidence. There is an insistence on the significance of relics and miracles as guarantees of the spiritual, and of the workings of Grace. There is a concentration on the process of conversion as the development through which everything else must be interpreted, and to which the whole course of a life must be referred. There is a constant echoing of—and reference to—scripture. There is a scathing attitude towards disbelief, apostasy and people whose conceptions of orthodoxy differ from those of the subject and the author (whose deepest convictions are, for these purposes, presented as identical). From the very beginning, hagiography is deeply implicated in the processes of religious apologetics, and it would remain so as long as it came to be written, whether the opposed forces were the Christian religion and paganism of various kinds—or more incestuously though no less passionately—different varieties of Christian belief. Invariably, life is portrayed as a battle: between belief and unbelief, between Evil and Good. And, just as invariably, Good and belief prevail.

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It would be easy to claim that the view of human nature purveyed by Eusebius is simpler or more monochrome that that espoused by, say, Plutarch, but this would be quite wrong. What is indubitably true is that, once the conversion experience is over, the less savoury aspects of the subject’s personality and behaviour pose a major problem for the hagiographer. If for us, the fathoming of such contradictions represents a psychological challenge, for the Christian biographer it involves an equally deep—arguably a deeper—theological one. How is it that those on whom the full beaker of divine grace has been poured continue to think debased thoughts and to perform less than perfect actions? The Problem of Evil has always been a stumbling block for theologians; it is the very taproot of hagiography and supplies much of its interest. Perhaps the most influential hagiography ever to have been written is the Life of Saint Antony of the desert by Saint Athanasius (296–373), twentieth Bishop of Alexandria. Its influence is all the more arresting because, from certain points of view, its subject seems so unpromising. Antony was an illiterate, so ignorant of letters, whether in Latin, Greek or Coptic, that he would have been unable to read the scriptures, though he more than made up for this deficiency by his skill in vocal argument. What is more, from the secular and reductionist viewpoint of twentieth-century psychiatry, his moments of spiritual clarity have predictably been regarded as symptoms of some sort of mental disturbance, perhaps schizophrenia, in which modern commentators, from Freud onwards, have not been slow to take an interest.13 For his devoted admirer Athanasius, however—a Bishop of the Church and thus in most formal respects Antony’s superior (as Antony himself would gracefully have conceded)—Antony’s lack of learning is proof positive of his virtue: he has attained supreme moral excellence without needing to be taught. For Athanasius, what is more, Antony’s seizures, which were many and vivid and which have been interpreted by virtually all recent commentators as hallucinations of some kind, are channels of revelation: the more bizarre they seem, the more the miraculous they are, the more they support the underlying system of belief. Athanasius approaches the Problem of Evil from two directions. First, he quarantines it beyond the Christian community by attributing it chiefly to heathens and schismatics. In the eyes of both subject and author, 13  Freud encountered the saint’s story in July, 1883 when reading Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Antony. See Paul C. Vitz, Freud’s Christian Unconscious (New York: The Guildford Press, 1988), 105.

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non-­Christians are largely prey to the forces of wrongdoing because they are unredeemed. This anathema, moreover, is not confined to pagans, but shared to an equal, and sometimes it appears more than equal, extent by adherents whose Christianity is less than orthodox. For this in Saint Athanasius speaking, the Father of the Church traditionally held to be the author of the Athanasian Creed, which, until comparatively recently, was recited on the fourteen most important feast days of the ecclesiastical year in place of the more familiar Apostle’s Creed. In Latin it commences with the phrase “Quicunque vult”: WHOSOEVER will be saved: before all things it is necessary that they hold the Catholick Faith. Which Faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled: without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the Catholick Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the Persons: nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son: and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal. Such as the Father is, such is the Son: and such is the Holy Ghost. The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate: and the Holy Ghost uncreate, etc.14

In the Mediterranean world of the fourth century AD, the group of Christians who most emphatically denied these tenets of Trinitarian theology were the Arians, who held that God the Father had created God the Son, who was thus a creature rather like—if on a very different level entirely from—human beings. This was to drive a coach and horses right through the doctrine of the divinity of Christ the Eternal Word as expounded at the beginning of the Gospel of Saint John.15 Athanasius himself had once briefly flirted with the heresy of Arianism—the Dragon that Saint George is said to have slain. By the time he assumed the see of 14  I have given the translation from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1662), where it appears between the order of service for Evening Prayer and the Litany. See The Book of Common Prayer, Diarmaid McCulloch ed. Everyman Library (London: Everyman Press, 1999), 92–4. Athanasius’s authorship has been widely contested, by Barnes amongst others. The traditional attribution, however, entails a recognition of—and a tribute to—the Alexandrian Bishop’s orthodoxy. 15  The Gospel According to Saint John, I, 1–14.

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Alexandria in 328, however, he had become a stout defender of the Trinitarian position agreed by the first Council of Nicaea three years previously. This did not mean that the Arians were defeated. As a result of the see-saw of ecclesiastical politics at the time, including the swerving sympathies of a succession of emperors, several of whom were overtly sympathetic to the Arians, Athanasius was obliged to spend five periods, amounting to seventeen years of the episcopate, in exile. During his third and fifth exiles he spent longish spells in the desert, where he met Antony. When, in around the year 337, a party of Arians threatened to get the upper hand in Alexandria, Antony was invited up from Lower Egypt to put them shame, whereupon Antony retreated back to the fastness of his cell, and Bishop Athanasius, as he is not slow to tell us, undertook to chaperone him from the contested city.16 These harrowing circumstances have left their mark on the Vita Antonini, where not only is the desert depicted as a reliable source of spiritual refreshment, but earthly power is regarded askance, not only by Antony, who at one point repudiates it, but implicitly by Athanasius as well. Whereas Eusebius is only too keen to celebrate Constantine as the ruler who once and for all secured the Empire for Christianity, Athanasius is equally resolute in setting out an alternative scheme of ascetic repudiation uncorrupted by the blandishments of power. As Helen Cox memorably states, life-writing in late antiquity is apt to tell as much, if not more, about the biographer as the biographee. The Athanasius who emerges from the Vita Antonini is a contrarian. Not for nothing was he known in his lifetime as “Athanasius Contra Mundum”, “Athanasius Against the World” or perhaps “Bloody-minded Athanasius”. Once Trinitarian theology had properly established itself as the orthodoxy of Church and State in 373, he came to be known as a pillar of the establishment, a fact that tells us quite a lot about the changing climate of opinion at the time. There were positions that needed to be defended, and others that needed to be attacked, depending on the point you occupied along the theological spectrum. As Averil Cameron puts the matter, “In this context 16  Athanasius, The Life of Antony, 71. The edition that I have used is The Life of Antony by Athanasius of Alexandria, trans. Tim Vivian and Apostolos N. Anathanassakis with Rowan A.  Greer. Introd. Tim Vivian. Preface Benedicta Ward, Foreword Rowan Williams (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 2003), Cistercian Studies Series Number 2002. This excellent publication prints a translation of the Coptic life alongside a translation of the Greek, together with John of Shmun’s “Enconium on Saint Antony” and Serapion of Thmuis’s “A Letter to the Disciples of Antony”.

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biography was part and parcel of apologetic”.17 Another way of putting this is that biography had become a battleground. There was also the problem of sin to be faced. As every Christian concedes, evil propensities lurk deep inside every sinner, and every saint as well. How to deal with the foe within? The early Church was obsessed with this problem. One solution was to view the universe as equally divided between the powers of Light and of Darkness, as did the Manichees (Saint Augustine as a young man had fleetingly embraced this reassuringly symmetrical conviction). But Antony and Athanasius had both rejected Manicheism, which by implication disputed the sovereignty of God. Another solution that an older Saint Augustine was to propose was to regard even the most God-fearing individuals as riven by sin, at war with their own baser instincts. The Antony whom Athanasius carefully portrays, however, is—and has always been—purity personified, to all appearances incapable of genuinely desiring to be bad. In fact, despite the depraved nature of some of his temptations, the overall impression given is one of vulnerability and innocence. It is hard to demur from the verdict of even so sceptical a reader as Kitty Mrosovsky: “There emerges a picture of a gentle, humble, infinitely patient and fairly unsophisticated saint, of compelling charm and serenity, never agitated or gloomy”.18 There remained one last solution, which was to personify these ignoble instincts, to locate the agency for their persistence in crowds of importunate demons or more singly of Satan whom the Church had already come to regard as a fallen angel. The Life of Saint Antony therefore consists of a sequence of pitched battles against malign doctrinal and ethical forces, which adopt many disguises from the voluptuous Queen of Sheba to packs of lions bulls, wolves, vipers, serpents, scorpions, leopards and bears, to an Ethiopian lad, to a batch of unseen flagellists. The contests are unrelenting. Antony’s great moments of glory are two. The first is when, during the persecutions unleashed on the Church by Maximinus Daia in 311, he is summoned to Alexandria for trial and dresses in stark white for maximum visibility. Much to his disappointment he is overlooked and, passed  Cameron, 165.  Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Antony, trans. With an introd. by Kitty Mrosovsky (London: Secker and Warbaug, 1980). Mrosovsky, who died of AIDS in 1995, had some insight into these matters, afflicted as she was by demons of her own. See Craig Raine’s poem “The Way It Was” from his collection A la recherche du temps perdu (London: Picador, 2000). 17 18

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over for a martyr’s crown, is obliged to return meekly to the desert.19 The second is when he undertakes to debate the relative merits of faith and reason with a top-notch duet of heathen—that is Greek—philosophers. By common consent, including that of the philosophers, he wins hands down. As one former Archbishop of Canterbury has put it: “at issue is the importance of wisdom acquired in and expressed through action and commitment; even the pagans in the debate grant this in theory”.20 Antony may not have been capable of reading the Bible unaided—presumably, in a method common in late antiquity, others read it out to him—but he acts it out continually in a series of typologically loaded episodes or  moral trials. There are Biblical allusions to Christ in the Wilderness and to Elijah in the desert, but it is on the Book of Job with its equivalent set of tribulations that Athanasius principally dwells. It is to this sorely tried, and boil-afflicted, soul that Antony so often compares himself, and his enemy is described in like terms: “His eyes look like the morning star and from his mouth come forth lamps of incense. His hair is sprinkled with flames and from his nostrils come forth smoke, like a coal from the heat of a burning oven. His breath is like a glowing coal and a flame leaps forth from his mouth.”21 Like Job, Antony is a crucible in which the metal of Godlike trust is assayed. In this sense, despite his oddities and extremities—or perhaps because of them—Antony is simultaneously Everyman. It is this aspect of the work that explains its widespread appeal. Antony in his vulnerability is all human flesh driven to the edge: as all saints occasionally are, like the rest of us indeed, however hard we try to hide it. If Constantine’s legacy has been organisational and political, Antony’s has been spiritual and artistic. For half a millennium his story has appealed to painters, from Michelangelo to Hieronymus Bosch to Salvador Dali. It was The Temptation of Saint Antony, then attributed to Peter Bruegel the Elder, now more usually to one of his followers, that so appealed to the twenty-four-year-old Gustave Flaubert, when he saw in the Balbi Palace in Genoa. Flaubert spent the rest of his life perfecting a literary work named after the canvas. On the manuscript of the first draft he wrote the words:

 Athanasius, 46.  Rowan Williams in Athanasius (2003), xv. 21  Athanasius, 24, quoting Job: 41, 18–21. 19 20

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Messieurs les démons Laissez-moi donc! Messieurs les démons Laissez-moi donc!22

Instinctively Flaubert recognised that the soul of the story was its inner drama. He therefore converted it into a set of dramatic tableaux with stage directions, albeit intended primarily for reading. It was this version that appealed to the young Sigmund Freud for its suggestion of everyday hallucinations and moral stress.23 In 1971 Jean-Paul Sartre detected in Flaubert’s text symptoms of autism—the saint’s and the author’s—seen as a withdrawal from the world.24 In the very same year Michel Foucault accused the saint of a special kind of materialism consisting of a desire to reconcile thought with “the stupid sanctity of things”, a diagnosis which perhaps brings the story full-circle.25 Thus the afterlives of hagiography burgeon, even in a secular age. * * * Back in the fourth century, Athanasius’s Greek text was translated into Latin by Evagrius of Antioch. It was this rendition which, the translator claimed, retained the sense, even if its style was compromised in the interests of clarity, which was read by Saint Jerome (c.347–420), to whom we are indebted for the authorial attribution. The book transformed Jerome’s outlook. Perhaps inspired by Anthony’s example, Jerome spent some time alone in the desert of Chalcis. He subsequently became the biographer of, among others, the saints Hilarius and Malchus. There is thus some reason for regarding Athanasius’s work as a foundation text for hagiography in the west. In the autumn of 386, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), who had been teaching rhetoric in Milan but had yet to be baptised, still less priested or bishoped, was staying with his small family in the little town of Cassiciatum in upper Italy, just a few miles to the west of Lake Garda.  Quoted by Mrosovsky in her introduction to Flaubert (1980).  Freud’s verdict occurs in a letter quoted by his biographer Ernest Jones in Sigmund Freud, Life and Works (London, 1953–7), i, 191–2. 24  Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Idiot de la famille: Gustave Flaubert de 1821 a 1857 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), ii, 1372. 25  Michel Foucault, La Bibliothèque Fantastique in La Tentation de Saint Antoine, ed. Henri Ronse (Paris: Gallimard Livre de Poche, 1971), 7–33. 22 23

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There they received a visit from one Ponticianus, who had been staying at the imperial court at Trèves, and whom Augustine’s twentieth-century biographer Peter Brown describes as “a member of the Special Reserve of Imperial agents”.26 Ponticianus was gratified to find on the kitchen table the Epistles of Saint Paul, which Augustine, who knew little Greek, had been reading in a pre-Vulgate—and perhaps rather approximate—Latin translation done in Africa. His reaction was to tell Augustine about Antony, Athanasius’s life of whom in the Evagrius translation had had a transformative effect on the lives of two of his close associates. In the words of William Watts’s 1631 Englishing: There began a speech (himself being the relater) of Antony the monk of Egypt: whose name was in most high estimate among thy servants, though for our part we had not so much as heard of him to that hour, which when he discovered, he insisted the more upon that discourse, hinting the knowledge of that man to us, and admiring of that our ignorance of him [eandem nostram ignorantiam]. But we stood amazed, on the other side, hearing such wonderful works of thine, so generally testified, so fresh in memory, and almost in our own times, to be done in the true faith and Church Catholic. We all wondered, we to hear of such great things reported; and he, that we had never heard of them.27

The passage is drawn from Augustine’s Confessions and, like the rest of that revolutionary work—at once memoir, autobiography, apologia, and prayer—is addressed to the God of the “Catholic”—that is, the universal—church. In the whole of world literature, there is nothing quite like the Confessions. Its uniqueness inheres in the breadth of its readership, encompassing Augustine himself, his diocese, the whole of the Latin-­ reading public, and most educated Christians since, together with the Three Persons of Athanasius’s Trinity. It thus tests modern “reception theory” to the very limit, the more so in that, amongst these constituencies human and divine, the phenomenology of reading—the intimacy of perusal—is focused on an individual reading consciousness which, by a process of imaginative osmosis, is made to fuse with the author’s own. In 26  Peter Brown, Saint Augustine: A Biography (London: Faber, 1967), 107, citing Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book VIII, vi. 27  Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII, vi. St Augustine’s Confessions with an English translation by William Watts, 1631 (London, William Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 1960). i, 432–3.

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The Confessions, hagiography is turned around. Though Augustine at the time would never have called himself a saint any more than he (the “ignoramus” of the above paragraph) would have described himself a scholar, he is recounting the familiar tale of iniquity, conversion (in his case, by incremental stages) and vocational dedication from the inside. The mirror is reversed. In its surface we are able to observe a celebrity of late antiquity who insists on his mediocrity, and a complicated, remorseful human being who considers having stolen a few pears from a neighbourhood garden when a boy to have been far more lethal to his potential salvation than the carbuncular upheavals of adolescent sex. His guilt is capricious and irrational, steered by deep awe and dread. In other words, it is much like our own. Brown for one attributes to the Confessions a radical variety of interiority which alone would mark it out as a seminal text in the long history of western life-writing: No book undermines with such great artistry the assumptions of conventional biography. Augustine makes plain, throughout the Confessions that the evolution of the heart is the real stuff of autobiography—and, viewed from the standpoint of the heart, much of the surface detail which a historian would demand of Augustine’s youth, sinks into the background.28

This is richly true, if questionable in some respects. In the fifth century AD, despite Plutarch and Suetonius, the “conventional” brand of biography of which Brown speaks had yet to settle down. Brown’s estimate also conflates three genres—history, biography and autobiography—without fully acknowledging the very different assumptions that underlie each. Augustine’s innovations permanently contributed to all of these forms though in terms of our accepted generic boundaries, the Confessions are closest to memoir. They include his meditations on memory in Book Ten, and on time in Book Eleven. These, naturally, are the very dimensions through which every species of life-writing passes. In Book Ten, Augustine wonders at the processes of recall which enable one to reconstitute a life. In Book Eleven, these thoughts burgeon into a theoretical discussion of the nature of time itself in its three phases of past, present and future. Augustine provisionally concludes that it might be more accurate to speak of a past presentness (praesens de praeteritis), a present presentness (praesens de praesentibus) and a future presentness  Peter Brown, 28.

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(praesens de futuris), since it is only in its fleeting proximity that we can truly speak of the existence of time, something that is real to us only as long as it lasts and we possess immediate experience it.29 It is God alone Who, in Augustine’s eyes, perceives the whole chronological sequence simultaneously. Augustine takes as his working model for his discussion of time an art he had experienced daily: the singing of the Psalms.30 He was so susceptible to the aesthetic charm of these performances that for him they—or at least the musical element in them—constituted a temptation only justifiable insofar as it raised the mind towards God. (It was for this very reason, he says, that Athanasius always insisted the Psalms were recited to him tunelessly.31) What really interests Augustine, though, is what this experience reveals about memory and duration, especially when—as would invariably have been the case—the text of the psalm being read or sung is already familiar to him. Under such circumstances, three processes are involved in the enjoyment of each verse: anticipation of words to come, involvement in words presently being articulated and memory of words already delivered. It is impossible, Augustine thinks, to have all three experiences at the same time. There is an analogous passage in De Vera Religione (Concerning the True Faith) where Augustine says much the same about poetry, which he considers from the point of view both of the poetry-lover and of the poet.32 The poetry-lover, even if he knows a given poem by heart, enjoys each syllable as it arrives through a process of accumulation. The poet, by contrast, has a pattern in his mind which the creation of each line expresses and completes. The poet is, as it were, above the poem, as God is above the world. It does not take a lot of imagination to extend these deliberations to the several varieties of life-writing. A memoirist such as Augustine, writing in early middle age, is immersed in his own life, feeling his way forward as it were (this is palpably the case with the Confessions, and one reason why Augustine feels that he needs the steadying presence of God). The biographer of a dead person, once the preparatory research has been done, is typically in a rather different position, since he can survey the  Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, xx.  Augustine, Confessions, Book X1, xxviii and xxxi. 31  Augustine, Confessions, Book X, xxxiii. 32  Augustine, De Vera Religione, XXII, 42, for a relevant discussion of which see A.D. Nuttall, Two Concepts of Allegory: A Study of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the Logic of Allegorical Expression (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 45. 29 30

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whole of a life and is usually aware of the circumstances of his subject’s decease, even as he recounts their antecedents and the birth. Like the poet, a biographer has a proleptic sense of an informing pattern, however delusory and deluded that may prove to be. No wonder biographers are so often accused of playing God. * * * Largely under the impact of Athanasius’s Saint Antony, hagiography continued to flourish throughout late antiquity. Sulpicius Severus’s Life of Saint Martin of Tours was justly famous, as Geoffrey of Tours artful treatment of the same subject attests. Pope Gregory’s life of the founder of the Benedictine Order is contained the second book of his Discourses; it proved as influential as the Rule. In Ireland Saint Patrick had received a life, Saint Brigid of Kildare three, and England would soon produce Stephanus’s Life of Saint Wilfrid. Eusebius’s work too cast a long shadow. Two centuries after his life of Constantine, on the northernmost fringes of Christendom, his cross and the battle recur as motifs in the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. This time the Battle is Heavenfield in 634, the victor is “the new Constantine”, St Oswald of Northumbria; the vanquished is Cadwallada, pagan King of Mercia; the cross, specifically compared to Constantine’s, is the wooden crucifix that Oswald’s army carry before them as a standard, and set up as a trophy.33 Bede’s theme is the consolidation of the Roman faith among the English; Oswald is its champion. Its tutelary spirit, however, and the culmination of Bede’s History, is St Cuthbert, sometime Bishop of Lindisfarne, Holy Island of the Angle kingdom of Bernicia. There was good reason for this, since a decade previously Bede had written Cuthbert’s biography, setting his seal on hagiography as a local British form. Already therefore, there were bifurcating models for a hagiographer to follow. When Eadfrith, a later bishop of Lindisfarne whom we have already met in connection with the Gospels, commissioned Bede to tell the story of Cuthbert first in verse, then in prose, he must have had this diversity in mind. In 705, an anonymous monk at Lindisfarne had assembled a 33  Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, Book Two, Ch. XX. For all of these correspondences, see Michelle P.  Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe (London: The British Library, 2003), 18.

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rough-­and-­ready life of the saint. Bede’s task was to turn it into decent literature, and permanently to instil a connection between Cuthbert, sanctity and Lindisfarne. A third purpose was also to be implicit in Bede’s History: to celebrate the integration of native Celtic and Roman rites agreed by English Christians at the Synod of Whitby—England’s own Nicaea—in 664. The cult of Cuthbert would enshrine accord; the biographies served as its testament. Compared with Eusebius, one is instantly conscious of contrasts: in scale, in mood and in the dispensation of civil and religious power. For a start, Cuthbert, who served as Bishop only between 685 and 687, is presented as one who took up the episcopal office with very great reluctance. For much of his ministry he lives as a hermit; it is as an anchorite on the tiny islet of Inner Farne that he dies. Bede seems overawed by Cuthert’s attitude, and his account endows the Saint’s indifference to rank with corresponding authority. In all of this, Bede proves himself an heir to Athanasius, of whose work he was aware, and for whom Antony in his Nilotic fastness had provided a pattern of insular renunciation. Like Antony’s, Cuthbert’s other-worldliness is a reproach to mere monarchs. Athanasius had described Antony planting lentils in the shade outside his grotto; even compared with this, Bede’s Cuthbert is homely. A creatureliness, a radical concentration on the humdrum consistent with the spirit of Celtic Christianity, pervades all that he does. In his youth Saint Cuthbert shares his simple meal of loaves and meat with his horse who has discovered these provisions in the cross-beams of the barn where they shelter for the night: “He brake the bread and gave half to the horse”.34 On another occasion he halves his fish supper with the eagle who has brought it: “Cut it in two”, he instructs his young acolyte, “and give half to the bird”.35 Like the Hermit Paul in the almost contemporary Voyage of Saint Brendan, the middle-aged Cuthbert is ministered to by otters. They warm him in their fur, rolling over him as he emerges from the ice-cold waters of the North Sea. Later, in a typological echo of the biblical feeding of the five thousand, Cuthbert discovers an unexpected snack of dolphin meat that miraculously expands to feed the sailors accompanying him on one of his marine expeditions. In imitation of the humility of Christ, he washes the feet of 34  Bede, Vita beati Cuthberti, 5. An illuminated manuscript of the work is held in the British Library as Yates Thompson Ms. 26. The episode with the horse is illustrated at f.14r. 35  Vita beati Cuthberti, 12. Yates Thompson Ms. 26, f.28v.

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his fellow priests and of an unknown visitor who turns out to be an angel. Staying on his tiny island retreat in the lee of Lindisfarne, he reproves some ravens for despoiling his guesthouse; in gratitude they bring him “a lump of pig’s lard”. Nearing his end, Cuthbert orders some priestly visitors from the main island to roast a goose for dinner before they depart; when they forget, the seas around Little Farne rise at his command, confining the guests to quarters until they eat as they are told. Dying of a suppurating leg—the medical detail is typical—one of Cuthbert’s last acts is to cure a young priest of diarrhoea. These homely touches are not divorced from the sacred; as in St Mark’s and Saint John’s gospels, they embody it. A representative example is an incident in chapter thirty-five, worth quoting in full since it illustrates Bede’s figural use of the New Testament. Again Cuthbert is travelling: When he had gone through the upper districts of the diocese in order, he came to a convent of virgins close to the mouth of the Tyne, a place we have already mentioned. Abbess Verca, a devout and, in the eyes of the world, a noble woman, gave him a magnificent welcome. When the after-dinner rest was over Cuthbert said he felt thirsty and would like a drink. They asked whether he wanted wine or beer. “Give me water”, came the reply. It was drawn from the well and brought. He blessed it, drank a little, and gave some to his priest, who gave it to the man who had brought it, a priest of the monastery. He asked if he might drink from the cup that the bishop had just used. “Of course. Why not?” Cuthbert answered. The priest drank, and it seemed to him that the water had taken on the taste of wine. Eager to have witnesses of so great a miracle he handed the cup to a brother who was standing by. He drank and thought that he had wine in his mouth, not water. They gaped at each other in astonishment and afterwards, when they had a chance to talk, confessed that they had never tasted better wine. One of them later came to stay at our monastery at Monkwearmouth, lived with us a long time, and was peacefully buried there. I had the story from him.36

The typological pattern for this touching anecdote is the Marriage at Cana of Galilee as recounted in Chap. 2 of the Gospel according to Saint 36  Vita beati Cuthberti, 35. Yates Thompson Ms. 26, f.66r. The translation given is J.  F. Webb’s in The Age of Bede ed. and introd. D.H.  Farmer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965).

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John, Cuthbert’s favourite book (a copy was enclosed in his coffin). Verca plays the role of the Mother of Jesus. She innocently asks the question that provokes Cuthbert’s/Christ’s request for water. The alternative of beer to wine localises the event. The priest of the monastery is the equivalent of John’s “governor of the feast”: he tastes the result and, with his fellow witnesses, passes a biblical estimate: “thou hast kept the best wine until now”. As in the gospel, the incident has reverberations of the Mass. It is domesticated—humanised as it were—by Cuthbert’s response to the priest’s question about sharing a cup with a bishop: when confronted with distinctions of status, the saint does not simply discount them; he fails to understand. But what gives the episode its distinctive tang is the rider about the evidence. As Bede has explained in his Preface, he has been to some trouble co-ordinating testimonies of the saint’s doings. The more marvellous the event, the more necessary the proof. Yet even here there is a faint echoing of Saint John’s penultimate verse: “This is the disciple which testifieth these things: and we know that his testimony is true”. In the Life of Cuthbert the biblical and typological overlay is peculiarly dense. It sometimes threatens to undermine chronology, yet it lends the whole recital a worthwhile signification. In each episode, the horizontal of time and the vertical of eternity meet. In this respect, the book is exemplary of medieval hagiography as a whole, in which Erich Auerbach’s verdict on the medieval mind set so often proves just: “The horizontal, that is the temporal and causal, connection of occurrences is dissolved; the here and now is no longer a link in an earthly chain of events; it is simultaneously something that has always been, and which will be fulfilled in future; and strictly, in the eyes of God, it is something eternal, something omni-­ temporal, something already consummated in the realm of fragmentary earthly event”.37 This does not simply apply to individual passages: it invades the author’s procedures at every point, including that of conception. In re-drafting the life from its raw original, Bede has imposed on it a shape instinct with its own symbolic figuration. There are forty-six chapters, equal to the number of years needed to complete the Temple at Jerusalem and to the reputed age of the Biblical Adam. In addition, as Michel P. Brown remarks, “forty-six was the time needed to create the perfect human and was

37  Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton University Press, 1968), 74.

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therefore apt for his account of the formation of the ideal saint”.38 All of these messages are implied, and surround the text with what she goes on to call a “sacred codicology” of form. Certainly Bede regarded its composition, not simply as a valuable act of commemoration and interpretation, but as a holy deed in itself, an aspect of his individual opus dei, his duty towards the divine. In a very real sense, like Stephanus’s Life of Saint Wilfrid of Ripon completed the following year, it enshrined both the life of a man and the spirit of a place. It is local; it is universal; a form of dedication as well as commemoration; remembrance, service, veneration all combined. * * * It is also, of course, in a sense we have to strain to recapture, eminently controversial. Bede’s subject is the English church. It is also the English nation, with which in his eyes it was co-terminus. For the past century the English people had been torn between native models of faith and those of Rome; at Whitby they had signed up to the European Union of the universal church. They would remain in that mould for the following eight centuries. At the Reformation they would break free. And, every inch of the way, hagiographies of the embattled great would follow them. When in the fifteenth century, Caxton set up his printing press in London, one of the first books he ran off, in 1483, was The Golden Legend, a compendium of Saints’ Lives translated from Jacobus da Varagine’s Legenda Aurea Santorum. At the Reformation, and then the Counter-Reformation (which in England periodically ran parallel), a war of hagiographies broke out, as apologetics on both sides recruited exemplary lives to the cause. Thomas More, beheaded for resisting Henry VIII’s usurpation of ecclesiastical authority, found an enthusiastic biographer in his son-in-law William Roper. His Life of More is in effect a hagiography, though in place of Satan he erects Queen Anne Boleyn. Catholic hagiography begged a rejoinder. In 1563 it was found in John Foxe’s Protestant-inspired Book of Martyrs, Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Days. Still, albeit underground, the Counter-Reformation rumbled on. Even in the mid-eighteenth century, a period at which the Catholic church in England was excluded almost to the point of inaudibility, Alban Butler could publish his Lives of the Saints. Two centuries later, and just over one  Michelle P. Brown, 72.

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hundred years after the re-establishment of the Roman hierarchy in Britain—the so-called Papal Aggression of 1850—Evelyn Waugh, as we have already heard, was still banging on that particular drum. In the medieval cult of hagiography, the person became a book, and the book the person. It is sometimes said that modern biography represents a reaction against the hagiographic style. This is only superficially true. On the contrary, it is because we retain some relicts of the hagiographic state of mind, because at some level of historically determined consciousness we hold the science of biography in such holy regard—because we invest such high, probably unrealistic hopes in it—that it remains for us a cause of heart-felt contention and dissent. With venerated things it was ever thus. The impulse runs very deep. We are squabbling over shrines, haggling over bones.

Bibliography and Further Reading Primary Texts

and

Translations

Andomnan of Iona, Life of St Columba Introd. and Trans. Richard Sharpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). Athanasius, The Life of Antony. The edition that I have used is The Life of Antony by Athanasius of Alexandria, The Coptic Life and the Greek Life  trans. Tim Vivian and Apostolos N.  Anathanassakis with Rowan A.  Greer. Introd. Tim Vivian. Preface Benedicta Ward, Foreword Rowan Williams (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 2003), Cistercian Studies Series Number 2002. St Augustine’s Confessions with an English translation by William Watts, 1631, 2 vols (London, William Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 1960). Augustine of Hippo, De doctrina christiana. De vera religione. Eds. K. D. Daur and J. Martin (Turnhout: Brepois, 1962). Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert: a life by the anonymous monk of Lindesfarne and Bede’s prose life Ed. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge University Press, 1940). Bede’s ecclesiastical history of the English people, Oxford medieval texts Eds. Bertram Colgrave and Roger Aubrey Baskeville Mynors (Oxford University Press, 1992) Reprinted from Mynor’s earlier edition for Nelsons. Bede, A History of the English Church and People trans. Leo Sherley-Price (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955). The Age of Bede ed. and introd. D.H. Farmer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965).

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Eusebius, Vita Constantini, Book II, 7–8. The edition that I have used is Eusebius Life of Constantine, introd., trans. and commentary by Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). Lactantius, De Mortibus Persecutorum Ed. and Trans J. L. Creed (Oxford University Press, 1984). Zosimus, Historia Nova. The most reliable modern edition is Zosime: Histoire Nouvelle Ed. F. Paschoud 2 vols (Paris: Collection des Universités de France sous le patronage de l’Association G. Budé, 1971). English translation Zosimus: New History trans and ed. Ronald T. Ridley (Sydney: Australian Association of Byzantine Studies, 1982.) Contains the few remaining fragments of Eunapius’s Universal History.

Select Commentary Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton University Press, 1968), Timothy Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Harvard University Press, 1981). Michelle P.  Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe (London: The British Library, 2003), Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London: Faber, 1967). Averil Cameron, “Eusebius’s Vita Constantini and the Construction of Constantine” in Portraits: Biographical Representation in the Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire eds M.J. Edwards and Simon Swain (Oxford University Press, 1997), 145–174. Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Antony, trans. with an introd. by Kitty Mrosovsky (London: Secker and Warbaug, 1980). Michel Foucault, La Bibliothèque Fantastique in La Tentation de Saint Antoine, ed. Henri Ronse (Paris: Gallimard Livre de Poche, 1971). Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud, Life and Works (London, 1953–7). Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 6 vols (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776–1781). Thomas S. Heffernan, Sacred Biography. Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 1992). A.D. Nuttall, Two Concepts of Allegory: A Study of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the Logic of Allegorical Expression (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Idiot de la famille: Gustave Flaubert de 1821 a 1857 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). Christopher Scarre, Chronicles of the Roman Emperors (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012)

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Michael Stuart Williams Ed., Authorised Lives in Early Christian Biography. Between Eusebius and Augustine (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Campion, Jesuit and Martyr (London: Longman, 1935). Evelyn Waugh, Helena: A Novel (London: Chapman and Hall, 1950). Evelyn Waugh, The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox (London: Chapman and Hall, 1959). Paul C. Vitz, Freud’s Christian Unconscious (New York: The Guildford Press, 1988).

CHAPTER 7

Heroic Biography: Carlyle & Co

If ancient biography in its various forms—from the representational to the scatological to the hagiographic—consistently raises the question of how truthfully to relate the story of a life, to few later periods of history does this debate seem so relevant, and yet so problematic, as the nineteenth century, and for several reasons. First, in contrast to the century that preceded it, the nineteenth was a religiously inclined period in passionate need of heroes and saints. Second, it was a century much fixated on history, as process and as discipline: the age in which the modern science of historicism was arguable conceived. Third, and importantly for our present purposes, the nineteenth century was the last period in western culture when the literature of the Greeks and the Romans—including biography—offered a commonly respected tradition to which questions of authority and truth could be referred, confident that the argument as conducted in these terms would be widely appreciated and understood. This remained the case, even when, around the middle of the century, the circle of potential readers broadened out from a limited circle of the classically educated towards a much more inclusive demographic covetous of traditional cultural ideals. At a period when the Christian gospels were daily reading for millions, the three authorised presses issued copies of the King James translation of the Bible in ever cheaper editions.1 Among readers of classical lives meanwhile 1  For Bible production in the period, see Amy Flanders with Stephen Colclough, “The Bible Press”, Ch. 8 of The History of the Oxford University Press (Oxford University Press,

© The Author(s) 2020 R. Fraser, After Ancient Biography, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35169-4_7

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were Thomas Arnold of Rugby (1795–1842) and the magisterial Benjamin Jowett of Balliol (1817–1893), but they also included William Edwin Adams (1832–1906), a travelling plaster’s son and radical who adopted the nickname “Caractacus”; the tailor James Carter (1792–1853) who browsed through Pope’s Homer at mealtimes; and the Chartist Samuel Bamford (1788–1972) who perused Gibbon during breaks from his job as a janitor. Nor should we forget James Burn (1802–1882), an apprentice hatter from Glasgow poring eagerly over his second-hand copy of The Travels of Cyrus—culled by the Scottish writer Andrew Michael Ramsay (“Le Chevalier Ramsay”) from Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus and Xenophon2—or the servant Mary Stancliff, required to read Ramsay’s sententious travelogue aloud to her mistress after breakfast every single morning. This broadening appetite for ancient lives, and the models they provided, was fed by a burgeoning trade in mass-market translations. Bohn’s Classical Library, launched in 1848, contained much of Plutarch, while Everyman’s Library—launched in 1905—featured the whole of him in three volumes in the version (1770) by John and William Langhorne.3 In the 1990s, the sixpenny parts of Cassell’s popular National Library at 192 pages each were large enough to accommodate one or two pairs of his Greek and Roman lives in a week, again in the Langhorne translation. One such was the double pairing of Alcibiades and Coriolanus with Aristides and Cato the Censor, purchased in Liverpool in 1892 by my maternal grandfather, a seventeen-year-old legal clerk, who subscribed to the whole series.4 2013), Ed. Simon Eliot, vol. ii, pp. 357–401. The three presses licensed to re-print the King James Bible of 1611 without notes were the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge and the King’s—later the Queen’s—Printer, Eyre & Spottiswoode. 2  Though Scottish by birth, Ramsay, a Catholic convert, had written in French. His Les Voyages de Cyrus appeared in Paris in 1727; the English translation, which Burn and Stancliff would have read, was issued in London the following year as The Travels of Cyrus, to which is annexed a dissertation on the theology and mythology of the ancients. 3  For working-class reading of the classics at the time, mostly though not exclusively in translation, see Edith Hall and Henry Stead, A People’s History of Classics: Class and GrecoRoman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689–1939 (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), especially Chap. 3, from which these details are taken. It is such aspirers after learning that Thomas Hardy seems to have had mind when in Jude the Obscure (1895) he portrayed an intellectually ambitious stonemason struggling with the title page of the Greek New Testament in the edition of Johann Jakob Griesbach. 4  For the impact of Cassell’s National Library on several generations of autodidacts, see Robert Fraser, “Leonard Bast’s Library: Aspiration, Emulation and the Imperial National

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Such audiences were thirsty for the knowledge and example provided by a canon of revered texts and the men and women who had lived in the light of them. Biography par excellence was the literary mode in which such role models were available for use. Society aspired upwards, spiritually as well as economically; indeed, there were those, especially in America, who implied that these two trajectories were essentially the same. “This”, wrote the Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay American Civilization of 1862, “is the wisdom of men, in every instance their labour, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the Gods themselves”.5 The first recorded application of the noun “star” to “one who shines in society, or is distinguished in any branch of art of science” dates from the exact mid-century point, in 1850. The stars of the new age were kings, poets and generals, but they were also engineers, tycoons and newspaper editors. Biography became their show case. To begin with, classical paradigms of excellence—or else of depravity—were frequently cited and adduced. In the following century they gradually went underground, finally almost into abeyance, but they remained subliminally in the memory, obliquely informing fashion and taste. The effects remain interesting and instructive and deserve more attention than they have sometimes been given, either by biographers or their readers, by classicists or else by modernists.

In Search of Heroes On the evening of Friday, May 22, 1840, three years after Queen Victoria’s accession and the publication of his own history of the French Revolution, Thomas Carlyle, who hated lecturing, stood before an audience in London and spoke on the theme of heroes and heroism. Over six evenings that spring he recounted his roll call of eminent men (yes of course, all of them were men). However, quite startlingly, Carlyle began with a God: with the Norse divinity Balder, who had led his people in battle and ended sacrificially on a funeral pyre, a flaming boat that was pushed out into the North Sea amid the lamentations of the faithful. God, prophet, poet, priest, man of letters, ruler, thus his sequence went, but the fountainhead of Carlyle’s vision was Divinity. All Gods, the Macedonian mythographer Euhemerus Tradition” in John Spiers ed. The Culture of the Publisher’s Series (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), vol ii (Nationalisms and the National Canon), 116–33. 5  Ralph Waldo Emerson, from the chapter “Civilization” in his Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1870).

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had once claimed in his Sacred History, were once upon a time successful human beings. Obversely, Carlyle appears to assert, all human heroes are potentially Gods. It is hero-worship that makes the hero, and it is into an attitude of appropriate worship that Carlyle invites us, listener and reader alike. Near the beginning of his first lecture, Carlyle invokes the Allegory of the Cave from Plato’s Republic.6 A race of slaves, artificially restrained underground, is brought out to see sun. They are brought into contact with the real, which in Plato’s terms means not the everyday, but the world of ideals which the everyday reality is a mere shadow. Biography, for Carlyle, should work like this. It should act as a kind of exposure to the Absolute. After Balder, his next example is a religious leader, not interestingly Christ or even Buddha, but the prophet Mohammed, a peasant who against many trials and tribulations brought his people an image of the divine. Carlyle’s other idols are more conventional and parochial: Dr Johnson, Burns, Cromwell, Napoleon. His last talk, however, contains a remark which fifty years earlier would have surprised many in France and may surprise us still: “Hero-worship”, Carlyle roundly declares, alluding to the subject of his lecture series as a whole, “would have sounded very strange to the workers and fighters of the French Revolution”. 7 As we have already observed, this generalisation hardly applies to Charlotte Corday, or to Madame Roland, or to Stendhal, or to the many Gallic intellectuals of the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods who derived much of their inspiration from a reading of Plutarch and his great ones. For Carlyle, though, speaking on the cusp of the new Victorian age, the French Revolution—with all the fear and trepidation it had caused in insular England—had been the very opposite of heroic. But there had in Carlyle’s eyes been one glorious, unlikely, exception. Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau (1749–1791) was the querulous, pock-marked veteran of several love affairs, much serial debt, and several periods of imprisonment. At the outbreak of the revolution, he had risen to sudden fame as the representative for Aix-en-Provence in the Constituent, then in the National Assembly. Such was his cachet in the early years of the uprising—even, to begin with, among the Jacobins—that on his death in 1792 the Pantheon was built to house his remains. It was  Plato, The Republic, Book VII, 514a–520a.  Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History [1840], Thomas Carlyle’s Collected Works (London: Chapman and Hall, 1869–70) Vol XII, 240. 6 7

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then revealed that he had been in the pay of Louis XVI, whereupon his bones were turfed out and replaced with Marat’s. This is how, in the first volume of The French Revolution—accidentally burned by John Stuart Mill’s maid, then courageously rewritten—Carlyle introduces the acrimonious comte: “All manner of men he has gained: for at bottom it is a social, loving heart, that wild, unconquerable one. … In fiery rough figure, with black Samson-like locks under the slouch-hat, he steps along there. A fiery fulginous mass, which could not be choked and smothered, but would fill all France with smoke.”8 Mirabeau it was who had held the fort against extremism, warned of the dangers of Terror, kept an uneasy balance between the governors and the governed, offered wise council at every point and, at every other turn, met with resistance, incomprehension or worse. He died of natural causes before the Terror took hold and was spared knowledge of it. He had wanted an understanding between the assembly and the King, wanted in effect a sort of constitutional monarchy such as he had once observed in England, which is one of the main reasons why Carlyle esteemed him so highly. Mirabeau was a middle-of-road man who was too often trodden underfoot. In Carlyle’s eyes, he was the one true hero the Revolution produced and far more glorious than Napoleon who is grudgingly featured at the very end of the lecture series. Mirabeau had failed but, for Carlyle, there were achievements far more significant than mere success. Such, for example, as going down fighting. Carlyle does not mention Plutarch in his lectures but, while reading the published talks, his shadow falls constantly across the page. Four of the talks enshrine parallel lives. In Lecture Three, “The Hero as Poet”, Dante is paired with Shakespeare. In Lecture Four, “The Hero as Priest”, Luther is cobbled with Knox (from whom, incidentally, Mrs Jane Carlyle claimed descent). In “The Hero as Man of Letters”, which is Lecture Five, Dr Johnson forms a trio with Rousseau and Burns. “The Hero as King”, which comes last, compares Cromwell to Napoleon, somewhat to the disadvantage of the second. Cromwell, that great Protestant hero, had been an obsession with Carlyle for years. For decades he had struggled to write about him, with positively heroic tenacity, but he could never quite get him right. One December morning, just five months prior to his lecture series, he had 8  Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History [1837] (London: Oxford University Press, 1907), I, 147.

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been wrestling with the text of a biography of the Lord Protector in his small study beneath the eves of his house at 5, Cheyne Row, Chelsea. At mid-morning, Jane Carlyle heard his heavy footsteps thudding down the stair well. In his plaid dressing gown, eyes aflame, he had entered the drawing room, raced to the fire place, and tossed the entire manuscript of the work so far upon the ardent coals. He had then turned around, sunk into an arm chair and addressed her in his characteristic brogue: “Dead heroes, buried under two centuries of Atheism, seem to whimper painfully, ‘Deliver us, can’st thou not deliver us. … Confound it, I have lost four years of good labour in the business. If the past time cannot become melodious, it must be forgotten, as good as annihilated; and we rove like aimless exiles that have not ancestors—whose world only began yesterday.’”9 Carlyle had sounded defiant, yet relieved. Throwing his painstaking work on the fire was clearly for him a profoundly moral act. It signalled his impatience with half measures, his determination to match the high political standards of his protagonist with artistic standards of his own. For the whole of that decade, as one of Jane’s biographers puts it, he had been “locked in struggle” with the Cromwell book.10 To dispose of it now was a “manly act”, and one he would not regret. Biography for Carlyle was an act of homage, to be undertaken seriously or not at all. It was also an act of retrieval of the neglected past, in this case of the lost Puritanism of England. To attempt biography was to strive for the highest. In Victorian biography, two traditions come precariously together. Plutarchian biography, as we have already seen, was multi-dimensional portraiture. Hagiography, as we later saw, was the elevation of one human life to the realm of the sublime. In the nineteenth century, these classical archetypes merge. For Carlyle in particular, a life was only worth recounting if it had been achieved against the odds of outer resistance and inner contradiction. By definition, an easy life could never be a worthwhile, still less a heroic, life. Handicaps were benefits, difficulty was bullion. Biography itself was struggle. The more you wrestled and sweated in the writing, so it followed, the better you were likely to be.

9  Jane Welsh Carlyle to Amely Boltë, December 18, 1843, quoted in Kathy Chamberlain, Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World: A Story of Love, Friendship and Marriage (London: Duckworth, 2017), 19 10  Chamberlain, 19.

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In the final decade of the previous century, a model in these respects had been set by James Bowell in his Life of Samuel Johnson. Boswell, whose Scottishness commended him to Carlyle, had been a laird’s son from Auchinleck in Ayreshire: an unsuccessful advocate, he had enjoyed the advantages of wealth, an intermittently sanguine temperament, some convivial charm and, in youth at least, plentiful opportunities for travel. Aged twenty-two he had met The Great Cham, as Johnson’s admirers called him, in a coffee house in Covent Garden; thirty years later, having failed at the London bar, he devoted the remainder of his existence to memorialising this giant. Johnson, by brutal contrast, was a bookseller’s son from an impoverished family in Lichfield; he had worked his way as a college servant at Pembroke College, Oxford, from which chronic lack of funds had obliged him to withdraw after just one year, upon which he gravitated to London where with some desperation he clung to the coat tails of Grub Street. He lost his wife Tetty early. Throughout his life he was tormented by muscular ticks and spasms, an elephantine physique, clouds of the direst melancholy, and a recurrence of what we would term Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. During his annual visits to the English capital, Bozzy, as Carlyle fondly calls his biographer, hovered around this monolith like an industrious bee. Boswell was, and knew himself to be, a lightweight; he would draw gravity from his subject. He considered Plutarch to have been “the prince of ancient biographers” and in his magnum opus he deliberately set out to produce a grand portrait of his master Plutarchian in its vividness and multivalency.11 The resulting Life became the principal source for the paragraphs devoted to Johnson by Carlyle in “The Hero As Man Of Letters”. Boswell paints a portrait of his subject in broad, candid but loving brushstrokes. Relying on his testimony, Carlyle in full rhetorical mode evokes the Great Cham as a sort of secular Protestant saint, hunted and haunted by inner and outer tribulation: Figure him there with his scrofulous diseases, with his great greedy heart, and unspeakable chaos of thoughts; stalking mournful as a stranger upon this Earth; eagerly devouring what spiritual thing he could come at: school-­ languages and other merely grammatical stuff, if there were nothing better! The largest soul that was in all England, and provision made for it of “fourpence-­halfpenny per day”. … And yet with all this rugged pride of

 For Boswell’s debt to Plutarch, see Chap. 3.

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manhood and self-help, was there ever a soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally submissive to what was really higher than he?12

Submission: it is for Carlyle a key attribute to complement the other strength of self-reliance. In his earlier lecture on Mohammed, his word for it is Islam. There are further arresting echoes in such a passage on Johnson. Carlyle’s closing tribute to the great lexicographer resounds in Latin: it is Cicero’s phrase “ultimus Romanorum”, “the last of the Romans”.13 We have met the phrase before in Chap. 1, in a paragraph from The French Revolution in which Carlyle is describing that desperate Jacobin and malcontent, Gilbert Romme.

“Character is Property” Johnson, in his inimitable singularity, had been a character. What is more to the point, from the vantage of the century we are now considering, he could well be regarded as a “Man of Character”, a somewhat different kettle of fish. The elision between these two applications of the same noun occurs, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and it marks a quite significant shift in focus. In the first sense, to be a character implied individuality, oddity, even eccentricity. In that sense, character was a mode of differentiation; it implied— then as now—the personality traits that make each of us unique. “Character”, on the other hand, had come to mean a quality firmer and more uniform, what in the visceral language of later decades came to be referred to as “backbone”, “gumption”, or “guts”.14 Actors tend to be characters, and their job is to play others. Soldiers, statesmen, scout masters and public school teachers by contrast were expected to display “Character”: moral muscle, fibre or fortitude: an ideal reputedly to be elicited from a reading of the classics, particularly of Plutarch’s Roman lives. Superficially the two perspectives seem to fly in opposite directions. It is remarkable how often, in the mind of the great mid-Victorian and pre-­ First World War consensus, they were thought to coincide. Socially the  Carlyle, On Heroes, 211.  Carlyle, On Heroes, 217. 14  For the political implications of this ideal, see Stefan Collini, “The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 35 (1985), 29–50. 12 13

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second designation was a migrating term. Though initially encouraged from above, the associated attitudes and values showed a marked tendency to move across class barriers. What had been a desideratum of the officer cadre, had by mid-century become an essential entry card for the rising middle classes. “Education”, wrote Herbert Spencer in 1850, “has for its object the formation of character”.15 At the great public schools, this need was fed by a predominantly classical curriculum. There was also a cross-­ over with the rise of non-conformism in England and an associated tendency to interpret this phenomenon in female as well as in male terms. Thus in October, 1826, we find the well-born Emily Eden, sister to Lord Auckland and admirer of the evangelical novelist Hannah Moore, writing to a friend that, it being her “Methodistical time of year”, she is reading a religious book by Anne Woodrooffe called Shades of Character, or the Infant Pilgrim.16 By means of the dialogue form, the book was designed to explore “the formation of the female character”. The qualities encompassed by this definition were an indispensable qualification for those— especially women—who worked as domestic servants. To request a reference from a former employer was to ask for a “Character”, meaning a guarantee of honesty, integrity and hard work, none of which might attach themselves to a character in the individual sense. In the professional sphere, “character” meant discipline, honour and self-restraint. Its earlier association with the armed forces naturally transferred itself, towards the end of the century, to those quasi-military bodies striving to encourage self-discipline among the urban poor: the temperance movement, the Salvation Army, the Boy’s Brigade, the Scout movement, organisations which demanded self-discipline among underprivileged city dwellers and, though their emphasis on social and political conformity, came, in the second decade of the following century, inadvertently to feed the cannons of the Somme. In 1871, thirty years after Carlyle’s influential lecture series, Samuel Smiles, who had become famous in 1859 as the author of that manual of manly independence Self-Help, wrote a book called simply Character in which he set out the ingredients of this desired, portmanteau quality. Smiles had turned himself into one of the most industrious biographers of the century. This “great modern Plutarch”, as Bernard Shaw was to call  Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (London: 1950), Part Two, Chapter 17, paragraph 4.  Emily Eden to Maria Copley, October 15, 1826. Grey Papers, Durham University Library. 15 16

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him in 1889, had biographised James Watt of the steam engine, George Stephenson of the Rocket locomotive, Thomas Telford of the Telford Bridge, and James Nysmyth of the steam hammer, and a number of other male engineers, all of whom he had described as manifesting the required sturdiness and brawn. His five-volume Lives of the Engineers, published in 1879, was to be sub-divided, not according to the personal traits of its subjects, but according to the things they had invented or built: harbours, roads, locomotives. Many of his subjects had, like Carlyle and Smiles himself, been Scots and Presbyterian Calvinists by upbringing. Indeed, those looking for a vindication of the contentions of the twentieth-century economic historians Max Weber in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) and R.H. Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) need look no further than Smiles. Several of his subjects had been instrumental in the railway boom of the 1840s. All of them had notably contributed to the growing collective affluence of Victorian Britain. In Character Smiles makes no bones about this causal connection. “Character”, he openly declares, “is Property”. He further advises those desirous of developing this range of qualities about what and whom they should read. “Among the great writers of the past”, he opines, “probably the two that have been most influential in forming the characters of great men of action and great men of thought, have been Plutarch and Montaigne—the one by presenting heroic models for imitation, the other by probing questions of constant recurrence in which the human mind in all ages has taken the deepest interest. And the works of both are for the most part cast in a biographic form, their most striking illustrations consisting in the exhibitions of character and experience which they contain.” He went on: Plutarch’s ‘Lives’, though written nearly eighteen hundred years ago, like Homer’s ‘Iliad’, still holds its ground as the greatest work of its kind. It was the favourite book of Montaigne; and to Englishmen it possesses the special interest of having been Shakespeare’s principal authority in his great classical dramas. Montaigne pronounced Plutarch to be “the greatest master in that kind of writing”—the biographic; and he declared that he “could no sooner cast an eye upon him but he purloined either a leg or a wing”. And how is it that Plutarch has succeeded in exciting an interest which continues to attract and rivet the attention of readers of all ages and classes to this day? In the first place, because the subject of his work is great men, who occupied a prominent place in the world’s history, and because he had an eye to see and a pen to describe the more prominent events and

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c­ ircumstances in their lives. And not only so, but he possessed the power of portraying the individual character of his heroes; for it is the principle of individuality which gives the charm and interest to all biography. The most engaging side of great men is not so much what they do as what they are, and does not depend upon their power of intellect but on their personal attractiveness. Thus, there are men whose lives are far more eloquent than their speeches, and whose personal character is far greater than their deeds.17

It is to be noted how niftily Smiles elides between the two senses of the word “character” as set out above. For him, the more daringly individual a person is, the more “characterful” and distinctively etched, the more likely they are to display grit and resolve, “character” in its moral and uplifting connotation. He is equally sure that both ideals are to be derived from a reading of Plutarch. The method by which the Greek author conveys these twin ideals is, for Smiles, his tendency towards digression and anecdote, his fastening on oddity and detail, what in Chap. 3 we called Plutarch’s “pointiliste” technique. In recommending it for use, Smiles speaks not as a critic or classical scholar, since he was neither, but as a biographer used to depicting his subjects in informal moments: Plutarch possessed the art of delineating the more delicate features of mind and minute peculiarities of conduct, as well as the foibles and defects of his heroes, all of which is necessary to faithful and accurate portraiture. “To see him”, says Montaigne, “pick out a light action in a man’s life, or a word, that does not seem to be of any importance, is itself a whole discourse”. He even condescends to inform us of such homely particulars as that Alexander carried his head affectedly on one side; that Alcibiades was a dandy, and had a lisp, which became him, giving a grace and persuasive turn to his discourse; that Cato had red hair and gray eyes, and was a usurer and a screw, selling off his old slaves when they became unfit for hard work; that Caesar was bald and fond of gay dress; and that Cicero (like Lord Brougham) had involuntary twitchings of his nose. Such minute particulars may by some be thought beneath the dignity of biography, but Plutarch thought them requisite for the due finish of the complete portrait which he set himself to draw; and it is by small details of character—personal traits, features, habits, and characteristics—that we are enabled to see before us the men as they really lived. Plutarch’s great merit consists in his attention to these little things, without giving them undue preponderance, or neglecting those which are of greater moment. Sometimes  Samuel Smiles, Character (Chicago: Bedford, Clarke & Co., 1881), 297–9.

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he hits off an individual trait by an anecdote, which throws more light upon the character described than pages of rhetorical description would do. In some cases, he gives us the favourite maxim of his hero; and the maxims of men often reveal their hearts. Then, as to foibles, the greatest of men are not visually symmetrical. Each has his defect, his twist, his craze; and it is by his faults that the great man reveals his common humanity. We may, at a distance, admire him as a demigod; but as we come nearer to him, we find that he is but a fallible man, and our brother. Nor are the illustrations of the defects of great men without their uses; for, as Dr. Johnson observed, “If nothing but the bright side of characters were shown, we should sit down in despondency, and think it utterly impossible to imitate them in anything”. Plutarch, himself justifies his method of portraiture by averring that his design was not to write histories, but lives.18

Imperial Plutarch Unsurprisingly, the term personality, meaning someone who stands out from the common crowd, is a nineteenth-century usage. “Individuality”, wrote Bernard Shaw in 1889, “is concentrated, fixed, gripped, in one exceptionally gifted man, who is consequently what we call a personality, a man pre-eminently himself: impossible to disguise”.19 Interestingly, the usage as applied to a woman had to wait a further thirty years, when it was deployed by Virginia Woolf to describe the hostess Katharine Hilbery in her novel Night and Day of 1919. Until then, women were more inclined to apply it to their menfolk. Jane Carlyle was convinced of the sovereign importance of individuality and what frequently went along with it: fame. One symptom of her conviction was a hearty participation in the mid-Victorian craze for autograph collecting. By the mid-1840s, as her husband extolled the virtues of hero-­ worship in front of an audience disposed to pay him that very tribute, Jane was busy, on behalf of her cousin Helen Welsh, amassing the signatures of Goethe, Walter Scott, Sir Robert Peel, Count Alfred d’Orsay, Charles Buller, Thackeray, Mazzini and Harriet Martineau. As her biographer Kathy Chamberlain observes, this habit “represented a growing sense of the importance of the individual in this century, also seen in the establishment of national portrait galleries and the mass selling of photographic  Samuel Smiles (1881), 300–1.  Church Reformer, March 1889, No. 68, 1.

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portraits of famous people. More particularly, it indicated the esteem felt for heroes or celebrated persons of genius and accomplishment, and a desire to touch something belonging to those special beings who were part of a wider sphere of life. Implied, also, was a yearning to connect with something beyond, the immortality of fame”20 The National Portrait Gallery, mentioned by Chamberlain in this passage, opened its doors in St Martin’s Lane in the West End of London in 1856. Over its main portal stand the neo-classical busts of three illustrious benefactors. One is Jane’s husband Thomas; the other two are Henry Stanhope and the historian Macaulay. Quasi-Roman busts were another way of commemorating the great. Two other methods, equally in vogue, were statuary and heroic biography, each one straining after an image— visual in the one case, verbal in the other—of private and public character as embodiments of a classically derived ethical ideal. All three possessed Roman antecedents, emphasised by a style of depiction at once monumental and personal. Round the corner from the gallery, in the year of its opening, this equation of merit was reinforced by the appearance on the vacant third plinth in the corner of Trafalgar of what is by common consent one of the ugliest statues in London. The sculptor was George Gammon Adams, an upholsterer’s son from Staines who had been apprenticed to the Royal Mint and then trained in Italy. The subject, seen in neo-classical pose, cloak toga-like around his shoulders, was Charles James Napier (1782–1853), a career soldier who had served with honour, though with uneven success, in the Peninsular war under Wellington (whose statue Adams also designed) in Cephalonia in (where he had befriended Byron), and most notoriously, in India, where he was Governor of Bombay. Napier’s main fame nowadays largely rests on a classical joke. In 1843, exceeding his orders from the Governor-General Lord Ellenburgh in Calcutta, he had invaded and annexed the Northwest province of Sindh, under the pretext of pacifying the district and rescuing it from internecine conflict between local amirs. When the news reached London, a mock-­ erudite notice appeared in Punch magazine under the heading “Foreign Affairs”: It is a common idea that the most laconic military dispatch ever issued was that sent by CAESAR to the horse-guards in Rome. Certainly the three  Chamberlain, 74.

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memorable words “Veni, vidi, vici” and perhaps until our own day, no like instance of brevity has been found. The dispatch of SIR CHARLES JAMES after the capture of Scinde to LORD ELLENBOROUGH [sic], both for brevity and truth, is however, far beyond it. The dispatch consisted of one emphatic word “Peccavi”, “I have Scinde” (sinned).21

The joke has echoed down to our own day and is repeated in Salman Rushdie’s Booker-prize winning novel of Indian independence Midnight’s Children (1982), where the pun is attributed to Napier himself. In fact, it was a hoax pulled by twelve-year-old Catherine Winkworth, to amuse her Latin teacher, the Rev. William Gaskell—husband of the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell—who suggested she send it in to the journal. But the comedic episode effectively conveys the appropriateness in the imperial context of a military grab being reported, albeit satirically, in terms of a cryptic Latinity, knowingly modelled on Caesar’s.22 In the same year as Napier’s statue—erected, according to the inscription on its granite plinth, “by public subscription, for the most part by private soldiers”—a four-volume life of the conqueror of Sindh was published by John Murray. Its author was his younger brother William, also a career soldier and, co-incidentally, a keen amateur sculptor. Lieutenant-­ General Sir William Napier KCB had served at Corunna and written a history of the Peninsular War. His statuette of Alcibiades had so impressed the Royal Academy that they made him an honorary member. From his youth up, he had been obsessed with Plutarch. And it was as a more-than-­ Plutarchian hero that, in his biography of 1856, he depicted brother Charles: “THIS shall be the story of a man who never tarnished his reputation by a shameful deed, of one who subdued distant nations by his valour, and then governed them so wisely that English rule was revered where before it had been feared and execrated”.23 But James had been very short-sighted, as his biographising brother admits. This defect, however, had reassuringly proved to be in a noble Graeco-Roman tradition. “As a child”, Charles Napier was demure and thoughtful, and his expressions generally had a touch of greatness: thus, when only ten years of age, he rejoiced to find he was short-sighted, because a portrait of Frederick the Great hanging  Punch, May 18, 1844.  For an exposure of the joke, see The Spectator, June 1, 1918, 11. 23  William Napier, The Life and Opinions of General Charles James Napier in four volumes. Second Edition (London: John Murray, 1857), i, 2. 21 22

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in his father’s room, had strange eyes: and because Plutarch said, Philip, Sertorius and Hannibal were one-eyed and Alexander’s eyes of different colours: he even wished to lose one of his own eyes as the token of a great general, unknowing that none of God’s gifts can be lost with satisfaction.24

You would never have guessed this from Adams’s statue which brings out his side-burns and hooked nose but deprives him of his specs. As, with his back to the National Gallery, he stares myopically down Whitehall, Charles Napier—with his sword, his ceremonial roll and his mock-toga—appears to us the epitome of imperial hubris. A recent, and decidedly post-­imperial, Labour Mayor of London wished to tear his effigy down. This sort of reaction seems distinctively modern, yet it was far from unknown in the Victorian age itself, when a comparative reading of the classical lives could at times mercilessly expose a fault-line running down the mind-set of liberal imperialist England. Here, in 1857—a year after of the erection of Napier’s statue and the publication of the besotted biography by his brother—is Thomas Babington Macaulay, historian and doyen of Whig intellectuals, speaking about the influence of patriotic readings of Plutarch on an earlier generation: They should have considered that in patriotism, such as it existed among the Greeks, there was nothing, that an exclusive attachment to a particular society, though a natural and, under certain circumstances, a most useful sentiment, implies no extraordinary attainments in wisdom and virtue, that, when it has existed in an intense degree, it has turned states into gangs of robbers whom their mutual fidelity has rendered more dangerous, has given a character of peculiar ferocity to wars and has generated that worst of all political evils, the tyranny of nation over nation.25

In this passage Lord Macaulay is speaking about the species of nationalism fomented by the French contemporaries of Marat, Corday and Danton. In the eyes of this great Whig historian, too narrow a reading of Plutarch had led directly to the excesses of the French Revolution, his reaction to which is at one with Carlyle’s. This is the very Macaulay on whose advice in 1835 English was adopted as the official language education in India, on the grounds that the study of the colonial tongue would do for India what an immersion in the classics had once done for England, since “What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our  William Napier, i, 3.  Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Collected Works (Longman, Green, 1898) Vol. VIII (Essays and Biographies) i, 186. 24 25

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tongue is to the people of India”.26 In Macaulay’s view, it seems, the English were entitled to be patriotic, the French and the Indians less so. What remains instructive is that all of these contradictory arguments, so intrinsic to the liberal politics of the age, were couched in terms of classical analogy.

The Hero as Saint It was in 1844, according to Harold Nicolson, twentieth-century biographer and diplomat, that hagiography entered the Victorian world. Two years earlier Dr Thomas Arnold—classicist, editor of Thucydides, man of the cloth and reforming and inspirational Headmaster of Rugby—had passed away unexpectedly at the age of forty-seven. Arnold was much mourned, not least by the large number of Rugby schoolboys who had hero-worshipped him. Among these was his own son Matthew, whose delayed elegy “Rugby Chapel” appeared in 1857, expressing the sense of lofty idealism and spiritual potential he believed himself to have inherited from his father, through whom: I believe In the noble and great who are gone; Pure souls honour’d and blest By former ages, who else— Such, so soulless, so poor, Is the race of men whom I see— Seem’d but a dream of the heart, Seem’d but a cry of desire. Yes! I believe that there lived Others like thee in the past, Not like the men of the crowd Who all round me to-day Bluster or cringe, and make life Hideous, and arid, and vile; But souls temper’d with fire, Fervent, heroic, and good, Helpers and friends of mankind.27

26  George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (London: Longman, Green, 1889), 291. 27  The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (London: Macmillan, 1893), 309.

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A second mourner was a Rugby old boy of a somewhat different cast of mind. Thomas Hughes had entered the school in 1834, and whilst there had been more notable for his cricketing prowess than for his scholarship. He later became a leading broad churchman and circuit court judge. In 1857, the same year as Matthew Arnold’s elegiac tribute to his father, he published Tom Brown’s Schooldays, based on his years at the school. It was to become a classic of schoolboy literature, and to fix a semi-permanent impression of the redoubtable doctor and the system of instruction that he had established at his school, in the mind of middle-class England. Its portrait of Arnold preaching one of his regular Sunday afternoon twenty-­ minute sermons in the college chapel “pleading for his Lord, the King of righteousness, and love and glory” proved unforgettable, at least in the consciousness of readers for whom schoolmasters, and more especially ordained schoolmasters, supplied the sort of moral uplift frequently lacking in policemen and politicians. But the literary work that really established Thomas Arnold’s reputation as a model educator and fount of religious and ethical wisdom had been the biography commissioned shortly after his death by his widow Mary. It appeared in 1844, and its author was yet another Rugbean: A.P. Stanley, classical scholar and a Fellow of University College, Oxford, later to be appointed, at the request of Queen Victoria, Dean of Westminster Abbey. It was this two-volume work, two-thirds of which is devoted to Arnold’s correspondence, that was to become the object of Harold Nicolson’s retrospective criticism and scorn. “The complete rejection of truthful representation”, Nicolson bewailed in The Development of English Biography, “the bag and baggage return to hagiography, cannot be dated earlier than 1844, the year in which Stanley published his egregious Life of Arnold”.28 Hagiography as a mode of writing, he further claimed, “returned in stately triumph with Dean Stanley’s Life”. Nine years earlier, Lytton Strachey, to whom we shall turn, had devoted a chapter of his iconoclastic Eminent Victorians to stylishly demolishing Dr Arnold’s reputation. However, as even Strachey conceded, almost all of the facts on which he deftly drew had come from Stanley’s life, a best-seller in its time, and one that was to cast a long shadow over biographical writing for the remainder of the nineteenth century.

28  Harold Nicolson, The Development of English Biography (London: The Hogarth Press, 1927), 125.

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Nicolson and Strachey were both Eminent Edwardians, sickened to death by the Great War of 1914–1918 and the unthinking patriotism that had seemingly contributed to the carnage. Their castigation of Stanley’s Life, and their general response to Victorian biography, was a reaction to pressures of their own time, and needs to be examined with some care. How much did Nicolson actually know about hagiography? By the 1844 there existed a venerable tradition of saints’ lives linking the early modern period with the late classical age. This tradition stretched from Saint Jerome’s Lives of the Fathers through Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea Sanctorum, translated into English in 1493 as The Golden Legend, to such homegrown examples as William Roper’s life of Thomas More, John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, George Cavendish’s biography of Cardinal Wolsey and, as recently as 1756, Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints. It is doubtful that Nicholson has any of these specifically in mind. Instead, he seems to have meant a sycophantic paean to perfection, something quite alien to hagiography historically conceived. “Impure” biography is what Nicolson calls it, by which he seems to have meant the adulteration of objective narrative by elements filched from theology or speculative ethics. Always supposing that such a thing existed, it would be a travesty of hagiography as classically practiced. A saint’s life is meaningless without temptation and conflict. Perfection is pointless without imperfection, hagiography in the classical sense pointless without contrast. In the last chapter, we examined some of the key characteristics of saints’ lives as written in late antiquity: persuasion by sign, an inversion of the real and the unreal, a reliance on biblical typologies, a vividly depicted theatre of moral struggle. Most of these recur in updated form in Stanley’s Life. The most evident feature that does is a reliance on biblical typology since, in common with most nineteenth-century Christians of different sectarian persuasions, Arnold clearly conceived his life as patterned on Christ’s and endeavoured to persuade his young charges to regard theirs in the same light, insisting that they read the Gospels in Greek from early on in their school career, and later on examining them rigorously in the essentials of the Catechism. The second feature that Stanley’s book has in common with the ancient texts is a conception on individual lives as a tussle against inner and outer forces of evil. As portrayed by Stanley, socially and personally Arnold perceived the whole of existence as just such a struggle. Any number of passages from his letters and sermons could be

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taken to confirm this view. Right at the beginning of his career as a headmaster, in one of those spell-binding sermons, he had identified six evils of which he declared his intention of ridding his school. These were “sensual wickedness” (by which he seems to have meant sexual experimentation after lights out in the dorm); lying; bullying; disobedience, idleness and, finally, “a prevailing spirit of combination in evil and companionship”, in other words the reinforcement of any of the above through peer group pressure.29 Lying was the worst, and Arnold went to some extremes to extirpate it, by beating if necessary. Here is Stanley on the subject: Lying, for example, to the masters, he made a great moral offence: placing implicit confidence in a boy’s assertion, and, then, if a falsehood were discovered, punishing it severely,—in the upper part of the school with expulsion. Even in the lower forms he never seemed to be on the watch for boys; and in the higher forms any attempt at further proof was immediately checked:—“If you say so, that is quite enough—of course I believe your word”; and there grew up in consequence a general feeling that “it was a shame to tell Arnold a lie—he always believes one”.30

When this tendency revealed itself in the censure of the young, it could well have savoured of the high-minded hypocrisy pilloried, over a century later, in Lindsay Anderson’s film of 1968 If with its savage indictment of public school life. But headmaster Arnold, as depicted in Stanley’s account, has little in common with Anderson’s pompous and abrasive Mr Kemp. For a start, Arnold’s high expectations are, when needs be, turned astringently upon himself. There are several instances of this. A twentieth-­ century biographer of Arnold, T.W. Bamford, tells of a boy punished for claiming not to have been asked to prepare a passage of Latin prose his form teacher asked him to construe. When, after the beating, Arnold discovered that the boy had been telling the truth all along, he was consumed by self-mortification and apologised to him in front of the entire school. Stanley tells a similar story of Arnold reprimanding a boy for slowness of apprehension and being chastised for his severity by the student himself: “the pupil looked up in his face and said ‘Why do speak angrily, sir?— indeed, I am doing the best that I can’”. Years afterwards, Stanley records, 29  Thomas Arnold, Sermons (London: B. Fellows, 1832), v, 65–7. See also David Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning: Four Stories of a Victorian Ideal (London: Cassell, 1961), 32–3. 30  Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D. (London: John Murray, 1844), i, 100.

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Arnold used to tell the story to his children, and said “I never felt so much ashamed in my life—that look and that speech I have never forgotten”.31 Arnold was incapable of trying to cover up his own failings, and his awareness of them adds another, internalised, dimension to the moral strife. Stanley does not shield us from exposure to these faults. Far from thinking of himself as a paragon against whom others should measure themselves, in his letters Arnold turns over his temptations like live coals. There is, for example his ambition (Milton’s “last affliction on noble mind”), of which he was never entirely free: “I believe”, Stanley reports him as declaring late in life, “that, naturally, I am one of the most ambitious men alive”, though in his early years he had not quite been able to determine whether he wished to be a Prime Minister, a colonial governor, or a world-famous author.32 There was his tendency to over-theorise, and to overlook individual differences between those with whom he had to deal as a result. Lastly, there was his lingering sense of failure and even, sometimes, of despair. Of the inversion of the real and the unreal noted in ancient hagiography there is less evidence, since Stanley’s naturalistic mode of address for the most part precludes it. But Dr Arnold as he portrays him is no common-­ or-­garden realist. There is a mystical side to his nature, evident both in his keen sense of the omnipresence of Providence and in his intuitive, almost neurotic, sense of the presence of evil.33 At times Arnold will personify the malignant forces against which he believes himself engaged. Of the existence of a Devil himself, he seems to have been almost as convinced as was Saint Antony. Suddenly, seeing a group of his pupils huddling sociably around the hearth, and without overhearing what they are saying to one another, he will be seized with a sinister feeling that all is not right. Stanley reports him seeing a “knot of vicious or careless boys gathered round the great school-house fire”. The sight causes him a spasm of moral panic: “It makes me think”, he would say, “that I see the Devil in the midst of them”.34 Reading this, one is reminded—and perhaps Stanley intends one to be reminded—of Luther hurling an inkpot at Satan. It also leads us to

 Stanley, i, 117.  Stanley, i, 31. 33  On his faith in Providence, see Stanley, i, 98. 34  Stanley, i, 103. See also A.O.J.  Cockshut, Truth to Life: The Art of Biography in the Nineteenth Century (London: Collins, 1974), 94. 31 32

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inquire how much of the great Doctor’s celebrated moral earnestness may have been founded on fear. Lastly there is persuasion by sign, in other words in the classical accounts by miracle. Arnold’s vehement distrust of the High Church party in the Church of England, which Stanley as a fellow High Churchman to some extent shared, excludes the possibility of miracles as such, but the narrative abounds in providential turning points, which Stanley the adoring disciple is very keen to record. Perhaps persuasion by nod might be a better term. There is for example, the mesmeric, and to our minds almost unaccountable, effect of Arnold’s preaching, unforgettable to those witnessed it, and near-miraculous in its effects. There is Arnold’s general, day-to-day charisma—a Greek term implying a God-given talent adopted into English in the seventeenth century, and gradually morphing into the sense of persuasive power over others. On occasions, a mere word from Arnold does seem to have been capable of turning a young man’s life around, at least as those exposed to such casual influence frequently remembered it. In the sixth form at Rugby, Arnold had almost free rein as a teacher. He used it, not only to drill his adoring pupils in the rudiments of classical language, literature and history—Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato—but to illustrate the principles of the ethics through a comparison between eminent lives, ancient and modern. Stanley well remembered those lessons and their exemplary effect. Arnold would illustrate Hannibal’s tactics in warfare by comparing them to those enacted in the Seven Years War, or by Frederick the Great (Carlyle’s six-volume biography of whom—his last major work—would appear between 1858 and 1865). Arnold would expatiate on the nobility of the virtuous dead and then, to thunderous effect, he would evoke the opposite: “No direct instruction”, Stanley avers, “could leave on their minds a livelier image of his disgust at moral evil, than the black cloud of indignation which passed over his face when speaking of the crimes of Napoleon, or of Caesar, and the dead pause that followed, as if the acts had just been committed in his very presence”.35 Thenceforth, for several decades, Christian heroism, with its seamless blend of echoes classical and biblical, was to supply a normative mode, in biography and beyond.36 In November, 1855, the Reverend Charles Kingsley sat in his study in Eversley in Hampshire, devising a Christmas  Stanley, i, 132.  For the diffused influence of Stanley’s book, see John Witheridge, Excellent Dr Stanley: The Life of Dean Stanley of Westminster (London: Michael Russell, 2013), 3–21. 35 36

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gift for his children. Like many decent-minded mid-Victorian parents, he was resolved that they should grow up to be classically educated and, as an ordained priest of the Church on England, he was determined that they should be Christians. Not only that, but he seems to have perceived these two aspirations as being complementary: they were to be Christians because educated in a certain way and classically educated because they were Christians. He decided therefore to present them with three Greek myths—those of Perseus, Theseus and Jason—in the light of these twin ideals. In Kingsley’s view, Perseus, Theseus and Jason were all very good chaps, and attention to their examples would give his family a fair indication as to how to live. He explained: Now, why have I called this book ‘The Heroes’? Because that was the name which the Hellens gave to men who were brave and skilful, and dare do more than other men. At first, I think, that was all it meant: but after a time it came to mean something more; it came to mean men who helped their country; men in those old times, when the country was half-wild, who killed fierce beasts and evil men, and drained swamps, and founded towns, and therefore after they were dead, were honoured, because they had left their country better than they found it. And we call such a man a hero in English to this day, and call it a ‘heroic’ thing to suffer pain and grief, that we may do good to our fellow-men. We may all do that, my children, boys and girls alike; and we ought to do it, for it is easier now than ever, and safer, and the path more clear. But you shall hear how the Hellens said their heroes worked, three thousand years ago. stories are not all true, of course, nor half of them; you are not simple enough to fancy that; but the meaning of them is true, and true for ever, and that is—‘Do right, and God will help you’.37

This is children’s literature, but all the more influential because of it. In a way very characteristic of Kingsley, two paradigms—Carlylean hero-­ worship (he was a great admirer of Carlyle) and Christian hagiography have been projected backwards onto the recumbent body of classical literature. The blend proved extremely potent and was to influence generations of English people.38

37  Charles Kingsley, The Heroes, or Greek Fairy Tales for My Children (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1930), xix–xx. 38  We were still being given Kingsley’s The Heroes to read at school in the 1950s, against the dying glow of the British Empire.

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In 1877, two years after her Kingsley’s death, his widow Fanny published a two-volume life of her husband.39 Stanley and Kingsley had been friends, and her book is modelled after Stanley’s example: a biography inter-dispersed with lengthy quotations from the subject’s correspondence. The letters may now be compared with the originals in the British Library, from which three facts are clear. The first is that Fanny Kingsley has edited the correspondence to leave out anything of too startlingly intimate a nature, such as the sacramental and sado-masochistic element in their five-year courtship.40 The second is that, during that courtship, she had been systematically schooled by her fiancé into habits of admiration for “Great Good Men–David–Moses–Paul–Hooker–the four Oxford Martyrs–Luther–Taylor–Howard”, all of whom were to be regarded in the reverential posture illustrated by Carlyle.41 The third is that, during the same period, she had been trained by the young Charles both into certain ethical priorities (she is to regard morals as meaningless without religion, and in 1842 to abstain from wine and spirits for a year) and into habits of reading very relevant to her eventual role as his biographer. In her perusal of those texts as he encourages her to study, she is to attend neither to style nor to personality, but to moral and intellect example. Take these “Hints on Reading” from a letter of September, 1842: “Do not be too fond of authors’ peculiarities: but in reading different books, extract the principles they hold in common, for those are the most likely to be true. … A truth cannot be too true! Therefore disbelieve everything that you cannot carry out in practice, and put into practice anything that you believe.”42 Fanny Kingsley’s Letters and Memories of Charles Kingsley is now almost unread, but in its time it went through a rapid series of editions, both in England and America. It was a much sanitised version of its subject’s life and, as such, in the late twentieth century became the target for

39  Frances Eliza Kingsley, Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life edited by his wife (London: Henry S. King, 1877). 40  See for example Charles Kingsley to Frances Grenfell, October 4, 1843: “Darling! We are one! And so you would let me scourge you!” and letter from Salisbury Cathedral, March 28, 1844, headed in Fanny’s handwriting “Burn”. Both in B.L Add. Ms 6552. 41  Charles Kingsley to Frances Grenfell, “Friday morning”, August 5, 1842.B.L.  Add Ms.62552. 42  Charles Kingsley to Frances Grenfell, September 9, 1842, B.L Add Ms. 62552.

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one of the most swingingly iconoclastic biographies of the 1970s: Susan Chitty’s The Beast and the Monk.43 Stanley’s and Fanny Kingsley’s biographies—one commissioned by a widow, the other written by one—set the tone for life-writing for most of the remainder of the century and the first decade of the next. Two volumes became the standard length (as distinct from three for the novel), and a combination of life events with a selection from the correspondence the standard form. The formula was copied more or less faithfully in G.M. Trevelyan’s Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (1876), Edmund Sheridan Purcell’s Life of Cardinal Manning and Demetrius Boulger’s Life of General Gordon (both 1896). Early in the following century the convention was maintained in John Morley’s Life of Gladstone (1903), Wilfred Ward’s Life of John Henry Newman (1912) and Sir Edward Cook’s Life of Florence Nightingale (1913). These were the monumental tomes against which in 1918 Lytton Strachey took aim. “The art of biography”, he then wrote, “seems to have fallen on evil times in England”, adding that “it is not the biographer’s business to be complementary; it is his business to lay bare that facts as he understands them”. Strachey considered that he was initiating a revolution and, like so many revolutionaries, he was inclined to simplify the opposition. In condemning his Victorian predecessors with so broad and disparaging a sweep, Strachey was cavalier in two respects. First, none of the admittedly weighty works mentioned is in the trite sense merely celebratory. All portray complicated individuals often at odds both with themselves and with the world. Second, in an effort to justify his revolt, Strachey has omitted all mention of the principal biographical achievement of the age he was so keen to condemn. He does so with good reason because, as we will soon see, any honest assessment of it would have seriously weakened his case.

National Plutarch There was one aspect of Plutarch’s achievement that was almost never revived: his arrangement of his subjects into parallel series of lives: one Greek and one Roman. Until the late nineteenth century, most editions of his work, and most translations, retained this system, including the poet Arthur Hugh Clough’s overhauling of the “Dryden” translation 43  Susan Chitty, The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley (London: Mason/ Charter, 1974).

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“corrected from the Greek and revised”, which appeared in Boston in five volumes between 1859 and 1860. Clough retains the pairings, one Latin against one Greek, with a synkrisis (judging together), or comparative essay, after each pair. In 1863, however, he collected several of the Greek lives together and published them separately as “Greek history … in a series of Lives from Plutarch”.44 This arrangement, soon copied by other editors, translators and publishers, reflected a double tendency. The first was an increasing willingness to read Plutarch historically rather than biographically, a trend which flew in the face of Plutarch’s own statement in his Life or Alexander that “I am not writing history, but lives”. The fashion was encouraged by changing provisions at the universities. At Oxford, for example, Plutarch was now studied in the Literae Humaniores syllabus, divided after 1850 into Mods (devoted to language and translation work) and Greats (devoted to Philosophy and Ancient History); it was in the context of the last that Plutarch was addressed.45 Between 1837 and 1841 Clough himself had read for an undivided Literae Humaniores degree which since 1830 had included “Ancient History” including, naturally, Plutarch. In the light of these provisions, it seemed natural to split up the pairs into national groupings and to raid the Parallel Lives for chronology, as well as other sorts of historical fact. The second and related tendency was a willingness to read each life against its local political background. Armed with this attitude, a life of Julius Caesar told you as much about Rome as it did about Caesar. Biography thus became local biography, which is as much as to say, in the context of the nineteenth century, it became national. If this attitude was adopted towards notable Greeks and Romans, there was no reason why it should not be taken towards dead Britons. Already by 1762 there had appeared the six volumes of Thomas Mortimer’s The British Plutarch or Biographical Entertainer containing the Lives of the Most Eminent STATESMEN, PATRIOTS, DIVINES, WARRIORS, PHILOSOPHERS, POETS and artists of GREAT BRITAIN and Ireland from the accession of Henry VIII to the Present Time.46 The compilation had included Boyle, 44  Arthur Hugh Clough, Greek History from Themistocles to Alexander in a series of lives from Plutarch (London: Longmans, Green, 1863). 45  W.H.Walsh, “The zenith of Greats”, in The History of the University of Oxford Volume VII “Nineteenth-Century Oxford”, M. G. Brock and M.C. Curthoys ed. (Oxford University Press, 2000), 311–326. 46  London: Edward Dilly, 1762. For an earlier discussion, see Chap. 1.

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Dryden, Locke and Newton together with many bishops and cabinet ministers. It had inclined towards the solemn and had listed the salient features of each life. Significantly, though, its contents were arranged chronologically rather than alphabetically. As the title page announced, it was to provide its readers with a sense of this particular range of people— all of whom were men—but it was also designed to provide a “compendious view of the History of England during that Period”. Mortimer was an economist: his book was history as much as it was biography. When in 1882 the Scottish-born publisher George Smith approached Leslie Stephen, editor of The Cornhill Magazine, to oversee a new biographical dictionary, the plan was for a multi-volume work universal in scope. Stephen persuaded him that a national compilation along the lines of Germany’s would be more manageable. Thus The Dictionary of National Biography was born. The following year they engaged as deputy editor Sidney Lee, a Balliol graduate in classics and history with a strong taste for antiquarian scholarship. For eight years the two men worked in harness, though as Juliette Anderson points out in her indispensable Victorian Biography Reconsidered, they could scarcely have been more different. Lee, who contributed 820 entries to the book, including that on Shakespeare, was in ready sympathy with the Carlylean consensus on national greatness. As Anderson says, he “drew inspiration from a classical biographical tradition and embraced Plutarch, Tacitus, Aristotle, and North”. Biography for him was an art of commemoration superior to mere statuary. As he wrote in his essay “National Biography” of 1896, “Pyramids and mausoleums, statues and columns … all fail to satisfy one or other of the conditions of permanence, publicity and perspicuity. … It is to the more prosaic, yet more accessible, machinery of biography that a nation must turn.”47 Lee’s own entries are statues in prose: thoroughly Victorian in both the good and the bad senses, he is by turns celebratory and, when that does not work, censorious. Of the married novelist Lawrence Sterne’s affair with Mlle Fourtanelle in 1758, he writes: “Meanwhile, his yearning for feminine sympathy revived, and happening to meet at York a very young and intelligent French lady of unblemished

47  Quoted in Juliette Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of NineteenthCentury ‘Hidden’ Lives (Oxford University Press, 2010), 224.

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reputation he, with indefensible disregard of his domestic position, amused himself with a flirtation”.48 The “machinery of biography” is hardly a phrase that Stephen would have used. Artistic by temperament, Quaker by background, Liberal by conviction, he wanted his compilation to be a fair picture of the nation in all of its departments, compartments and trade. Stephen possessed a breadth of reading and a liberal moral awareness far in excess of Lee’s. Though he would not have acknowledged Smiles as an influence, he possessed Smiles’s determination to look beyond the celebrated, the great and the good to people—sometimes quite obscure—who were worthy in their own right and interesting in their own way. This is clear, both from his own entries and from his principles of selection. It is thanks to Stephen that the dictionary contained so many women and every manner of profession. He writes six pages on George Eliot, though listing her under her married name of Mary Ann or Marion Cross. Here his judgements are definite but eccentric. Scenes from Clerical Life is the most “charming” of all her works, and Romola can be considered as her masterpiece which “certainly represents her reflective powers at their ripest”.49 Middlemarch on the other hand has “obvious faults of composition, and some jarring discords”. But Stephen also made sure that the disreputable rubbed shoulders with the illustrious. Charles II’s orange-selling woman friend Nell Gwynn earns her place, as does the notorious Regency kiss-and-tell goodtime girl, Harriet Wilson. All of this is right in line with Suetonius’s long-­ lost Lives of the Famous Courtesans, of which Stephen would have known. But there were also continuities. All of the entries display a brevity and concentration which are an inevitable consequence of the format, but which also reflect a consistent feature of the classical biographers both editors would have known. Very many of these entries deal with their subjects by divisio in the manner of Suetonius; they also tend to begin with a chronological account of this person’s life and proceed to enumerate his qualities good and bad, again in conformity with the Suetonian method. The majority also adopt the formula, familiar from both Plutarch and Suetonius, of holding back a physical description of each character to the end of the relevant entry, where it sometimes comes as an illuminating surprise, all the more so because these tightly packed, leather-bound volumes are not illustrated. Where they do not do this, they supply a list of  The Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 54 (London: Smith and Elder, 1898), 206.  DNB, Vol. 13 (London: Smith and Elder, 1888), 216–22.

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surviving likenesses and portraits, a feature retained in the edition of 2004. Much of the protocol is carried forward to the next century: culminating descriptions of each subject were to be deployed as late as 1951–1954 by Sir Steven Runciman for the personalities at war in his three-volume history of The Crusades.50 Runciman, though, has taken the technique direct from Plutarch. Plutarchian too is the balance of judgement to which both editors aspired, even if Lee sometimes tripped up on his own prejudices. Complexity of viewpoint was encouraged by Stephen from the outset and, with it, a wry insight. Take the entry by Richard Garnett (1835–1906), Keeper of Printed Books in the British Library, translator from the Greek, and biographer of Milton, Blake and Carlyle, on the personal limitations of John Aubrey, seventeenth-century compiler of Brief Lives. Aubrey had been one of his Garnett’s principal source for successive biographies. In himself, though, he had been in Garnett’s opinion a sort of biographer manqué: Aubrey was the very type of the man who is no man’s enemy but his own. He possessed every virtue usually associated with a careless temper, and an industry in his own pursuits that would have done credit to one of robuster mould. “My head”, he says, “was always working, never idle and even travelling did glean some observations, some whereof are to be valued”. They usually are, and many, especially those on the alterations of manners in his time, exhibit real shrewdness. He was well aware of his failings, and it is impossible not to sympathize with his regret for the abolition of the monasteries which could have offered him a congenial refuge and his verdict that “if ever I had been good for anything, that would have been a painter”. His buoyant cheerfulness defied calamity and preserved his self-respect under the hard trial of dependence. He certainly is devoid of literary talent, except as a re-teller of anecdotes; and his head teams with particulars which he lacks the faculty to reduce to order or combine into a whole. As a gossip, however, he is a kind of immature Boswell and we are infinitely beholden to him for the minute but vivid of Bacon, Milton, Raleigh, Hobbes and other great men preserved in his “Minutes of Lives”.51

50  Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades (Cambridge University Press), 3 vols, 1951–1954. See, for example, the culminating descriptions of King Philip Augustus of France, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, King Amalric II of Cyprus and, especially, Saladin in Volume Three (Penguin, 1990), 5–6, 34, 103 and 76–80. 51  DNB, Vol. 1 (London: Smith and Elder, 1885), 113–7.

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Tinged with condescension this verdict may be, yet it contains the kernel of a biographical credo which was to be of central importance to the following generation. Biography is an art as much as it is a record of experience; unless it is achieved organically and aesthetically, it cannot be said to be done at all. Stephen died in 1904, two years into the following reign, and thirteen years after he retired from the Dictionary, leaving Lee in sole charge. It was his daughter Virginia Woolf who inherited the fascination with biography and, with it, a determination to do it in a fresh way. Together with her friend Lytton Strachey she initiated a new and fearless approach to “life-writing” (as she newly called it) that set its face fastidiously against what it saw as Victorian solemnity and its tendency to hero-worship. An integral aspect of this attitude was a debunking attitude to authority, and a biographical inclusiveness that took in human subjects of all temperaments and inclinations, and even Elizabeth Barret Browning’s lapdog, but not usually the British working classes. In 2007 the writer Alison Light transcended Woolf’s class limitations in her revolutionary study Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service.52 In 2004 the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a comprehensive revision of the Smith and Elder compendium, was to include crooks, tycoons and pop stars. Thus did the frontiers of national biography continue to expand. Arguably, though, despite the view of him as a reactionary old buffer promulgated in the Edwardian period by Strachey & Co., Stephen it was who acted as herald to all this inclusiveness.

Bibliography and Further Reading Matthew Arnold, Poetical Works (London and New York, 1893). Thomas Arnold, Sermons Preached in the Chapel of Rugby School (London: B. Fellows, 1832). Juliette Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-­ Century ‘Hidden’ Lives (Oxford University Press, 2010). Asa Briggs, Victorian People: A Re-Assessment of Persons and Themes, 1851–1867 (University of Chicago Press, 1955). M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys, Eds. The History of the University of Oxford Vol VII The Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2000). Demetrius Charles de Kavanagh Boulger, Life of General Gordon (London: Fisher Unwin, 1896)  Alison Light, Virginia Woolf and the Servants (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008).

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Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History [1840], Thomas Carlyle’s Collected Works (London: Chapman and Hall, 1869–70) Vol XII. Kathy Chamberlain, Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World: A Story of Love, Friendship and Marriage (London: Duckworth, 2017). Susan Chitty, The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley (London: Mason/ Charter, 1974.) Arthur Hugh Clough, Greek History from Themistocles to Alexander in a series of lives from Plutarch (London: Longmans, Green, 1863). Arthur Hugh Clough, Plutarch’s Lives. The translation called “Dryden’s” corrected from the Greek and revised (London: Sampson Low & Co., 1876). The first edition had been published in Boston in 1864. A. O. J. Cockshut, Truth to Life: The Art of Biography in the Nineteenth Century (London: Collins, 1974.) Stefan Collini, “The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 35 (1985), 29–50 Amy Flanders with Stephen Colclough, “The Bible Press”, in Ch. 8 of The History of the Oxford University Press, Ed. Simon Eliot, vol. ii (Oxford University Press, 2013), 357–401. Edward Tyas Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1913). Robert Fraser, “Leonard Bast’s Library: Aspiration, Emulation and the Imperial National Tradition” in The Culture of the Publisher’s Series, Ed. John Spiers, vol ii (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) (Nationalisms and the National Canon), 116–133. Edith Hall and Henry Stead, A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland, 1689–1939 (London and New  York: Routledge, 2020). Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days (London: Macmillan, 1857). Charles Kingsley, The Heroes, or Greek Fairy Tales for My Children (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1856). Frances Eliza Kingsley, Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life edited by his wife, 2 vols (London: Henry S. King, 1877). Charles Kingsley. Letters to Frances Grenfell, B.L Add. Ms 6552. Alison Light, Virginia Woolf and the Servants (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008) Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Collected Works (Longman, Green, 1898) Vol. VIII (Essays and Biographies). Thomas Mortimer, The British Plutarch or Biographical Entertainer containing the Lives of the Most Eminent Statesmen, Patriots, Divines, Warriors, Philosophers, Poets and artists of Great Britain and Ireland from the accession of Henry VIII to the Present Time, 8 vols (London: Edward Dilly, 1762). William Napier, The Life and Opinions of General Charles James Napier, 4 vols., Second Edition (London: John Murray, 1857).

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David Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning: Four Stories of a Victorian Ideal (London: Cassell, 1961). Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols (Cambridge University Press, 1951–1954.) The Dictionary of National Biography. Eds. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, 63 vols (London: Smith and Elder, 1885–1900). Samuel Smiles, Character (Chicago: Bedford, Clarke & Co., 1881) Samuel Smiles, Lives of the Engineers, 4 vols (London: John Murray, 1862). Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1844). George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (London: Longman, Green, 1889). John Witheridge, Dean Stanley; The Life of Dean Stanley of Westminster (London: Michael Russell, 2013) Cornélie Wouters, Baronne de Vase, Le Plutarch anglais, 12 vols (Paris, 1785–86).

CHAPTER 8

Caustic Biography: Strachey & Co.

The “infinite regression” involved in the reception of biography of which we spoke towards the close of Chap. 2—from subject to author, from reader to critic—has necessary historic consequences. The resulting inter-­ subjectivity of impression, counter-impression, revision (re-vision, seeing again) has meant that, more perhaps than any other literary form, biographies—including successive biographies of a single subject—have evolved in step with the moods and phases of the surrounding cultural atmosphere. There has been a succession of Alexanders. As Robin Lane Fox remarked in 1973 at the start of his substantial and coolly appreciative work Alexander the Great, “More than twenty contemporaries wrote books on Alexander and not one of them survives. They are known by quotations in later authors.”1 One of those authors was Plutarch, but there has been a succession of accounts of Alexander’s short and impressive life from Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander to Lane Fox’s own book. Each has involved writerly projections of aspiration, illusion, disillusion or desire. As Shakespeare’s maladroit Welshman Fluellin trenchantly remarks in Act Five, Scene Five of Henry V, “Alexander is porn”. But there has also been a succession of Plutarchs and Procopiuses, as scholars and historical biographers reconstitute their times. There has, as we have already seen, been a procession of Christs from Renan to Albert Schweitzer and beyond; there has also been an answering procession of Saint Matthews and Saint Johns. There have been several Saint Antonies 1

 Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 11.

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up to and beyond Gustave Flaubert’s, but there have also been several versions of Saint Athanasius and Saint Augustine (and, at the hands of Julian Barnes of Flaubert too). Each of these reflects the manner of which, in a desire to be “original”, writers have read the “original” sources, then re-­ read, interpreted or edited them afresh. Hence biography constantly alters its mien in a uniquely calculating way. The Victorian habit of sanctification, which we have just examined, presented one stage in this process, but so did the twentieth-century habit of denigration that followed hard upon. Yet each of these phases can be seen to re-echo phases through which ancient life-writing passed in its own day, even when modern biographers are not always aware of this fact. Modern attitudes frequently ape classical ones. Lane Fox carries an epigraph which perfectly captures the posture of Rome’s most prominent denigrator in an episode from Suetonius’s Life of Augustus: “When Alexander’s sarcophagus was brought from its shrine, Augustus gazed at the body, then laid a crown of gold on its glass case and scattered some flowers to pay his respects. When they asked if he could like to see Ptolemy too, ‘I wished to see a king’, he replied ‘I did not wish to see corpses’”.2 A related feature of modern and postmodern biography is that its practitioners have grown precociously, sometimes narcissistically, aware of the nature of the biographical act and of the characteristics and opportunities of their calling. Lane Fox states modestly that his book cannot claim to be a “biography of Alexander”, and yet the result reads at points very much like one. He sets aside the biographical diadem since, like so many of his contemporaries, he has become acutely aware of the requirements of the genre: its sources, its responsibilities, its strengths and weaknesses, of its limits and his own. Along with a heightened acceptance of biography as an art form has gone a corresponding decline of faith its supposed objectivity: which is one reason that scholars such as Arnaldo Momigliano learned to mistrust it.3 Some modern biographers have made hay with the facts, and have been acutely conscious that they are doing do. The very fact of the factual is up for grabs. This phenomenon is as applicable—if in a slightly different way—to biographies depicting long-dead figures as it is to those portraying subjects alive and kicking or only recently deceased. The last one hundred years have witnessed a remarkable growth of historical biographising. As 2 3

 Lane Fox, 13, quoting Suetonius Divus Augustus, 18. Lane Fox’s translation.  See Chap. 2.

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they crowd round the sarcophagus of the past, the clan of historical biographers feels less and less constrained by loyalty or awe. “What is truth?” some of them appear to ask.

Judas, Biographer Towards the beginning of The Critic as Artist, a tongue-in-cheek dramatic dialogue by Oscar Wilde (MA, Literae Humaniores, Oxon) first published in book form in May, 1891, two affluent young gentlemen are discussing the nature of literary representation in different varieties of life-writing. Both are worldly, flippant, insouciant as only Wilde’s people can be. “Ernest” is the more serious of the two: more so, in any case, than his near-namesake in the play “The Importance of Being Earnest”, staged four years later on the edge of Wilde’s disgrace and death. As the dialogue opens, he is perusing a volume of memoirs picked up from the desk of his more frivolous friend Gilbert. After he has finished strumming on the piano, Gilbert informs him that memoirs are his favourite form of reading, citing Cicero’s, Balzac’s, Flaubert’s and Berlioz’s, Byron’s and Madame de Sevignés, and supremely Rousseau’s. Ernest promptly counters this view by urging the competing claims of biography as a more reputable and authentic form. What, he asks indignantly, will happen to biographers if memoirists now take over?: Do you seriously propose that every man should become his own Boswell? What would become of our industrious compilers of Lives and Recollections in that case? GILBERT. What has become of them? They are the pest of the age, nothing more and nothing less. Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography. ERNEST. My dear fellow! GILBERT. I am afraid it is true. Formerly we used to canonise our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarise them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable. ERNEST. May I ask, Gilbert, to whom you allude?4 4  Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist with some remarks upon the importance of Doing Nothing”, in Intentions (London: Methuen, 1909), 98.

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The conversation passes on, but already we have gleaned three facts. The first is that, in the eyes of these well-read and intelligent late Victorians, biography and memoir are starting to impinge on, and sometimes compete with, one another. The second is that, in this new literary dispensation, both biographer and subject are regarded as possessing special and protected rights, enshrined in convention, and maybe too in law. The third is that biographers are beginning to be seen, not least by their intended subjects, as potential traitors and threats. Gilbert aims his remarks vaguely at “all our second-rate littérateurs”. That having been said, there is a certain animosity to his tone, almost as if he has some particular biographer or school of biography in mind. Since Gilbert is acting here at least partly as Wilde’s mouthpiece, we are entitled to press Ernest’s question ourselves. Judas was famously a betrayer and, before the end of the decade, in his open letter De Profundis, Wilde would implicitly compare himself to Christ. To which particular “pest”, in this bantering assault on biographers, does Gerald/ Wilde allude?5

From Caesar to Carlyle In the previous decade there had been one very well publicised scandal involving apparent biographical treachery. It was an episode that had gone to the very taproot of the biographical art, the ethical responsibility of biographers and the relationship between third person biography and first person memoir. We must return to Thomas Carlyle. By the 1870s, Carlyle’s star had risen, then fallen. Following Heroes he had to general admiration written lives of his fellow writer John Stirling and of Frederick the Great, and an edition of the speeches and letters of Cromwell. In a series of high-minded and passionate works, he had lambasted his countrymen for their hypocrisy and spiritual sloth. For several years at mid-century he had been adopted as a kind of national prophet, to whom those seeking spiritual and cultural direction could look, all the  The sense of biography as a potential threat has far outlasted Wilde. See Oxford Centre of Life-Writing, Wolfson College, 2015–2016, especially Julian Barnes, “Some of My Best Friends Are Biographers” (26 January 2016) and Adam Philips, “Against Biography”: h t t p s : / / r e s o u r c e s p a c e . w o l f . o x . a c . u k / r e s o u r c e s p a c e / p a g e s / v i e w. php?ref=9041&k=b12851810a. 5

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time faithfully supported by Jane. Amongst those who revered and followed him, none had been more ardent than the historian James Anthony Froude (1818–1894). Froude had lost his Christian faith whilst a fellow of Oriel, Oxford, had written a novel about that loss6 and resigned his fellowship in consequence. Thenceforth, like Carlyle himself, “The Hero as Man of Letters”, he had earned his living by his pen. In the early 1860s he had sought Carlyle out, becoming at length a weekly visitor to Cheyne Row. By 1870 he was closer to Carlyle than any man alive. Then, in April 1866, whilst Thomas was away in Scotland, Jane collapsed on the pavement outside their home, dying at the age of sixty-five and leaving Thomas inconsolable. Five years later, he arrived on Froude’s doorstep, carrying a large sheaf of papers. In the words of Froude’s modern biographer, “It was his deepest desire, he told Froude that no biography of him should be written, and that the materials now given to him should be the only authentic memorials of his life”.7 In fact, two unauthorised biographies had already appeared in Germany. It was all the more necessary that any authorised account be completed in a spirit of arduous responsibility. The difficulty attendant on his commission, however, only dawned on Froude as he read the papers through. There were self-lacerating contributions by Carlyle himself, which reminded Froude of the scourging self-­ recriminations recorded in Boswell’s Life of Johnson. For the most part, though, the cache consisted of letters by Jane to a number of correspondents which made it quite clear to Froude, as they had already made it clear to her grieving and remorseful husband, just how unhappy Thomas’s conduct had made his wife. There were his tempers, his dogmatism, his impracticality in the home, his refusal either to countenance the idea of her as an intellectual equal or to entertain the possibility of children. There was his brusqueness and self-absorption. Froude was viscerally alarmed, but he knew that he must persist and honour this request. By 1871, Carlyle had made a will in effect appointing Froude as his official biographer. It was an unwelcome task, but Froude knew he must be faithful to the work in hand and, in so doing, be faithful to the man. Froude was both a classical scholar and a biographer. For much of the period between Carlyle’s commission and the appearance in 1882 of his  J. A. Froude, The Nemesis of Faith (London: John Chapman, 1859).  Ciaran Brady, James Anthony Froude: An Intellectual Biography of A Victorian Prophet (Oxford University Press, 2013), 354. 6 7

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four-volume life of his friend, he was involved in another project: a biographical “sketch” of Julius Caesar. It saw the light of day in 1879, three years before the first two volumes of the life of Carlyle, and was prefaced by a meditation on its sources, several of which Froude, suspecting authorial bias, was disposed to disregard. Among the ancient authorities, however, there were, he thought, certain exceptions: Suetonius is apparently the most trustworthy. His narrative, like those of his contemporaries, was coloured by tradition. His biographies of the earlier Caesars betray the same animosity towards them which taints the credibility of Tacitus, and prevailed for so many years in aristocratic Roman society. But Suetonius shows nevertheless a devotion to veracity, an antiquarian curiosity, diligence and a serious desire to tell his story impartially. Suetonius, in the absence of evidence, direct or presumptive, to the contrary, I have felt myself able to follow.8

As Froude must have been aware, this assessment was a little disingenuous. For all his purported judiciousness, Suetonius—as we saw in Chap. 4—had always been regarded as among the principal perpetrators of libels against Caesar’s reputation. It was on him that later ages had relied when they had accused Julius of prostituting his young body to the King of Bythynia, or peculation, or imperiousness, or of riding roughshod over the wishes of the Senate. Froude knew all of this but wished to set it aside, attributing fault-finding with the first of the Caesars to jealous gossip or prejudice. Froude’s Julius as a result is not simply a hero but a hero of a peculiarly Carlylean sort. Froude was no democrat but, as more recent commentators have seen, an imperialist of a fairly brutal kind, a racist, a defender of slavery, an enemy of abolition, an advocate of strong government. For him the consequences of the second, 1867 reform act had been destabilising and weakening, and in his account of Caesar’s rise to supreme authority in Rome he implicitly compares these recent developments in England to the last days of the Roman republic. Both situations had necessitated the emergence of a strong man. In Rome, Caesar had been that man; now England was longing for her Caesar. Froude read his classical sources in line with this ideology. His attitude towards the even-keeling Suetonius is by and large to follow his chronology, but in those passages detrimental to Caesar’s glory, to ignore his 8

 James Anthony Froude, Caesar: A Sketch (New York: Scribners, 1880), viii.

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judgement and his tone. Yet, at the same time as performing this balancing act in Caesar’s favour, Froude was having in his parallel project to be fair to first-hand sources which left his friend Carlyle’s private reputation pretty much in tatters. His reaction to Caesar had been to re-mould him in the shape of a Carlylean Great Man. When it came to Carlyle himself, Froude had eventually to pen passages such as this: There were times when Carlyle was like a child, and like a very naughty one. … It was not easy to live with a husband subject to strange fits of passion and depression. Often as unreasonable as a child. … With all his splendid gifts, moral and intellectual, Carlyle was like a wayward child—a child in willfulness, a child in remorse.9

These observations did not consort easily with the Great Man theory. And there was more: suggestions, for example, that Carlyle’s reluctance to beget children had been linked to, and perhaps caused by, an organic inability to do so: that he had been, not merely sterile but impotent. Little wonder the book caused a furore. Froude had included all of these details or hints in the spirit of Carlyle’s express demand for utter truthfulness in the telling. His readers, however, could not know the shape that Froude’s undertaking to his friend had taken, nor (despite certain tormented ruminations in the text), the extent of his misgivings. To those like Wilde ignorant of the back story, it looked very much like a Judas-like betrayal of trust: the worshipper had turned iconoclast. Seemingly, in the view of the reading public, Froude had produced a pen portrait of his friend, less in the appreciative posture of a Plutarch than in the censorious spirit of a Suetonius. But, of course, there was another dimension to the exercise. So closely had Froude, in a perhaps misguided spirit of friendship, followed his mentor Carlyle’s dying instructions, that the work at times reads almost as distanced autobiography dictated by a subject at odds with himself. The wounds aimed at Carlyle’s personality are in effect self-lacerations delivered in confessional mode. The classical precedents are as a consequence blended or mixed. For large sections of the text, it is as if Suetonius has been corresponding with Saint Augustine.

9  James Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle, A History of His Life in London (London, 1882) ii, 212.

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Strachey and the Triumph of Style Along the corridors of Brixton Jail in South London, one afternoon in August 1918, a peculiar noise was heard to resound. The sound was that of a cultured voice guffawing at—or rather with—a recently published book. The inmate’s hilarity did not go down too well with the prison authorities. According to his own later account, “the officer came round to my cell, saying I must remember that prison is a place of punishment”.10 Since the detainee’s name was Bertrand Russell, you could say he was able to enjoy the last laugh, both with the book and at the expense of the social, political and moral system that had confined him in this setting for several weeks, simply for opposing the Great War. There was a connection between these sources of laughter and the war itself, since the text that had caused Russell such mirth had implicitly been aimed at the set of values that had given rise to the conflict itself, or so the book’s author and its imprisoned reader both believed. The work, an experiment in group biography, was Eminent Victorians, and its author was Russell’s friend Lytton Strachey. It enjoyed immediate success, sending ripples throughout the world of English letters and beyond, propelling its feckless author from literary obscurity to notorious fame. Strachey’s former university teacher, the historian G.M. Trevelyan, read it whilst traversing the North of Italy in a train. He promptly wrote to his former pupil, of whom in secret he had always somewhat disapproved, to congratulate him, adding the barbed comment that his erstwhile charge had now “found a method of writing about history which suits you admirably”.11 The method was a biographical one that Strachey would later apply to Queen Victoria and to Elizabeth and Essex. By common consent, biography would never to be the same again. It was a watershed in English life-writing but, as we have just seen, it was far from being unprecedented. Strachey had chosen his four subjects carefully and, in every case, they had been, not simply pillars of the establishment, but representatives of four main facets of national life: Cardinal 10  Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, Vol. I (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967), 73. At the time, though, as his letters to Ottoline Morrell make clear, Russell was clearly torn, enjoying Strachey’s wit whilst recognising its power to hurt. See Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), 427. 11  David Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (London: HarperCollins, 1992), 43. Yet Trevelyan was similarly torn, admiring the narrative skill evident in Strachey’s book whilst hating “its zestful iconoclasm and self-conscious irrelevance”. See also Holroyd, 423.

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Manning of the church, Thomas Arnold of the public schools, Florence Nightingale of the medical and nursing professions, General Gordon of the army. Strachey’s funny and provocative book contained almost no original research (none in what we would now call primary sources). Instead he had relied firmly on the standard, by and large hagiographic, multi-volume Life and Letters of each of his victims penned by an admirer, and turned it on its head. His cheeky portrait of Thomas Arnold, for example, relies pretty much on that worshipful biography by Arnold’s devout pupil, Dean Stanley of Westminster Abbey, at which we looked in the last chapter. When it comes to Florence Nightingale, as Nightingale’s outraged niece Rosalind Nash was quick to observe, almost every aspect of Strachey’s sketch is derived from Edward Tyas Cook’s respectful life: not published until 1913 but Victorian in spirit, quoting as it does liberally from its subject’s letters and stressing her indomitable organisational and fighting spirit. In situating Nightingale as an activist and pioneer often at odds with officialdom, Cook had already gone some way towards dispelling her sentimental image as “The Lady With The Lamp” epitomised by her statue on the Crimean monument on Waterloo Place in London. Strachey goes a lot further than this. His Nightingale is at times wilfully obstinate, frankly a thorn in the flesh. However, though he departs from the spirit of Cook’s account, he keeps very close to its letter. In places indeed he echoes entire passages, simply altering the angle of approach. When, in her last illness, Nightingale is presented with the Order of Merit by the Monarch, the first woman to receive it, Cook simply remarks that “Sir Douglas Dawson, on the King’s behalf, brought the Order—then for the first time bestowed upon a woman—to South Street. Miss Nightingale understood that some kindness had been done to her, but hardly more. ‘Too kind, too kind.’ She said.” Strachey in his turn makes Nightingale much more alert—alert enough to assume an attitude—and he converts the whole episode into a minor dramatic scene, like this: The Order of Merit was brought to South Street and there was a little ceremony of presentation. Sir Douglas Dawson, after a short speech, stepped forward and handed the insignia of the Order to Miss Nightingale. Propped up by pillows she dimly recognized that some compliment was being paid to her. “Too kind, too kind”, she murmured; and she was not ironical.12

12  Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918), 202. Quoted in Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale Abridged and Revised by Rosalind Nash (London: Macmillan, 1925), 381.

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“And she was not ironical”, this carefully worded paragraph concludes, and Strachey promptly takes this as a cue to be so. Strachey’s triumphs were less ones of substance than of style and tone. He has in full measure what the laudatory biographers on whose spadework he largely relied characteristically lacked: he has rhythm, he has emphasis. The rhythm is contagious, and the emphasis placed so as to chime with the mind-set of readers sick of official pieties. Strachey, moreover, was well aware that the selection of style involved moral choices which he was not the first to make. As early as 1909, in a review of a book on Roman history, he had cited with approval one ancient historian’s prioritising of verbal elegance over a slavish fidelity to facts. Livy once admitted that he would have allowed Pompey to win the Battle of Pharsalia in 48 BC rather than Julius Caesar “if the turn of the sentence had required it”.13 This was justified in Strachey’s eyes since “the first duty of a great historian is to be an artist”. Three years later in his first published book, he reinforced these priorities in a chapter devoted to the French writer Voltaire. Landmarks in French Literature of 1912 contains a pithily admiring sketch of the sage of Ferney, and an appreciative discussion of the Dictionnaire Philosophique of 1762, the plan of which, Strachey says, “gave Voltaire complete freedom both in the choice of subjects and of their manipulation; as the spirit seized him he could fly out in a page of sarcasm or speculation or criticism or buffoonery, and such liberty was precisely to his taste”.14 It is the Dictionnaire that we read for example, of Augustus Caesar’s rumoured incest with his daughter. “Caligula”, Voltaire reports, “published aloud that his mother was born of the incest of Augustus with Julia. So says Suetonius in his life of Caligula.”15 Voltaire’s style, Strachey admiringly asserts, is that of a primo ballerino: “Voltaire’s sprightly periods remind one of a pirouette. But the pirouette is Voltaire’s—executed with all the grace, all the ease, all the latent strength of a consummate dancer.” Strachey was dancing still. His achievement, revolutionary in his time, was 13  Lytton Strachey, “A New History of Rome”, Review of Volume Five (The Republic of Augustus) of Gugliemo Ferrero’s The Greatness and Decline of Rome, trans. H. J. Chaytor (London: Heinemann 1907–1909), Spectator 102 (2 January 1909), 20–21. 14  Lytton Strachey, Landmarks in French Literature (London: Williams & Norgate, 1912), 158. 15  Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique (1762), ii, citing Suetonius, Gauis (Caligula) 23 where, however, Gaius’s opinion is written off as a sick fantasy.

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also a sort of revival of a neo-classical mode which itself had looked back to classicism. As Max Saunders perceptively remarks, “satire … is one of the modes in which modernism engages with the auto-/biographic”.16 Yet Modernism, it can be argued, represents not only a stage of creativity and iconoclastic forgetfulness but also one of anamnesis or recall. Regarded in this light, Strachey’s were after-lives, almost as much as they were lives.

Plutarch Lied The war had dealt a fearful blow to the cult of heroism, in France as well as in England. In the immediate post-war period, on both sides of the Channel, a literature of national and celebration had grown up, the verbal equivalent of those gaunt memorials in marble or stone that now adorned almost every city in Western Europe. A counter-literature of denigration was not slow to follow from men who had suffered the hostilities at first hand or who, like Russell and Strachey, had dissented from the side-lines. Examine, for instance, this intervention in an imaginary “Socratic” dialogue from a book published in Paris in 1922, four years after Strachey’s. The author is Jean de Pierrefeu, a professional journalist who had enlisted in 1914 and, after being invalided in the early months of the conflict, had spent the duration vetting official military communiques issuing from General Headquarters at Chantilly. His book’s pointed title was Plutarch a menti: Plutarch Lied: What remains now of the divine man whom a grateful France has placed among her guardian geniuses? You have tried to prove that his strategy was at fault, that he did not foresee events, and that his successes were due to a lucky conjunction of circumstances. A pretty task, indeed, and you may well be proud of it! As a result, it only remains for the French to build an altar to Chance: for your fine critical effort, whereby you wanted to show the triumph of reason, has ended in a denial that reason enters in any way into the actions of mankind.17

The speaker is Pierrefeu’s patriotic alter persona who is reprimanding him for doubts concerning the French High Command. Pierrefeu was 16  Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-Writing, & the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford University Press, 2010), 420. 17  Jean de Pierrefeu, Plutarch Lied, trans. Jeffrey E.  Jeffrey (London: Grant Richards, 1924), 114.

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personally well acquainted with the arts of propaganda, having peddled the official line himself. For this reason alone, he was abundantly qualified to contradict them. In his masterpiece of denigration, published four years after the armistice, he trawls through the events of the late conflict, inter-­ dispersing his account with dialogues with and against his loyal “Familiar Demon”. The subjects in dispute are, first, the conduct of the First Battle of the Marne directed by Field Marshall Foch. This was the so-called Battle of Miracles which in September 1914 had halted the German advance, saved Paris and bogged both armies down in futile, static conflict for the next four years. Next, the character and professionalism of Field Marshall Joffre, largely responsible for allied strategy at this point. For the ‘Patriotic Demon’, Joffre is a hero whose foresight delivered France from ruin. For Pierrefeu, he is a conventionally minded cipher cravenly obedient to prevailing logistic norms. Who is right? Pierrefeu dedicates his book to his fellow “Temporary Officers”, inspired as he says by “A Patriotic Fear for the Future”. His guiding theme is the salutary nature of criticism directed at misconceived gratitude and hero-worship. Joffre, for example, is far from a Great Man. Schooled in the official doctrines of the Ecole de Guerre, he follows to the letter of the so-called Plan 17, which laid it down that, in the event of confrontation with the Germans, the French must seize the initiative by attacking to the Northeast, and not stop until they have pressed home their advantage. In the event the assault was repulsed, largely because the Commander-in-Chief had mistaken the likely direction of the German advance. Forced back, he was obliged to sacrifice three legions to the defence of Paris. Luckily for Joffre, at this point, his enemy made a mistake. Exercising a wheeling movement, they exposed their left wing to allied fire and, taken by surprise, were repulsed and driven back to the north. Joffre, Pierrefeu argues, could not possibly have foreseen this course of events. The most that could be said for him is that, in the face of the enemy’s blunder, he was encouraged by others to respond. There was nothing in his decision-making that conformed either to his own declared principles or to the protocol of Plan 17. Joffre had been a beneficiary of luck, not of skill. A subordinate theme throughout the book is the responsibility of leadership at moments of public crisis. Pierrefeu is classically educated, and he peppers his account with references to Xenophon, Plato and Plutarch to express his sense of the inappropriateness of these points of reference to this utterly unprecedented kind of total war. “To Plutarchise” is a verb he

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coins, meaning to justify human folly. Caesar and Napoleon (two constant sources of comparison) left their stamp on events: Joffre and later Foche were at their mercy. A few years later there was to be an official rejoinder to discredit Pierrefeu’s jeremaiad; it was called Plutarch n’a pas menti: Plutarch did not lie. In both cases the second-century biographer, moralist and priest is less in question than a version of his world view tailored to later events: Amyot’s exemplary reading of the Greek original as channelled through the republican vision of the Girondins, the Jacobins, and the ensuing French neo-classical tradition.18 Within a year the book was translated into English with a Preface by Pierrefeu arguing that his disaffection was something that could be shared by both allies. A couple of years later, it enjoyed a sequel entitled L’AntiPlutarch. Both books caught the prevailing mood, and soon they set a trend, not only for reminiscence and biography but for conversation in the soigné cafes of the Left Bank. In 1923 Ford Madox Ford, novelist and soon-to-be editor of The Transatlantic Review, was lolling on the terrace of la Cloiserie des Lilas on the Boulevard Montparnasse, where: Some novelist or other was descanting on the disappearance of the Great Figure from the Earth. He was a violent anti-Plutarchian and declared that the war just ended had made all the leaders of men appear such feckless fools that never again would Society consent to be led by Great Men.19

T.E. Lawrence, Hero and Anti-hero It was not merely in France that events on the Western Front gave rise to retrospective misgiving. In England too, speculation was rife as to what had gone wrong, and classical parallels featured largely in the discussion. Biographically much of this debate centred around the enigmatic personality of T.E.  Lawrence, who in 1917–1918 had led a revolt against the Turks by the Arabs of the desert, and in consequence rapidly became the object of veneration and denigration in equal measure. In the inter-war period and well beyond, Lawrence was to become a biographical subject over whom the competing claims of idealisation and denigration were fought long and bitterly. To some extent he was to serve for twentieth-­ century biography, as Napoleon had served for the nineteenth, as a  See Chap. 1.  Ford Maddox Ford, Portraits from Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), 120.

18 19

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weather-vane blown hither and thither as much in response to biographical fashion as to his own inherent worth. To some he was a buccaneer and a hero; for others, a charlatan with no right to their respect. Like Napoleon too he came to be viewed through a series of classical or neo-classical lenses: some clear, some smoky, none altogether precise. Over a forty-year period Lawrence was biographised by the military theorist Basil Liddell Hart (1895–1970), the American journalist Lowell Jackson Thomas (1892–1981), the poet, historical novelist and mythographer Robert Graves (1895–1985) and the waspishly disillusioned jack of all literary trades Richard Aldington (1892–1962). The disparity between these rival biographers serves as a snapshot of the development of twentieth-century biography. Interestingly each of them invoked ancient biography in support of their case. But then, so did Lawrence the memoirist. In 1929, Lawrence, already known to the public as “Lawrence of Arabia”, was in correspondence with Liddell Hart, whose biography of him, already in preparation, would appear five years later as T.E. Lawrence in Arabia and After.20 Hart, who regarded Lawrence above all as a supreme strategist in an almost classical tradition (he had already written books on Scipio Africanus and Napoleon), was an ex-military man who had devoted himself since the war to dissecting the failure of the allied advance between 1914 and 1917. In his mind, this failure had been the result of what he called “the direct approach”, confronting the enemy straight on. Instead, the allies should have steered round them, cultivated what he called the “indirect approach”, the variety of guerrilla tactics that, he believed, Lawrence had so impressively put into effect in the Near East. In 1929, Liddell Hart was about to publish a book called The Decisive Wars of History which compared the logistic approach of various generals ancient and modern.21 He sent the proofs to Lawrence for comment. Liddell Hart’s own favourite commander, he told him, was Epaminondas, the Theban general who, a century prior to Alexander, had resisted domination of his city by the Spartans by treating them to a cat-and-mouse game. “The most original genius in military history” is what Hart called him. At the “decisive” battle of Leutra in 371 BC, Epanimondas with his 6000 troops had defeated a Spartan host of 10,000 by instructing his right wing to appear to retreat, luring the superior numbers of the enemy on,  Basil Liddell Hart, T.E. Lawrence in Arabia and After (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934).  Basil Liddell Hart, The Decisive Wars of History: a study of strategy (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1929). 20 21

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and then pouncing. Plutarch once wrote a Life of Epanimondas, comparing him to Roman general Scipio Africanus. It has not survived, but the circumstances of the Battle of Leutra can be reconstructed partly from Plutarch’s “Life of Pelopidas” and party from other works by Xenophon and Cornelius Nepos. The victory, in Liddell Hart’s opinion, had been won by a trick worthy of Lawrence himself. Lawrence’s response to this assessment was characteristically emphatic. Since Plutarch’s life of Epanimondas is lost, he remarked, we know too little about him to reach a reasonable assessment. Do not speak to me of this man. Speak, says Lawrence, of Alexander, who was “part knight-errant, and part-­ experimenter with life. He is so above the rules that ordinary people dare not follow him.”22 With one half of his mind, Lawrence regarded his own early exploits in a heroic and classical light. His book Seven Pillars of Wisdom, written and copiously re-written between 1919 and 1927, contains an artistically embellished account of the rising that he claimed largely to have led. In Lawrence’s own eyes, the work was to be a variety of epic, written up with an eye to certain Greek archetypes. Well before the desert campaign, Lawrence had mulled over the life and work of Charles Doughty, the late Victorian adventurer, topographer and poet who from 1876–1878 had undertaken a perilous trek from Egypt to Jedda, dressing and speaking as an Arab and calling himself Khalil. Doughty’s elaborate, and sometimes deliberately archaic account, of his journey was contained in his two-­ volume Travels in Arabia deserta (1888), an introduction to which Lawrence supplied when he persuaded the Medici Society to re-issue the work in 1921, the year prior to Seven Pillars. His description of Doughty is one that might well be applied to himself: He says that he was never oriental, though the sun made him an Arab, and much of his value lies in that distinction. His seeing is altogether English: yet at the same time his externals, his manners, his speech and his dress were Arab, and nomad Arab of the desert.23 22  T.  E. Lawrence to His Biographers Robert Graves and Liddell Hart (London: Cassell, 1963), II, 8. 23  Charles M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia deserta with an introduction by T.E. Lawrence of All Souls’ College, Oxford (London: The Medici Society and Jonathan Cape, 1921), xxviii. As for the Arabs themselves, whom both Doughty and Lawrence treat as a branch of the Semitic stock, Lawrence’s attitude towards them steers so close to Doughty’s that his description of them in his Introduction to Arabia deserta was incorporated lock, stock and

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In certain respects, Arabia deserta served as a template for Seven Pillars. Doughty had possessed his own templates, some of which were Biblical and medieval, but several of which were ancient Greek. Here he is in the climactic closing paragraphs of Arabia deserta describing his first glimpse of Jedda: When the sun was going down from the mid-afternoon height, we set forward: a merry townsman of Mecca without any fanaticism, and his son, came riding along with us from the station. “Rejoice, Khalil”, quoth my rafiks, “for from the next brow we will show you Jidda”. I beheld the white sea gleaming under the sun, and tall ships riding, and minarets of the town!24

And here is Lawrence, at the climax of the first part of Seven Pillars, evoking the capture from the Turks of Akaba by his Arabian comrades, after which he and his friends raced ahead towards the billows of the Red Sea and wallowed triumphantly in the waves: “Then we raced through the driving sandstorm down to Akaba, four miles further, and splashed into the sea on July the sixth, just two months after our setting out from Wejh”.25 If these passages remind us of one another, it is because both of them hark back to an equivalent moment of arrival and relief towards the close of Xenophon’s Anabasis when, after the defeat and death of Cyrus, whom the Greeks have been assisting in his claim to the throne of Persia, Xenophon leads his disconsolate troops towards the coast. As they reach the summit of Mount Theches, they catch sight of the Black Sea whereupon, embracing one another, they burst out in Attic Greek “Thálatta! Thálatta!”26 Lawrence had stressed his debt to Xenophon when corresponding with his first biographer, the American publicist and film-maker Jackson Thomas. Entrusted by Woodrow Wilson with the task of glamourising the war to inspire the support of the American electorate, Thomas had sought out Lawrence in Cairo in 1918. In 1924, two years after the publication of Seven Pillars, he published With Lawrence in Arabia, based principally on their conversations. In a letter to him, Lawrence had been very clear, barrel into Seven Pillars the following year. Compare Doughty (1921), 1, xxix–xxxi with Seven Pillars, chapter 3. 24  Doughty (1921), ii, 538–539. 25  T.E.  Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph [1922] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), 312. 26  Xenophon, Anabasis, 4.7, xxiv.

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both about the sources of his military tactics and about his literary crushes.27 Julius Caesar’s Commentaries were “one of the most impressive things in print”. Caesar, he claimed, had really pulled off “the impersonal thing” and yet the resulting work was “palpitant with excitement”. For all that, “My Seven Pillars is nearer Xenophon, a much more ambitious ancient”.28 Perhaps conscious of this epic strain, in 1924 Thomas produced an account of their relationship in his published account of their relationship that was part greatness-worship, part spectacle.29 In these respects, it was the literary equivalent of the West End shows he directed at the Covent Garden in the early 20s: complete with newsreel shots, faux exotic music and dancing girls. These were a cause of some personal embarrassment to their subject, even if the cult of celebrity that they encouraged was something he felt he could use to political effect to advance the cause of Arab nationalism: Lawrence, remarked Lowell-Smith, possessed a remarkable talent for “backing into the limelight”. Three years later there appeared the first Lawrence biography of proper Plutarchian amplitude, by his friend and fellow writer, Robert Graves. Graves and Lawrence had met in Oxford shortly after the Armistice. Both were de-mobbed officers, fascinated with military discipline while recoiling from some of its effects. Graves for once shared the disaffection war evident in his friends Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Own. Lawrence, meanwhile, was disgusted with the political machinations he had observed at the Treaty Conference in Versailles which had robbed his Arab fellow warriors of their objective of national independence. He told Graves that of all classical people he felt most akin to Hippoclides, whose courtship rituals, as described by Herodotus, are unique in ancient literature. Invited to a feast to catch the eye of a young woman he was determined to marry, Hippoclides stood on his head on a table top and wagged his legs in time with the band. When told that this behaviour was unlikely to impress the young girl, he replied ou frontis Hippoclide or “Hippoclides does not care”. Upon which, Plutarch, who hated Herodotus, accused the Father of History in his diatribe Contra Herodotum of “dancing away the truth”. 27  Lowell Jackson Thomas, With Lawrence in Arabia [1924] (New York, 1952), 16. See also Jeffrey Myers, “Xenophon and The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”, The Classical Journal, Vol. 72. No. 2 (Dec. 1976–Jan. 1977), 141–143. 28  Quoted in Myers, 141. 29  Thomas, With Lawrence in Arabia [1924].

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But Lawrence was much taken with Hippoclides’s remark. In the following decade, when he entered the ranks of the Airforce as Aircraftsman Shaw, he caused it to be inscribed above the lintel of a small cottage he purchased in Dorset at Cloud’s Hill. In 1932 he told the story of the ill-­ fated Greek suitor to his correspondent Celandine Kennington, for whose sake he translated ou frontis in the single neologism “whyworry”.30 It could have been the motto of that particular post-war generation, the generation if you like of British anti-Plutarchians. In Graves’s Lawrence and the Arabs published in 1927 Lawrence is portrayed as a complicated, ironic but essentially amiable man caught, like Graves himself, between romanticism and anti-romanticism. Graves indeed believed that Lawrence had come to detest hero-worship, even if as a young man he had once sought it out. In the biography Graves endorses this reluctance, saying of his friend that “Hero-worship seems not only to annoy Lawrence, but to make him physically ill”.31 When he sent the draft of this sentence to Lawrence himself, “ill” got corrected to “unclean”, a word Lawrence often used when expressing his personal distaste from physical contact, including sex.32 One clue to Lawrence’s personality, Graves believed, lay in his literary tastes. On the romantic side was his fondness for chivalric literature, especially Mallory’s Morte D’Arthur. His deflationary and iconoclastic side explained his partiality for Aristophanes, one classical author whom Arnold of Rugby refused to teach (another, unsurprisingly, was Petronius). Whilst in the desert, Lawrence kept under his pillow a copy of Aristophanes “whose laughing skepticism, especially in his anti-militaristic Lysistrata provides a laughing antidote to false romanticism”. Alongside it he kept Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse, a recently published, somewhat saccharine, anthology about which Graves lets rip. The anthology, he firmly states, gives the poetry it contains “too strong an atmosphere of literary artistry”: Perhaps I should have added to my portrait of Lawrence that his blind desire to be a literary artist is the more to be wondered at because he might well  T. E. Lawrence to His Biographers, 1, 81.  Lawrence seems to have discerned an equivalent attitude in Doughty, of whom he says in his Introduction to Arabia Deserta: “He refused to be the hero of his story. Yet he was to become its victim and, while part of him saw its usefulness, a deeper part of him shrank.” Doughty (1921), xxvii. 32  T. E. Lawrence to His Biographers, 1, 74. 30 31

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be something better than a mere artist. Artistic writing comes from a competitive literary atmosphere and the last thing on earth that Lawrence should aim at; the pursuit of “style” is a social practice of the vulgarest sort. … The justification of the literary epic that came out of this adventure, his Seven Pillars, is that where the pursuit of style is forgotten in the excitement of story-telling, there is clean and beautiful writing...33

Accordingly, in the pursuit of an anti-stylistic style, Graves relates Lawrence’s story in a lean and matter-of-fact manner quite devoid of colour or frills. It is manner that derives from classical biography, especially from Plutarch’s separated sections on appearance and temperament. Graves devotes a balanced section to each, then tells his tale as plainly as he can. Sooner or later, post-Great War disillusionment was bound to catch up with Lawrence. In his case, the effect was delayed until after the war that followed it. In 1955, twenty years after Lawrence’s death, Richard Aldington published a lengthy biography that drew on several of the above sources and gave them a bitter twist. Aldington had had a bad war: commissioned into the Royal Sussex Regiment in November 1917 he was wounded on the Western Front and ever afterwards bore a grudge against the allied leaders, and the cult of heroism which they had fostered to maintain recruitment. His bitterest attacks occurred obliquely in fiction, specifically in his accomplished novel of 1929, Death of A Hero which culminates in the self-immolation, a sort of quasi-suicide, of a poet of the Georgian generation hollowed out by the attrition of the trenches, and despair at the cynical behaviour of his wife and mistress back in England.34 For Max Saunders, who has written sensitively about the impact of the war on a number of the modernists, this novel marks a watershed in the autobiographical fiction of the time, and he connects it with the almost simultaneous emergence of what Virginia Woolf called “The New Biography”, with its candour and fearless encounter with the truth.35  Robert Graves, Lawrence and the Arabs (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927), 210.  Richard Aldington, Death of A Hero (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929). The novel ends with an anti-heroic gesture: a poem in which a veteran of the Trojan campaign muses over “the long agony, and how useless it was./And the talk still clashed about me/Like the meeting of blade on blade.” Meanwhile a young lover beseeches his mistress, “Haven’t you heard enough of Troy and Achilles?” (439–440). 35  Saunders, 427–439. See also Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography” (1927) in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4, Ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press, 1994), 473–480. 33 34

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Aldington’s biography of Lawrence, which he entitled Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry, is a late product of this mood. Impartiality and even-handedness are implied in the wording of its title, but the result is a forensic, Suetonian inquest into Lawrence’s reputation, his cult and his legend, especially insofar as the subject himself had encouraged it. Aldington questions Lawrence’s role in the Arab revolt, his stories about the sabotage of the Turkish railway, even his account of how he lost the manuscript of the first draft of Seven Pillars at Reading railway station, pointing to several discrepancies in Lawrence’s own account of the last episode.36 He even goes so far as to suggest that Lawrence actively collaborated with Lowell Thomas in the commercial exploitation of his adventures, a development he later pretended to regret. The Lawrence that emerges is a monster of egotism and false modesty, a boastful self-­advertiser who, not altogether paradoxically, wishes to retain the air of one shrinking from public view. The book threw a gauntlet in the path of Lawrence’s idolaters and admirers. In the west it took several decades for his reputation to recover as further documentation from the National Archives came to light, a process culminating in Jeremy Wilson’s compendious “official biography” of 1989.37 In the Arab world, where the political repercussions of the repression by the Treaty of Versailles of the legitimate aims of the rising of 1917 were most keenly felt, Aldington’s iconoclasm proved more lasting. In November 1955, in the wake of the appearance of Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry, the Jordanian historian Suleiman Musa reviewed the book in the magazine Al Adab under the judicious headline “Lawrence on Balance”. Five years later, he expanded his estimate in the book T. E. Lawrence: An Arab View, stressing the autonomy and self-reliance of the local troops whom, according to more flattering accounts, he had supposedly led.38 In the west, this corrective fell on deaf ears. David Lean’s film of 1962 converted Lawrence into a tall, blond (if fetchingly self-­doubting) Tarzan on a camel, leaning cinematically into sand and storm. And so it continues: Michael Korda’s doorstep biography of 2010 is entitled Hero.39 All the same, in the official museum in Damascus devoted to the rising, Lawrence is not mentioned once.  Richard Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry (London: Collins, 1955), 313–316. 37  Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia: The Official Biography of T.E. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1989). 38  Suleiman Mousa, T. E Lawrence: An Arab View, trans. Albert Butras (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). 39  Michael Korda, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (New York: Harper, 2010). The title echoes Korda’s earlier Ike: An American Hero (2008). 36

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Graves Refreshes the Ancients On few writers of the generation did the Great War leave a more permanent and fruitful mark than Graves, who served with the Royal Welch Fusiliers for the duration, apart from a period in 1916 when he was briefly invalided out and made the acquaintance of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Sassoon and Owen soon turned against the war in a spirit of vocal protest, and their revulsion occasionally took the form of writing back to ancient, inherited texts. Owen, for example ironically cites an ode by Horace in his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori”,40 and in “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young” he recasts the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac so that Abraham refuses the offer of a kid as a substitute for the sacrifice of his only boy. Instead, “The old man would not so, but slew his son/And half the seed of Europe, one by one”.41 In Graves, however, this habit of mind is far more persistent and systematic. In book after book, bio-fiction after bio-fiction, he reassesses ancient texts, recasting them in the likeness of his own dissent. In every case this involved him in a re-assessment of ancient biographies. These were, in order, Procopius, the Christian gospels and, pre-eminently and most dramatically, Suetonius. The result of this textual interchange was a novelistic variant on biography as persuasion, though the message is Procopian and censorious: there is something rotten in the state of Europe. In a television interview screened in 1969, Graves was asked to identify the scorned “that” in the title of his memoir Goodbye To All That, written in 1933 immediately prior to his departure from Britain for Mallorca, where he was to spend much of the rest of his life. Was it the war, with which most of its later chapters are concerned? Yes, he said, it was the war, but it was also the collapse of his first marriage, it was ribbon development in the countryside, it was a whole range of superannuated characteristic of class-bound inter-war England. Graves’s title in that book reminds one of nothing so much as the motto ou frontis culled by his friend Lawrence from his reading of Herodotus, and placed above the entrance to his house at Cloud’s Hill, Dorset: “whyworry?”, or “what the Hell!”—a shrug in  The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen ed. C. Day Lewis (London: Chatto and Windus, 1963), 55–56. The reference is to Horace, Odes III.2, ll. 13–16: “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori:/mors et fugacem persequitur virum,/nec parcit imbellis iuventae/poplitibus timidove tergo”. 41  Owen ed. Day Lewis (1963), 42. Drawing on Genesis, chapter twenty-two. 40

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the face of authority that Lawrence had expressed in his deliberate decision to reduce himself to the ranks, and Graves by his decision to “clear out of England”.42 Ever after the war Graves had remained fascinated by military tactics, ancient and modern, while continuing to distrust hierarchy in all its forms. In the 1930s, when his fellow Lawrence biographer Liddell Hart was revising The Decisive Wars of History, Lawrence had persuaded him to include an extra chapter on the Byzantine general Belisarius, for whose exploits in Syria, Africa and Italy our best—in effect our only—authority is Procopius.43 In Book Two of his work De Bellis, Procopius had praised Belisarius and his imperial master. Later, when disillusioned, he had turned round and lacerated both men in his scurrilous Anekdota or Secret History. Hart’s revised book appeared in 1941, six years after Lawrence’s death, under the title The Strategy of the Indirect Approach; the following year it was re-issued as The Way To Win Wars. It drew exclusively on De Bellis to illustrate what it calls Belisarius’s “consistent use of the tactical offensive, his series of conquests by abstention from attack”.44 But in 1938, encouraged by Lawrence’s enthusiasm for the subject, Graves wrote a novel about Belisarius, drawing on Byzantine sources—supremely on Procopius—and giving them an anti-militaristic twist. For several periods Procopius had accompanied the general on his campaigns: for Belisarius’s strategies of warfare, and for his personal restraint and nobility of mind, Graves therefore relied on De Bellis. For the political atmosphere, and the inner machinations of the Byzantine court, he drew on the same author’s Secret History—to devastating effect. Graves’s Justinian is a caricature of cowardly self-regard, religious hypocrisy and culpable ingratitude towards his talented general whom he constantly humiliates and insults, goaded to these enormities by jealousy of his subject’s virtue and military prowess. Graves even goes as far as to feature an apocryphal legend, attributable to the fanciful seventeenth-century Romance of Belisarius, to the effect that, in a fit of envious rage, the Emperor finally stripped this exemplary soldier of his rank and possessions, and then caused him to be blinded and left to beg in the streets. The  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q45-AE5ZK1k.  T. E. Lawrence to His Biographers, II, 9. 44  Liddell Hart’s prime examples are the Battles of Dara (530  AD) and Callinicum (531  AD), both described by Procopius in De bello Persico Book One, and subsequently evoked by Graves. 42 43

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Empress Theodora fares little better. Adulterous and controlling, she interferes in policy to an egregious extent and shifts sides when it suits her, though Graves baulks at some of Procopius’s more lurid allegations as to her promiscuity and sexual self-display. Count Belisarius is thus a book about the conduct and the morality of war. Belisarius is presented as a Christian soldier who relishes tactical cunning but detests and avoids unnecessary violence. When first confronted by an invasion by the Persian army, he refuses to offer battle, but instead orders his troops to conduct them peacefully home, until, bored by this restraint, they insist on confronting the enemy. Against his better judgement Belisarius agrees and is defeated. When accused by Justinian of this action amongst other unreasonable charges, he refrains from fighting back, and is led to his punishment like a lamb to the slaughter. Graves relates all of this through the voice of a eunuch in the employ of Belisarius’s wife puzzled, as so many of Graves’s readers have been, by Belisarius’s curiously self-denying discipline. This was the fruit of his faith, but, the eunuch asks us in the text’s closing paragraphs, would not it have been better for him to have adopted a pagan attitude with its humanistic insistence that virtue should be rewarded, enemies resisted?45 During the Second World War, Graves was briefly in Devonian exile from his home in Mallorca. In the contest against Hitler, as in the Great War, the ethics of Christian self-sacrifice were constantly invoked by the military authorities. Graves’s subversive response was to confront the canonical Christian gospels, in effect by re-writing them. In preparation for this task, he embarked on an extensive course of ancient reading in and around the New Testament: the Acts of the Apostles; the second-century Greek Gospel of the Egyptians (a dialogue between Christ and his disciple Salome advocating celibacy), the Proto-evangelium (otherwise known and the Gospel of the Infancy or The Gospel of James the Less). The most thought-­ provoking text was the Descent of Mary, a fragmentary work known only from the writings of Epiphanius of Salamis which describes a temple vision  One possible reading of the novel is as a radically anti-Christian text, as in its parody of the dispute between the Blue and Green factions in the Hippodrome over the precise nature of the Trinity. The episode is very reminiscent of the Augustan satire in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) when depicting the dispute between the Big-Endians and LittleEndians in Lilliput over how to crack an egg: appropriately so, since Graves at this point is echoing the account of these Byzantine rivalries by Swift’s fellow neo-classical satirist, Edward Gibbon. 45

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attributable to Zachariah, father of John the Baptist, of a man in the form of an ass: in Graves’s blasphemous version the donkey represents the Deity Himself. The result in 1947 was King Jesus, a pseudo-biographical work of speculative fiction and in effect an alternative gospel. Graves channels his understanding of events through Agabus of Decapolitan, son of a Syrian father and a Samaritan mother writing—we are to suppose—in the reign of that persecutor of the Christians, the Emperor Diocletian. Agabus has little time for the four canonical gospels or for the projected common source known to Biblical scholars as “Quelle”.46 Agabus calls it The Acts and the Sayings of Jesus which was, he claims: originally written in Aramaic but circulated in Greek translation among the Gentile Churches. … Several versions of it exist. The editing is often ignorant, sometimes disingenuous and occasionally fraudulent, yet it is a handbook that serves conveniently both to attract converts and to disarm the suspicions of those civil authorities for whom Christian is simply another name for Jew. Being no more than a skeleton of the full story of Jesus, it is supplemented by a secret oral tradition communicated stage by stage to initiates as they are judged worthy of initiation.47

Instead, Agabus peddles an account of Christ’s life which in Graves’s time was greeted with a howl of derision by the religious press. According to this version of events, the nativity story recounted in the gospels of Matthew and Luke is a cover-up. Mary, known as Miriam, is of the royal line of David. As Simon the High Priest (synonymous here with Simeon in the Temple) instructs Herod Antipas—Herod the Great’s ambitious son—at the outset, the kingly title is “carried through the female, not the male, line”. At the beginning of the story Joseph is betrothed to, but not initially married to, Mary. Her secret husband is none other than Antipas himself, the real father of Jesus, who, via this linking of the male and female regal lines, is therefore the authentic King of Israel. There is no need for a sacred Incarnation. Jehovah is a fraud whom Herod the Great is keen to identify with the Egyptian God Seth. Jesus himself is conscious of his royal descent, but less interested in earthly  For which, see Chap. 5.  Robert Graves, King Jesus (London: Cassell, 1946), 238.

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power than in a spiritual vocation consistent with the later teaching of the Gnostics. He is devoted to celibacy and suspicious of women, especially of Mary Magdalene, here called Mary of the Hairdressers, armed with the seductive allure of the Great Goddess Astarte. Judas is a publicly spirited patriot who delivers Jesus to the Roman powers on the understanding that they—in the person of Pontius Pilate—will welcome him as a vehicle for re-uniting Herod the Great’s realm under the suzerainty of Caesar. But the plot fails owing to the indifference of Jesus, this celestially minded intellectual. The potential monarch is crucified agonizingly for all to see. Remarkably, there is a resurrection. Thus, in this and other books written immediately before, during and following the Second World War, Graves perfected a style of writing that might be called “heterodox biography” combining the licence of historical fiction with obsessive, though eccentrically driven, research. Much of it stemmed from a radical re-reading of the early biographical accounts of his chosen subjects in the light of his own feminist and pacifist preoccupations, combined with a radical scepticism regarding their traditional interpretations. Ultimately Graves’s rejection of conventional forms of deference found voice in his work The White Goddess (1948), with its espousal of the theory of matriliny (and by extension matriarchy) as the original human norm, and in The Greek Myths, in which all mythology was reconstructed in the light of this view. In the latter work, Graves spared no effort to debunk heroes. Of the elevation of Herakles to Godhead, we are told, “deification of a hero in a society which formerly only worshipped the goddess implies that the king has defied immemorial custom and refused to die for her sake”.48 Graves’s translation of Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars, published in 1957, proved to be among the most influential classical translations of the twentieth century. Long before its appearance, however, Suetonius had left an indelible mark on his work. His historic novels I Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1934) are imaginative re-workings of the life and career of the most derided of the Caesars, reproducing the essential facts of Claudius’s existence as Suetonius relays them, but re-orientating their mood by converting Claudius himself into the principal narrator. The camera turns round; the buffoon becomes the judge.

48  Robert Graves, The Greek Myths [1948, rev. 1955] (London: The Folio Society, 1996), ii, 471.

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In Claudius the God, the focus shifts for a while to Claudius’s loyal friend Herod Agrippa, which gives Graves an opportunity to air some pet theories about Hebrew history and to re-jig some well-known biblical texts. The parable of the Good Samaritan from the Gospel According to Luke Chapter Ten is re-told from the standpoint of a Samaritan: Herod’s gloomy but “gold-hearted” comrade, the charioteer Silas, with whom he later falls out.49 The story is much the same, but the slant is different: namely that the Jews (in the person of the Pharisee and the Levite who abandon the victim by the wayside) are so encumbered by ritualism that for them the avoidance of pollution take precedence over charity. Silas tells the tale so as to counteract the anti-Samaritan prejudices of Herod’s wife Cypros. Doubtless also, in the context of 1934, to interrogate lurking prejudices, including residual antisemitism, among Graves’s readers. The two novels cover the period between the last years of Augustus’s reign and Claudius’s old age. Claudius’s death is then relayed via the accounts in Suetonius (as translated by Philemon Holland in 1606), Tacitus Book XII and Dion Cassius Book LXI, followed by a Menippean satire, attributed by Graves to Seneca though possibly by Petronius, debunking his deification. The impression created by the succession of emperors—Augustus worldly and shrewd, Tiberius canny and debased, Claudius reclusive but wiser than he seems, Caligula spoilt and demagogic—derives substantially from Suetonius’s Lives. Graves’s Livia—second wife to Augustus, and dominating mother to the cringing Tiberius—is in effect Suetonius’s Livia. She rules the empire through her mastery of Augustus, who is besotted despite himself, and converts her son Tiberius— who she is determined should accede to the imperial throne—into a resentful, slobbering wreck. Claudius she regards with open contempt, in line with Suetonius’s observation that “she never failed to treat him with the deepest scorn and seldom addressed him personally”,50 and disparaging letters about Claudius’s conduct between Livia and Augustus quoted by Suetonius, which Graves also quotes. In one of those letters Augustus asks “The question is whether he has— shall I say?—full command of his senses”.51 To this question the novel returns a resolute yes, with the proviso that Graves’s Claudius is clever in 49  Robert Graves, Claudius the God and his wife Messalina: the troublesome reign of Tiberius Claudius, Emperor of the Romans (born BC10, died AD 54) described by himself, also his murder at the hands of the notorious Agrippina (mother of the Emperor Nero) and his subsequent deification as described by others (London: Arthur Baker, 1934), 32–33. 50  Suetonius, “Claudius Divus”, 3. Graves translation. 51  Suetonius, “Claudius Divus”, 4. Graves translation.

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hiding and adept at using his supposed idiocy as a mask. As a result, Suetonius’s careful balance sheet of strength and weakness, virtue against vice, becomes instead a layering of disguises. Suetonius’s Claudius is both a capable imaginative administrator and a wimp. Graves draws on this stereotype whilst internalising it. He supplements this account by recourse to the comprehensive and pithy summary of Claudius’s character and regime in Arnaldo Momigliano’s biography, translated into English in 1936, which Graves read the following year. But he also adds a world-weariness and cynicism which are the product of his own profound disillusionment with post-war Western Europe. In the words of Graves’s biographer Martin Seymour-Smith, the result is a “caricature of the goddawful”.52 His subject is Rome, yes, but it is also the modern world—and Stanley Baldwin’s Britain—as he viewed them from a distance. The general diffusion of all of this was dramatically abetted in Britain in 1976, when both novels were given televisual treatment on the newly launched BBC2. The series was distributed across America and other parts of the world, spreading as it went an attractively decadent impression of the lives of the earliest Caesars as “a web of power, corruption and lies”. The tone was set by the opening credits against whiplash music and a sequence featuring a viper slithering across a mosaic floor. The role of Claudius was allocated to a much made-up Derek Jacobi, who developed for the cameras a nerdish stammer and twitch that were to become a permanent aspect of his repertoire. Augustus was given to Brian Blessed, stocky but gullible, Tiberius to George Baker, who turned limp helplessness into a fine art. John Hurt was a slimily camp Caligula. The limelight shone firmly on Sian Phillips as Livia, archly splendid and cinematically contemptuous. Phillips had set out with the intention of portraying a complex and tormented woman, only to be instructed by the director Herbert Wise that this did not work, and that she should go all out for filme noire. In Jack Pulman’s script she became a poisoner extraordinary, the true power behind the imperial succession. The impression given was of a pornographically lubricious household rife with intrigue, cruelty and lust. In the process, the foundation and the decline of the Empire came to seem simultaneous. Some endorsement for this view was supplied by a misremembering of Gibbon, whose monumental account of the great decline begins two centuries later, with the first of the Antonines. 52  Martin Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves, His Life and Work (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 231.

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Sex and salaciousness sell. Thirteen years later Bob Guccione and Penthouse films issued Caligula, “a film that tells the truth as no film ever dared”, in which one half of the Suetonian formula was exaggerated out of all recognition, and Rome became one sado-masochistic brothel. John Guilgud walked off the set. The impact on the popular imagination was only slightly offset in 2014 by the classicist Mary Beard’s television essay on Caligula’s reign, retaining the authentic Suetonian proportion and assessment.

Postmodern Suetonius: Holroyd & Co. Successive recountings of the life of T.E. Lawrence serve as a paradigm of biography in the twentieth century. Just as there had been both a heroic and an anti-heroic Lawrence, so there flourished before and after the Second World War heroic and anti-heroic schools of biography. The most distinguished practitioner of the former was Lawrence’s friend and colleague, Winston Churchill. Winston’s biography of his late seventeenth-­ century ancestor John Churchill, Queen Anne’s most successful general and First Duke of Marlborough, was a self-consciously Plutarchian exercise. Its purpose was to rebuild Marlborough’s renown, since both in his own time and since he had been extensively disparaged, and to build in his honour a literary equivalent of the Column of Victory that rises on a lip of land to the north of Blenheim Palace, Winston’s childhood home, topped with Roman Eagles and a lead statue of the First Duke in the guise of Julius Caesar. To endow him too with a sort of quasi-Plutarchian gravitas, since, as Winston grandiloquently states, “Successive generations have not ceased to name him with Hannibal and with Caesar”.53 In his highly personal accounts both of the first and of the Second World War, Churchill strove to secure his own position in history by placing himself stage-centre, as Xenophon had done in Anabasis and Caesar in his Gallic Wars. It was left to Churchill’s own biographers—Martin Gilbert (1991) and Roy Jenkins (2001)—to stand back and, where appropriate, to point out his flaws. In the meantime, there had been a watershed in the fortunes of British biography. In the 1960s something akin to a Suetonian attitude—jaundiced, curious and wryly percipient—entered the mainstream of English letters. Michael Holroyd cut his biographical teeth on 53  Winston S.  Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times [1933] (London: Harrap, 1947), i. 15.

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the waspish litterateur Hugh Kingsmill (1889–1949), biographer of Dr Johnson and Frank Harris, often taken to be an imitator of Strachey’s. In 1967 Holroyd published the first volume of a Strachey biography, in 1968 the second. The book ruffled several feathers amongst Strachey’s surviving acquaintance and caused alarm and jubilation through its exploration of its subject’s timidly blatant homosexuality. It passed through a process of mild censorship, since Strachey’s psychologist James had insisted on agreeing to the formulation of each and every sentence. Looking back in 1994, Holroyd connected the revolution in taste it helped instigate with the liberal reforms initiated in the same decade by Jenkins—biographer and Home Secretary—in the wake of the Wolfenden Report on human sexuality. “Discretion”, Strachey had opined, “is not the better part of biography”. Thenceforth, much late twentieth-century biography appeared to pertain to an Age of Indiscretion. The more indiscreet, it sometimes seemed, the better. One of the results of this change was a re-reading of the history of the biographical form according to which Strachey came to seem the great originator of elegant truth and of frankness. Viewed in the context of the twentieth century alone, this stance appeared unprecedented, yet few classicists could have been unaware of a candour and decadence among the ancients far more extreme—or far more honestly searing—than anything Strachey or Holroyd could offer. Strachey for one, as we have already seen, had been well aware of such classical antecedents. Seen in long shot, the writing revolutions associated with Strachey and Holroyd were phases of a much longer tradition, sometimes conscious and sometimes not. There had even been a sort of backwards recession: Holroyd had imitated Kingsmill who had imitated Strachey. Strachey had imitated Voltaire, who in his turn had imitated Suetonius, Juvenal and other ancient purveyors of candour. As there had been a procession in writerly influence, so there had been a procession in reading. Macaulay once blamed Plutarch for the excesses of the French Revolution. The Cambridge literary academic F.R. Leavis told his students in the 1950s that, as a result of his malign influence on John Maynard Keynes, Strachey had been responsible for the outbreak of the Second World War.54 Late twentieth-century biography was diverse both in tone and in theme. Towards the end of the century the art form seemed to split between Plutarchian and Suetonian poles. Coincidental with, though  Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), xxxiii-xxxiv.

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strangely symptomatic of, this fissure was the fact that there existed in England at time two biographers, both named Richard Homes. The first (1946–2011) was a military historian—celebratory biographer of Sir John French (1981), Wellington (2002), Marlborough (2008) and of course Churchill (2005)—the second (1945–) the literary critic and appreciative biographer of the Romantic-period poets Shelley (1974) and Coleridge (1989 and 1998). When in 2001 the second was appointed to a Chair of Biography at the University of East Anglia, one Sunday newspaper confusedly printed a photo of the first. If, in the literary biography of the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a Suetonius-like cynicism sometimes prevailed, in the political biography of the same period, Plutarch seemed to be making a comeback. The figures that interested readers frequently seemed to be distinguished by flawed grandeur. The hagiographic tone of the Victorians had long since bitten the dust, and heroism was out of fashion. Instead, especially in the measured conclusions or summings-up to their works (arrangements that possess a clear ancestry in the grand comparative essays with which Plutarch concluded each pair of his lives), biographer after biographer, whether of historic or of more recent figures, reached out for a sort of Plutarchian judiciousness and distance. The classically educated British parliamentarian Enoch Powell once declared that every political career ends in failure. In the chapter entitled “The many faces of Brutus” with which she concludes her recent biography of that enigmatic and tragic Roman (a politician who decidedly failed) Kathyrn Tempest remarks that “In all, [Marcus] Brutus emerges as a human being possessing some of the most admirable virtues, and a concomitant share of the corresponding vices, of his day”.55 It is an observation clothed in Plutarchian impartiality, and it could be paralleled with many such observations from the annals of modern political biography. Thus Simon Heffer purported that Powell was not cut out to be a career politician and succeeded nonetheless in being true to a highly individual sense of honour.56 Boris Johnson sought for the roots of Churchill’s achievements in his half-conscious resolve belatedly to impress his father and his sense during adolescence of his  Kathryn Tempest, Brutus: The Noble Conspirator (Yale University Press, 2019), 232–237.  Simon Heffer, Like The Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998). The phrase in the title refers to Powell’s misremembering of Aeneid, 6, line 87. It was the Sybil of Cumae who envisioned the Tiber foaming with blood: “Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno”. But the Sybil was Greek. 55 56

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physical insufficiency.57 At such moments classical balance was the objective, deliberately courted or not. The measured, often paradoxical, equanimity thus achieved stood in marked contrast to the memoirs of politicians themselves, whose accounts of their own careers, whether Margaret Thatcher’s or Tony Blair’s, Yannis Varoufakis’s or David Cameron’s, tended towards justifications of their own actions (just as Julius Caesar’s in his day amounted to a justification of his). Meanwhile, caustic biography proceeded apace. Having dispatched Charles Kingsley, Susan Chitty turned her Procopian gaze on her mother Antonia White, and then on Edward Lear.58 Carole Seymour Jones coolly assessed T.S. Eliot’s behaviour during his first marriage, then that of the Bohemian couple Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir during a relationship of fifty years.59 Andrew Biswell, asked for a solid and respectful biography of his mentor Anthony Burgess, proceeded to unmask his pretensions.60 Contrasted lives flourished side by side. The novelist Iris Murdoch received three alternative treatments from authors intimately connected with her: as disciple, husband or protégé. Peter J. Conradi aimed at a sort of Plutarchian gravity and distance but betrayed his devotion at every step.61 John Bayley exposed his wife as an ageing women at her most vulnerable moments.62 A.N.  Wilson, official biographer lapsed or possibly scorned, waded in gossip, his own and others’, in the spirit surely of Xenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates.63 In whose archetype walked Bayley? He had presented himself as loving friend and partner, but for Wilson, he had been a man jealous of his wife’s fame and numerous affairs, a biographer bent on revenge. For Wilson, Bayley was a Procopius, wielding malicious pen. 57  Boris Johnson, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2014). 58  Susan Chitty, Now To My Mother: A Very Personal Memoir of Antonia White (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985); That Singular Person Called Lear: A Biography of Edward Lear, Artist, Traveller, and Prince of Nonsense (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989). 59  Carole Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot (London: Constable, 2001); A Dangerous Liaison: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (London: Century, 2008). 60  Andrew Biswell, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (London: Picador, 2005). 61  Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (London: HarperCollins, 2001). 62  John Bayley, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (London: Duckworth, 1998). 63  A.N. Wilson, Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her (London: Hutchinson, 2003).

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These are games, of course, yet ancient archetypes persist. Biography has grown ever more experimental, sometimes espousing arrangements— retrogression, a marriage with memoir and other sorts of life-writing—for which there is limited ancient precedent. Yet, even as it reaches out for new territory, classical echoes stir: the four-way conversation between Thomas Chatterton, Oscar Wilde, Dickens and T.S. Eliot which features in Peter Ackroyd’s monumental biography of Dickens (1990), for instance, possesses an indelible ancestry in Plato and in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead.64 Just as the challenge of portraying a human life with decency and fairness is perennial, so are the available solutions. Several of those solutions are classical or neo-classical, and others derive from a wilful postmodern misunderstanding of the classics. As writers and readers of biography, and as interpreters of history remote and near, we have not ceased to learn from the ancient world.

Bibliography and Further Reading Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Minerva, 1991). Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929). Richard Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry (London: Collins, 1955). John Bayley, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (London: Duckworth, 1998). Ciaran Brady, James Anthony Froude: An Intellectual Biography of A Victorian Prophet (Oxford University Press, 2013), David Cannadine, G.  M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (London: HarperCollins, 1992). Susan Chitty, Now to My Mother: A Very Personal Memoir of Antonia White (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985). Susan Chitty, That Singular Person Called Lear: A Biography of Edward Lear, Artist, Traveller, and Prince of Nonsense (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989). Winston S.  Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times [1933] (London: Harrap, 1947). Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, Abridged and Revised by Rosalind Nash (London: Macmillan, 1925). Charles M.  Doughty, Travels in Arabia deserta with an introduction by T. E. Lawrence of All Souls’ College, Oxford (London: The Medici Society and Jonathan Cape, 1921).  Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Minerva, 1991), 450–455.

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Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). Robert Fraser, “The Fish and the Stream: publishing, genre and life-writing’s crisis of form”, in Alison Baverstock, Richard Bradford and Madelena Gonzales, Contemporary Publishing and the Culture of Books (London and New  York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 133–151. James Anthony Froude, Caesar: A Sketch (New York: Scribners, 1880). James Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle, A History of His Life in London (London, 1882). Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, 6 vols. (3–8) (London: 1971–1988) - the “official biography”. Volumes 1 and 2 were co-written with Churchill’s son, Randolph. Robert Graves, Lawrence and the Arabs (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927). Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929). Robert Graves, I, Claudius (London: Arthur Barker, 1934a). Robert Graves, Claudius the God and his wife Messalina: the troublesome reign of Tiberius Claudius, Emperor of the Romans (born BC10, died AD 54) described by himself, also his murder at the hands of the notorious Agrippina (mother of the Emperor Nero) and his subsequent deification as described by others (London: Arthur Baker, 1934b). Robert Graves, Count Belisarius (London: Cassell, 1938). Robert Graves, King Jesus (London: Cassell, 1946). Robert Graves, The Greek Myths [1948, rev. 1955] (London: The Folio Society, 1996). Simon Heffer, Like The Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998). Michael Holroyd, Hugh Kingsmill: A Critical Biography (London: Union Press, 1964). Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994). Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 2001). Boris Johnson, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2014). Michael Korda, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (New York: Harper, 2010). T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph [1922] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935). T.  E. Lawrence to His Biographers Robert Graves and Liddell Hart (London: Cassell, 1963). II, 8. Zachary Leader, ed., On Life-Writing (Oxford University Press, 2015). Basil Liddell-Hart, The Decisive Wars of History: a study of strategy (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1929). Basil Liddell-Hart, T.  E. Lawrence in Arabia and After (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934).

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Suleiman Mousa, T. E Lawrence: An Arab View, Trans. Albert Butras (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). Jean de Pierrefeu, Plutarch Lied, Trans. Jeffrey E. Jeffrey (London: Grant Richards, 1924), 114. Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, Vol. I (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967). Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-Writing, & the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford University Press, 2010). Carole Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot (London: Constable, 2001). Carole Seymour-Jones, A Dangerous Liaison: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (London: Century, 2008). Martin Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves, His Life and Work (London: Hutchinson, 1982). Lytton Strachey, Landmarks in French Literature (London: Williams & Norgate, 1912). Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918). Kathryn Tempest, Brutus: The Noble Conspirator (Yale University Press, 2019). Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique (Geneva: Gabriel Grasset, 1764). The one-­ volume work was later expanded to two volumes. Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist with some remarks upon the importance of Doing Nothing”, in Intentions (London: Methuen, 1909). Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia: The Official Biography of T.E.  Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1989). A.N. Wilson, Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her (London: Hutchinson, 2003). Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography” (1927), in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4, Ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press, 1994), 473–480.

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion: “Beauty Is Terror”

In a Liberal Arts college in Vermont, USA, Julian—an opinionated and worryingly influential classics professor possibly named after the Emperor Julian the Apostate—is talking to his undergraduate class (later revealed to be an inept clan of assassins) about the death of Julius Caesar. They have all read the relevant passage in Suetonius Julius 82, so Julian homes in on details. “Remember”, he cajoles, “how Suetonius describes his body being borne away on the litter, with one arm hanging down?” Henry, enthusiastic pupil and voracious linguist, responds with an aphorism: “Death is beauty”. “And what is beauty?” Julian inquires. “Terror”, replies Henry, who later kills a friend.1 Back now to the beginning of the present book. Remember how Jacques-Louis David portrays Marat gorily assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday, pallid right arm drooping over the side? Terrible and beautiful, Julian and Henry would have agreed. But Julian has not finished with Suetonius. Reminding his young people of The Twelve Caesars, he passes on to the next but one emperor. He talks of Tiberius whom he calls Augustus’s “ugly stepson”, then asks what it must have been like to follow in the footsteps of Augustus the god. “The people hated him.” No matter how hard he tried, Tiberius was no match for Augustus Divus, the idol of the populace: “Finally the floodgates broke. He was swept away on his perversions and he died, old and mad, lost in the pleasure gardens of Capri.” To re-inforce the point, he recites 1

 Donna Tartt, The Secret History (London: Viking, 1992), 37.

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the emperor’s last, desponding letter to the Senate: “May all the Gods and Goddesses visit me with more utter destruction than I feel I am daily suffering”.2 “Think”, Julian implores the class, “of those that came after him: Caligula. Nero”. Now turn back two centuries, to 1828. In Chap. 4 I quoted Lord Macaulay, writing about the uses and abuses of history. He evoked Tiberius’s last days, drawing on the account on by Tacitus who: was to trace the gradations by which the first magistrate of the republic, a senator mixing freely in debate, a noble associating with his brother nobles, was transformed into an Asiatic sultan. He was to exhibit a character distinguished by corruption, self-command, and profound policy, yet defiled by all       th’extravangancy     And crazy ribaldry of fancy. He was to mark the gradual effect of advancing age and approaching death on this strange compound of strength and weakness, to exhibit the old sovereign of the world sinking into a dotage which, though it rendered his appetites eccentric, and his temper savage, never impaired the powers of his stern and penetrating mind—conscious of failing strength, and raging with capricious sensuality, yet to the end the keenest of observers, the most artful of dissemblers, and the most terrible of masters.3

Julian and Henry, of course, are characters in a novel, and Macaulay was a flesh-and-blood historian. All of them, however, are held by a vision of virtue tainted, which Macaulay finds dismaying, and Julian and Henry— and their creator Donna Tartt—find intriguing. Virtue corrupted is one of the themes of Tartt’s novel, entitled, in a conscious echo of Procopius’s account of the reign of Justinian and Theodora, The Secret History. What corrupts Henry and his classmates is the study of classics they have been encouraged to see in the light of the sort of Dionysian rite extruded by Nietzche from his readings of Greek tragedy, especially from Euripides’s The Bacchae. They attempt to imitate such a rite whilst high on drugs, and end up inadvertently slaying a bystander, then deliberately killing one of their comrades. This is not a good advertisement for Greek.  Donna Tartt, 39, quoting Suetonius, Tiberius Divus, 67.  Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Works of Lord Macaulay (London: Longman, 1898), Vol, VII Essays and Biographies i, 186. The essay, which originally appeared in The Edinburgh Review, was an appraisal of Henry Neele’s The Romance of History (London, 1828.) The quoted half-couplet is from Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1684). 2 3

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But the vision of Roman imperial politics as a source of public and private corruption has been remarkably persistent across the centuries and has lost none of its potency even now. Classically it derives from a reading of Suetonius and Tacitus, though the intermediate conduit for it in post-­ Renaissance literature is Gibbon’s History. From the late nineteenth century it gained a substantial foothold in the novel and during the later twentieth century on the screen. In both incarnations it served as a sounding board for contemporary religious and cultural anxieties.

From Biography to Biopic A constant motif across the centuries, both in fiction and on film, has been a contrast between Roman cruelty and Christian courage. In 1880 Lew Wallace, sometime Union General and Governor of New Mexico, published Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ recounting the persecution of a well-born first-century Jew by Messala, a Roman aristocrat and his adoptive half-­ brother whom he has accidentally wounded and insulted. Ben-Hur is reduced to slavery and his mother and sister are infected with leprosy from which they are cured by drops of blood from the crucified Christ carried to them in a downpour. In 1925 the best-selling book was the basis of a silent film; in 1959 of a technicolour movie to a script by Gore Vidal and the British playwright Christopher Fry; a less successful remake was issued in 2016. The story has no historical foundation, despite its indirect roots in Plutarch, the New Testament and Josephus.4 But its popularity has had much to do with continuing anxieties about racial politics and with America’s neo-Christian imperialism. “Rome”, proclaimed the 1959 trailer, “is the country where you live”. The tale touched other nerves: Pope Leo XIII gave his blessing to the original novel; Pope Francis blessed Rodrigo Santoro, director of the 2016 remake. And, not long before his death, Vidal spoke of a homosexual subtext in his screenplay of 1959, arguing that Ben-Hur and Messala would not have fallen out so badly in adult life had they not been boyhood lovers. In all of its versions, the fictitious story reached more people than had any of its indirect sources.

4  For the largely self-educated Wallace’s reliance on a cluster of ancient sources, see Jon Solomon, “The Classical Sources of Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur”, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 22. No. 1 (April, 2015), 29–75. See also Solomon’s Ben-Hur: The Original Blockbuster (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

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In 1895, the Polish novelist Hennyk Sierkiewicz drew on an episode from the apocryphal Acts of Saint Peter for his Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero. Nero’s reign has been a subject of prurient curiosity well before 1643 when, during his Venetian period, Monteverdi set a libretto depicted the emperor’s callous adultery in the carnival-tide opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea. Monteverdi’s Nero is derived principally from Tactitus’s Annals; he is prey to the unscrupulous wiles of Poppaea Sabina, who encourages him to leave his wife Octavia, thus causing their divorce, her banishment and the suicide of Nero’s tutor Seneca, who has warned Nero about his misconduct. The work ends with a love song between the adulterous lovers, one of the most haunting duets in all opera (even if the music at this point is probably not Monteverdi’s). Monteverdi’s librettist, Giovanni Francesco Busenello, ignores Suetonius’s disclosure that the emperor caused Poppaea’s death by kicking her whilst pregnant.5 The result is a sort of celebration of hedonism, much feted in pleasure-loving Venice at the most hedonistic of seasons. Sierkiewicz’s Nero is predominantly the persecutor of Christians, and the depiction of this egotistical monster is recognisably derived from Suetonius. His court is presided over by Petronius Arbiter, on whose evocation of imperial entertainments in The Satyricon Sierkiewicz draws, amongst other sources. The focus of the book is a love affair between a Roman patrician Marcus Vinicius and Lycia, a Christian woman much envied by Poppaea for her virtuous allure. They marry after he has converted, but in the meantime we are treated to the burning of Rome by the demented emperor, convinced that he is a great musician and poet—pure Suetonius all of this—and the public torture of Christians in the amphitheatre. The novel is recognisably a product of late nineteenth-century Polish Catholic spirituality with a strong patriotic subtext, both of which were exploited on the grand scale in 1907 by the Polish composer Feliks Nowowiejski in his Opus 30, a gargantuan oratorio of the same name. The story enjoyed a further cinematic life in America, where versions were made for the screen in 1901, 1912 and 1924. The most successful screen version is the Metro Goldwyn Meyer blockbuster of 1959, in which a youngish Peter Ustinov delivers a camp and eye-rolling impersonation of the emperor at the height of his artistic self-delusion. All of these films pandered as much to voyeurism as they did to piety. Sierkiewicz’s book, however, was to play a further and significant role in 5

 Suetonius, Nero, 35.

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the history of human rights. In 1911, in Wolkowysk in Russian-held Poland, it was read and re-read by an eleven-year-old Jewish lad called Raphael Lemkin, who found himself appalled by “the destruction of the Christians under Nero. … Here was a group of people collectively sentenced to death for no reason except that they believed in Christ.”6 Lemkin went on to become an ethically driven international lawyer. Thirty years later he was in exile in New York, where he coined the neologism “genocide” to describe Nazi pogroms in the Ukraine. In 1945 he proposed the term to the prosecuting team at the Nuremberg Trials who initially rejected it as likely to rebound on the allied case.7 By the 1960s it had entered the global debate on ethnic cleansing. Its origins, though, by Lemkin’s admission, lay in his adolescent reactions to Sierkiewicz’s description of Nero’s pogroms against the early Christians, itself drawn principally from Suetonius’s Life of Nero. Throughout the twentieth century ancient biography continued to supply metaphors for power and the heroic resistance to power. In Plutarch’s Life of Crassus there occurs an episode some four paragraphs in length that has proved unusually suggestive to latter-day political insurgents, demonstrating in the process how the work of a classical author could be put to use quite alien to those originally intended. The patrician Marcus Licinius Crassus was a rich and ruthless rival to Pompey and Caesar, entrusted in 73–71BC with putting down a rebellion that had broken out in the southern city of Capua among escaped gladiators. Spartacus was one of their leaders and the best tactician among them. They settled at the foot of Mount Vesuvius and then made their way northwards to escape Italy. The Roman senate grew alarmed by the growth of the uprising and dispatched Crassus to see them off. Then military rivalry came into play. Pompey had been in Spain with his army but returned to supplement Crassus’s forces. Crassus had been tempted to parley with Spartacus, but now feared that his glory would be lost. He faced the gladiatorial hosts in one final battle, then strung up the perpetrators along a single line of crucifixes stretching from Rome to Capua: 6000 according to Appian’s Civil Wars. Plutarch states that Spartacus himself

6  Raphael Lemkin, Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin. Ed. DonnaLee Frieze (New Haven, Cn: Yale University Press, 2013), 1. 7  For Lemkin’s interventions, see Philippe Sands, East-West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (London: Vintage, 2017)

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was slain in the battle. Appian leaves us to assume he perished among the crucified.8 Plutarch admired Spartacus’s cunning, but his real focus is on Crassus’s state of mind. There matters would have rested, had it not been for the tergiversations of nineteenth-century European politics. In 1861 Karl Marx was in London, researching the book that was to become Das Kapital. He read Appian in Greek in the British Museum, and on 27 February he wrote to Engels in Manchester that “Spartacus is revealed as the most splendid fellow in the whole of ancient history. Great general (no Garibaldi), noble character, real representative of the ancient proletariat.”9 There was, needless to say, no such thing as a proletariat in pre-industrial ancient Rome nor had any of the ancient sources suggested Spartacus wished to liberate all slaves. This did not stop Spartacus being adopted by Marx’s disciples as a proleptic class warrior. In 1951, during the McCarthyite purges in America, the novelist Howard Fast wrote an historical novel, self-published to avoid official censorship, in which Spartacus became a sort of proto-communist, insisting his band of rebels hold their property in common. In 1960, once the ghost of Senator McCarthy’s All American Committee had been laid, Stanley Kubrick directed a movie based on Fast’s book, casting Kirk Douglas as Spartacus and Lawrence Olivier as Crassus. This adopted Appian’s version of Spartacus’s death, thereby eliciting an anachronistic Christian crucifixion motif in its closing scenes. When it came to Crassus, however, it reflected Plutarch’s concern with a divided mind. In one especially loaded scene, the patrician general faces his lithe opponent in manacles after his capture. The result is a charged blend of admiration, loathing and desire. Spartacus’s rebellion was to prove thematic fodder in postcolonial times, more especially among writers of a Marxist persuasion. Herein lay a contradiction. All classical biographers, including notably Plutarch, believed strongly in human agency; Marxist historians, on the other hand, are committed to regard individual people as symptoms of, or at least expressions of, wider social and economic forces. To that extent, Marxism is anti-biographical. When in 1938, towards the end of a radical decade, the Trinidadian author C.L.R. James produced Black Jacobins, his history of Toussaint Louverture’s Haitian revolution of 1793–1803, he called  Plutarch, Life of Crassus 10.1–11.7; Appian Civil Wars, 1. 116–20  Marx to Engels, 27 February, 1861, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Correspondence 1846–1895. Ed. Dona Torr (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1934), 126. 8 9

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attention to this difference of approach. Traditional historians, he wrote, “from Tacitus to Michelet, from Thucydides to [John Richard] Green have been more artist than scientist”. They had written as if their subjects were free agents. Now, thought James, the common recognition was that “Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make”.10 Louverture’s rising stirred into life one year after the assassination of Marat; it was very much a product of the ideological contortions evoked in Chap. 1 of the present work, with their draping of classical precedent. The revolution failed, since Napoleon turned against it. Louverture perished in a French gaol, whereupon Wordsworth, still in his radical period, wrote him a sonnet saying that he has born witness to “man’s unconquerable mind”. Such statements were possible in 1803; they had come to seem otiose by the time of C.L.R. James. The decades since have seen a rebirth of biographical confidence. Sudhir Hazareesingh’s 2020 “epic” life of Touissant is entitled simply Black Spartacus.

Ancient Biographies as Perennial Prototypes Ancient biography has enjoyed re-incarnations across two millennia and more, and in a multiplicity of media: in art, in politics, in critical discourse, in revolution and in murder, in despotism and its overthrow, in religion and irreligion, piety and impiety, in sanctity and debasement, in fiction, in film, in opera and oratorio, and within this century in video games as well. A Facebook page headed “The Plutarch Project” is followed by over a thousand people. On another page devoted to Suetonius, contributors continue to debate the merits and demerits of Claudius and of Nero. Classical biographies continue to inspire artists when they survive, and inspire them to attempts at reconstruction where they do not. In 1934 Graves tried to recreate the eight-volume autobiography of the Emperor Claudius. It had disappeared, but we know of it from Suetonius. Graves’s Claudian novels were the result. In 2006, Robert Harris, working from translations, began a three novel sequence about the life of Cicero. He had Plutarch’s Life to help him, and the twenty-three volumes of the speeches. What allowed him space to improvise was the loss of a biography of his master by Cicero’s former slave Marcus Tullius Tiro, the existence of which we know of from Plutarch and from the blind historian Quintus 10  C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938), viii.

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Asconius Pedianus. Time had swept it away, impoverishing the historian but emboldening the novelist. The most interesting effect has been on the art of biography itself. This is evident in five distinct ways, which frequently co-exist. There has been an overt occurrence of reference and allusion, and a common use of ancient archetypes as a basis for biographical comparison, from Stendhal’s Napoleon to Churchill’s Marlborough. Some of this has been relevant and searching, the rest sometimes for mere effect. Not everybody who refers to Plutarch has read him in any language, any more than many of those who refer to Proust have read the whole of A la recherche du temps perdu. Ancient biography has, inevitably, been ideologically read. The variety of critical stances exhibited is legion and witness to the versatility of reading and re-writing. There is a right-wing Plutarch and a left-wing Plutarch, a reactionary Plutarch (especially in the nineteenth century) and a revolutionary Plutarch (particularly in the eighteenth). An author who could inspire both Charlotte Corday and Samuel Smiles has clearly spoken to effect. As biographers have been re-read and re-assessed, so have their subjects. There has been a socialist Christ and a militaristic Christ, a heroic Caesar and a reactionary Caesar, an inspired Saint Antony and a perverted Saint Antony. There has also been a backwards recession of emulation in real life. Alexander the Great wanted to be like Achilles, Julius Caesar wanted to be like Alexander, T.E. Lawrence wanted to be like Caesar, and so did the Duke of Marlborough. Sir Winston Churchill wanted to be like Marlborough; Boris Johnson, biographer and premier, wants to be Churchill (indeed, has written a book, The Churchill Factor, more-or-less claiming that he is.) Third, there is the abiding example, or set of examples, of ancient biography as a form, or set of forms. Almost certainly those who wrote it did not consider it as a “genre”, a term for which there is no ancient equivalent. What is clear is that those who addressed themselves to narrating the lives of others knew that they were tackling a recurrent set of questions about conduct good or bad, the nature of responsibility or leadership, and the meaning of human existence, and how these matters might fruitfully and effectively be set forth. They devised a range of solutions to these problems, many of which are still applicable and valid. Modern biographers have much to learn from them. Though the medium has changed drastically, the readership expanded and the stylus given way before the computer, the essential task facing biographers has not changed nor have some of their working methods.

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Like Plutarch, the contemporary biographer is dependent on a mixture of “interviews, eyewitness reports, expeditions to absorb atmosphere, archival work and the assiduous taking of notes”. Like Plutarch and Suetonius, their modern counterparts haunt libraries, worry over responsibilities, pile up notebooks or files. Suetonius the Grammaticus had been an archivist. Plutarch tells us that he kept two sets of notebooks, the literary biographer Richard Holmes that he now has almost two hundred, ranging from one in “crumpled cardboard from Woolworths” to the latest “in glossy black spiral-bound A5 hardback, from Black n’ Red”.11 Both Plutarch and Suetonius liked to quote, especially from letters. Victorian lives were composed largely of correspondence, but modern biographers too are keen to cite their subjects’ words, partly to authenticate their case, partly to give us a flavour of an individual’s style and caste of mind. Like Suetonius, modern biographers strive ruefully to balance their scales of judgement; like Propertius, they sometimes settle scores. Like the evangelists, they offer alternative readings of lives covered by others. Like Athanasius or Bede, some of them are prone to awe. In pursuit of his object, Plutarch hiked to Athens from Chaeronea; his modern counterpart flies out to Austin, Texas, or boards Amtrak to squat in the Beinecke at Yale. In a chapter about the teaching of biography in his book This Long Pursuit, Richard Holmes lays out Ten Commandments he would wish students of the craft to follow. It is headed by an ordinance which runs “Thou shall honour Biography as living, experimental, and multifarious in all its forms”.12 It is the contention of this book that this generalisation is as applicable to ancient biography as it is to modern. Earlier, Holmes lays out a reading list of existing biographies to which his students might usefully attend. Among them is the “Dryden” translation of Plutarch dating from 1683 to 1686. I hope I have persuaded you that, in the ancient division, there are one or two names he might add. Ancient biography offers a series of archetypes that lurk behind much subsequent biographical writing. It offers strategies available for use. It suggests alternative approaches to which successive styles of biographical writing hark back. In that sense, biography is—and always will be—both ancient and modern, as recurrent in its wayward and imaginative courses as human life itself.

11  Richard Holmes, This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer (London: Pantheon, 2016), 5. 12  Holmes, 69.

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Bibliography and Further Reading Howard Fast, Spartacus (New York: published by the author, 1951) Richard Holmes, This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer (London: Pantheon, 2016) C.L.R.  James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938 Arthur Koestler, The Gladiators (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939). A counter-­ revolutionary reading of the Spartacus legend, one of a trilogy expressing Koestler’s profound disillusionment with Communism. Raphael Lemkin, Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin. Ed. Donna-Lee Frieze (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2013). Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Works of Lord Macaulay (London: Longman, 1898), Vol. VII Essays and Biographies. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Correspondence 1846–1895. Ed. Dona Torr (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1934). Philippe Sands, East-West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (London: Vintage, 2017). Henryck Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis: Powisc z Czasow Nerona, 2 vols (Warsaw, 1896). Translated the same year as Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero trans. Jeremiah Curtin (London: Dent, 1896). On October 8, 2019—at the height of the Brexit crisis—the title was quoted in a tweet from Donald Tusk, Polish-­ born President of the European Union, to Boris Johnson, the freshly elected British Prime Minister. Jon Solomon, “The Classical Sources of Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur”, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 22. No. 1 (April 2015), 29–75. Jon Solomon, Ben-Hur: The Original Blockbuster (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). Donna Tartt, The Secret History (London: Viking, 1992) Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1895).

Index1

A Ackroyd, Peter, 54, 66, 252 Acts of the Apostles, 132, 134, 243 Adams, George Gammon, 201, 203 Adams, William Edwin, 190 Aldington, Richard, 234, 239, 240 Alexander the Great, 11, 20, 22, 77, 262 Ambrose, Saint, 136, 137 Amyot, Bishop Jacques, 3, 10, 11, 14–16, 32, 93, 233 Anderson, Juliette, 214 Anthony, Saint (Anthony the Great), 60 Antoine, Louis, Duc d’Enghien, 27 Antonius, Marcus (Mark Antony), 8, 15, 79, 81, 83 Apelles of Kos, 77n11, 167 Appian of Alexandria, 259–260 Appollonius of Tyana, 61, 62 Aramaic, 132, 140, 145, 154, 155, 244 Arianism, 169, 172 Arius of Alexandria, 169

Arnold, Matthew, 96, 205 Arnold, Thomas, 190, 204–209, 229, 238 Arrian of Nicomedia, 221 Asconius Pedianus, Quintus, 262 Athanasian Creed, 172 Athanasius, Saint, of Alexandria, 65, 163–185, 263 Aubrey, John, 216 Auerbach, Erich, 21, 146, 146n40, 159, 183, 183n37, 186 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 136, 176 Augustus Caesar, Emperor, 22, 100, 102, 104, 105, 109n19, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 118, 123, 124, 222, 230, 246, 247, 255 B Bach, Johann Sebastian, 145n37 Bacon, Francis, 129 Baillie, Donald, 147 Bakewell, Sarah, 11

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 R. Fraser, After Ancient Biography, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35169-4

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Balder (Norse deity), 191, 192 Bamford, Samuel, 190 Bamford, T.W., 207 Barbaroux, Charles Jean-Marie, 4, 5 Bayle, Pierre, 21 Bayley, John, 41, 251 Beck, Mark, 58n38 Bede, the Venerable, 142, 180–184, 263 Belisarius, General Flavius, 119, 120, 242, 243 Ben-Hur (novel and movie), 257 Berlin, Isaiah, 41n8 Betriacum, battle of, 83, 102 Beyle, Marie-Henri, see Stendhal Beza, Theodore, 152 Biography caustic, 221–252 as censure, x, 99–126 fictionalised, 124, 163 heroic, 189–217 as inner drama, xi, 163–185 as persuasion, x, 129–159, 241 as representation, x, 73–97 Bodin, Jean, 13 Bohn, Henry George, 190 Bonaparte, Lucien, 30 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 12, 16–33, 43, 99, 192, 193, 209, 233, 234, 261, 262 Bosch, Hieronymus, 175 Boswell, James, 94, 95, 97, 99, 144, 195, 216, 225 Bowie, Ewen, 60n41 Brecht, Berthold, 14 Brendan, Saint, Voyage of, 181 Brook, Peter, 6 Brown, Michelle P., 183 Brown, Peter, 137, 177, 178 Browning, Elizabeth Barret, 217 Bruegel, Peter the Elder, 175 Brutus, Lucius Junius, 2

Brutus, Marcus, 2, 5, 6, 8, 8n13, 9, 11, 13–16, 25, 79, 81, 90, 93, 108, 109, 250 Burckhardt, Jacob, 39, 41n8 Burke, Edmund, 25 Burke, Peter, 41n8 Burn, James, 190 Burns, Robert, 192, 193 Burridge, Richard, 132–134, 138 Butler, Alban, 184 Byron, George Gordon (Lord), 22, 156, 201, 223 C Cairns, Francis, 66 “Caligula” see Gaius Caesar Callinicum, Battle of, 242n44 Campion, Edmund (Saint), 164 Camus, Albert, 113, 121 Caractacus, King of the Catuvellauni, 190 Carlyle, Jane, 193–195, 200 Carlyle, Thomas, 7, 8, 147, 191–193, 195–198, 203, 209–211, 216, 224–227 Carter, James, 190 Cassell, John, 96, 190 Cavendish, George, 206 Caxton, William, 184 Chamberlain, Kathy, 200, 201 Chambers, Ephraim, 21 “Character”, concepts of, 196, 199 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 27–32 Chaumette, Pierre Gaspard, 6, 7 Churchill, John, Duke of Marlborough, 248 Churchill, Sir Winston, 43, 248, 250, 262 Claudius Caesar, Emperor, 39, 43, 116, 124, 245–247, 261

 INDEX 

Clay, Diskin, 58 Cleopatra, Queen, 13, 81, 84, 90 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 91, 96, 212, 213 Cobb, Richard, 7 Conradi, Peter J., 41, 251 Cook, Edward Tyas, 212, 229 Corday, Charlotte, 1, 3–6, 12, 16, 32, 33, 99, 192, 203, 255, 262 Corneille, Pierre, 3 Cotton, Robert, 151 Cox, Patricia, 63–65, 67, 68 Crashaw, Richard, 146 Crispus, Flavius Junius, Emperor, 165, 166, 170 Croesus, King of Lydia, 74, 75 Cromwell, Oliver, 27, 81, 192–194, 224 Cruserius, Hermannus, editor of Plutarch, 10 Cuthbert, Saint, 142, 180–183 Cyrus II of Persia (“Cyrus the Great”), 59, 75, 190n2, 236 D Dalí, Salvador, 175 Damon, Cynthia, 106, 149 Dara, Battle of, 242n44 David, Jacques-Louis, 1, 2, 255 De Urquijo, Mariano Luis, 19 Demoen, Kristoffer, 57, 62 Demonax, philosopher, 57, 58, 133 Desmoulins, Camille, 33 Diatessarion, 138n17 Diderot, Denis, 21 Dihle, Albrecht, 45, 46, 56, 57 Dillon, John, vii, 64, 65 Dilly, Edward, 95 Diocletian, Emperor, 28, 170, 244 Dion Cassius, 246

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Dokimasai, 48 Domitian, Emperor, xi, 27, 61, 99, 102, 111, 118, 119 Dorey, Thomas Allen, 66n53 Doughty, Charles, 235, 235n23, 236, 238n31 Douglas, Kirk, 84, 260 Douglas, Lord Alfred, 155 Dryden, John, 74, 94, 214 Dubrow, Heather, 67 Duff, Tim, 76, 82 Dzielska, Maria, 62n42 E Eardfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne, 151, 152 Edwards, Mark, 67, 133 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans), 215 Ellman, Richard, 156n58, 156n59 Elsner, Jas, 60 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 191 Epaminondas of Thebes, 234 Erasmus, Desiderius, 152 Euhemerus, mythographer, 191 Eunapius of Sardis, 82, 166 Euripides, 3, 256 Eusebius of Caesarea, Saint, 61, 63, 165, 166, 169 Evagrius of Antioch, 176 Ezekiel, Book of, 137, 138n19 F Fact, viii, xii, 27, 40, 41, 44, 49, 50, 52–59, 64, 65, 68, 73, 75, 76, 79, 83, 86, 88, 90, 104–108, 110, 113, 114, 116, 125, 133, 137, 139n21, 145, 147, 148, 150, 155, 164, 169, 170, 173, 205, 211–213, 222, 224, 230, 245, 250

268 

INDEX

Fiction, ix, 42, 44, 47, 53–59, 125, 143, 146, 163, 239, 244, 245, 261 Fictionality, 57, 62 Fictiveness, 57, 62 Fitzgerald, Penelope, 54 Flaubert, Gustave, 21, 171n13, 175, 176, 222, 223 Flesch, Joseph (Archbishop), 30 Foch, Marshal Ferdinand, 232 Ford Madox Ford (Ford Hermann Hueffer), 233 Form criticism, biblical (Formgeschichte), 130 Foucault, Michel, 176 Foxe, John, 184, 206 Fraser, Robert, 54n32 Freeman, John, 163, 164 Freud, Sigmund, 176, 176n23 Fronto, Marcus Cornellius, 78 Froude, James Anthony, 225–227 Fry, Christopher, 257 G Gaius Caesar, Emperor (“Caligula”), 22, 27, 99, 100, 106, 110, 112, 113, 115, 117, 230, 230n15, 246–248, 256 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 202 Gaskell, Rev. William, 202 Gastou, Jean, 113 Gemelli, Fra Agostino, 40 Germanicus Julius Caesar, 106, 110, 115 Gibbon, Edward, 17, 119, 119n36, 166, 166n7, 190, 243n45, 247, 257 Gibson, Margaret, 153 Gibson, Roy K., 101 Gilbert, Martin, 248 Girondins, 4–6

Glaucon, philosopher (brother of Plato), 48 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 17, 200 Goldhill, Simon, 54 Gordon, General Charles George, 229 Gospels, Christian according to Saint John, 182 according to Saint Luke, 61, 130–132, 134, 136, 138, 140n24, 141n26, 142n29, 142n30, 143n32, 143n34, 147, 150, 157n61, 159 according to Saint Mark, 130, 131n4, 131n5, 138, 139n22, 140n23, 141, 142, 145, 150, 168 according to Saint Matthew, 55 of the Egyptians, 243 Lindisfarne, 150, 151 synoptic, 131, 131n8, 132, 137, 141 Goujon, Jean-Marie, 7 Graves, Robert, 39, 103, 112, 113, 116, 119, 124, 125, 125n45, 234, 237–239, 241–248, 261 Gregory I, Pope (Saint Gregory the Great), 180 Griesbach, Johann Jakob, 190n3 Guccione, Bob, 113, 248 Gunderson, Erik, 110 H Hägg, Tomas, 53, 56–59, 62, 65, 66, 132 Hagiography, 32, 52, 60, 65, 142, 147, 165–167, 170, 171, 176, 178, 180, 183–185, 194, 204–206, 208, 210 Harari, Yuval Noah, 54

 INDEX 

Harris, William, 42 Hazareesingh, Sudhir, 261 Heffer, Simon, 250 Helena, Saint and Empress, 20, 28, 29, 31 Henderson, John, 110 Heracles, 101 Herod Antipas, 244 Herodotus, 51, 52, 73, 74, 82, 190, 209, 237, 241 Herod the Great, 244, 245 Hippoclides, 237, 238 Holmes, Edward Richard (military biographer), viii, x, 56, 250, 263 Holmes, Richard Gordon Heath (literary biographer), viii, x, 56, 250, 263 Holroyd, Michael, 248, 249 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 102, 103, 241 Housman, A.E., 51 Hughes, Thomas, 205 Hume, David, 8 J Jacobin Club, 2, 4 James, C.L.R., 260, 261 Jefferson, Ann, 10 Jenkins, Roy, 248, 249 Jenkinson, Edna, 66n53 Jerome, Saint, 55, 150, 152, 176, 206 John, Saint, 134, 151, 169, 172, 182, 183, 221 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 95, 144, 192, 193, 195, 196, 200, 249 Jones, Ernest, 176n23 Jowett, Benjamin, 158, 190 Julian the Apostate, 166, 255 Justinian, Emperor, 119–122, 124, 126, 242, 243, 256

269

K Keats, John, viii Kenosis, 147 King James Bible, 139n21, 190n1 Kingsley, Charles, 209–211, 210n38, 251 Kingsley, Fanny (née Grenfell), 142, 211, 212 Knox, Rev Ronald, 165 Konstan, David, 58, 59 L Lamartine, Alphonse de, 6 Lane Fox, Robin, 221, 222 Langhorne, John, 190 Langhorne, William, 95, 190 Langlands, Rebecca, 104, 110, 118 Lawrence, T.E., 233–242, 248, 262 Lee, Hermione, xi, 53–59 Lee, Sidney, 214–217 Lely, Sir Peter, 81 Lemkin, Raphael, 259 Leo, Friedrich, 44, 45, 59, 100, 101 Leutra, battle of, 234, 235 Lewis, Agnes, 153 Licinius I, Emperor, 8n13, 165, 166, 170 Liddell Hart, Sir Basil Henry, 234, 235, 242, 242n44 Light, Alison, 217 Lindisfarne Gospels, 150, 151 Literae Humaniores, 213 Livia, Empress, 110, 114, 116, 246, 247 Livy (Titus Livius), 2, 33, 74n3, 230 Louverture, Toussaint, 260, 261 Lucian of Samosata, 58, 133, 252 Luke, Trevor, 38, 66 Lysias, 48

270 

INDEX

M Macaulay, Thomas Babington (Lord), 111, 201, 203, 204, 249, 256 Mahomet (Mohammed), prophet, 192 Manning, Cardinal Henry Edward, 229 Manzini, Francesco, 16 Marat, Jean-Paul, 1–7, 193, 203, 255, 261 Marx, Karl, 33, 260 McGing, Brian, 66–68 Menander, dramatist, 20 Michelangelo, Buonarotti, 1, 144, 175 Michelet, Jules, 5, 261 Milton, John, 142, 208, 216 Mimesis, 21, 62 Minos, King of Crete, 51, 52, 73, 74 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de, 7, 192, 193 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 38, 39, 41–44, 41n8, 48–50, 53, 54, 58–60, 64, 66, 116, 126, 133, 222, 247 Momigliano, Felice, 40 Montaigne, Michel de, 11–13, 32, 33, 84, 93, 198, 199 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de, 8, 9 Monteverdi, Claudio, 258 Montmorin Saint-Herem, Pauline de, 31 More, Thomas, 184, 203, 206 Moreau, General Victor, 23–25 Mortimer, Thomas, 21, 213, 214 Mossman, Judith, 66–68 Murdoch, Iris, 41, 251 Murray, John I, 202 Murray, Oswyn, 41 Myth, meaning of, 20–52, 67, 73, 79, 81, 116, 126, 157, 166 N Napier, Sir Charles James, 201–203, 219 Napoleon, see Bonaparte, Napoleon

Nash, Rosalind, 229 Nepos, Cornelius, 66, 66n53, 78, 103, 235 Nero Caesar, Emperor, xi, 12, 19, 22, 26–28, 61, 99, 100, 105, 112, 116, 117, 120, 124, 131, 151, 167, 168, 258, 259, 261 Nicolson, Harold, 204–206 Nicomedes IV Philopater, King of Bithynia, 107 Nightingale, Florence, 229 North, Sir Thomas, 4, 14, 15, 32, 93, 94 Nuttall, A.D., 16 O Olivier, Sir Lawrence, 84 Omphale, Queen of Lydia, 101 Origen of Alexandria, 63, 64 Oswald, Saint of Northumbria, 180 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 103, 105 Owen, Wilfred, 241 P Pelling, Christopher, 74, 74n3, 75, 82 Perrault, Charles, 21 Petronius, Gaius Arbiter, 238, 246, 258 Phantasia, 62, 63 Pharsalia (of Lucan), 29 Pharsalus, Battle of, 90, 107 Phélippeaux, Antoine Le Picard de, 24, 26, 27 Philip of Macedon, 39, 82 Philostratus, Lucius Flavius, xi, xii, 60–62, 65, 134, 141, 141n27 Pichegru, General Jean-­Charles, 23, 24 Pierrefeu, Jean de, 231–233 Plass, Paul, 104

 INDEX 

Plato, vii, 2, 46–49, 47n20, 53, 55–57, 64, 73, 81, 85, 115, 132, 134, 192, 209, 232, 252 Platt, Verity, 62, 63 Pliny the Elder, 105 Pliny the Younger, 100, 103 Plotinus, 63, 64 Plutarch, vii, 2, 10–21, 37, 73–97, 99, 102–106, 132, 167, 190, 200–204, 212–217, 221, 257 de cohibenda ira, 79, 80n20 De curiositate, 14 de malignitate Heroditi, 82 de Stoicorum repugnantis, 9, 12 de virtute morali, 80n21 Life of Aemelius, 26 Life of Alcibiades, 10, 76, 79, 81, 82, 96, 190 Life of Alexander, vii, 55, 76, 95, 97, 167 Life of Aristides, 11, 79, 86, 190 Life of Cato the Elder (“Cato The Censor”), 79, 96, 105, 133, 199 Life of Cato the Younger, 9, 11, 25, 81, 96, 105 Life of Cicero, 12n22 Life of Cimon, 86 Life of Coriolanus, 10, 13, 14, 35, 79, 81, 82, 94, 96, 190 Life of Crassus, 259 Life of Demetrius, 2, 79, 84, 93 Life of Demosthenes, 83 Life of Dion, 11, 79, 81, 93n52 Life of Fabius Maximus, 79, 82n24 Life of Galba, 81, 88 Life of Julius Caesar, 84, 89 Life of Lycurgus, 13 Life of Marcellus, 87 Life of Marcus Brutus, 90, 93 Life of Nicias, 75 Life of Otho, 81, 83, 88, 102 Life of Pelopidas, 91, 235

271

Life of Pericles, 7 Life of Phocion, 10, 79, 85n35 Life of Pompey, 12n29 Life of Poplicola, 2 Life of Romulus, 52, 73, 74n3, 79, 81 Life of Solon, 74 Life of Themistocles, 11, 86, 213n44, 218 Life of Theseus, 74 Life of Timoleon, 11n21, 12n24 Life of Titus Flaminius, 18, 20n39 Moralia, 11, 12, 32, 80, 85 quomodo adulator ab amico internoscator, 12n25 an virtus doceri possit, 85n34 Poetry, Saint Augustine on, 179 Pompey the Great, 25, 84, 87, 89, 90, 107, 108, 230, 259 Ponticianus, 177 Poppaea, Empress, 258 Popper, Karl, 49 Porphry of Tyre, 63–65 Powell, J. Enoch, 131, 250, 250n56 Power, Tristan, 99, 102 Praxilities of Athens, 167 Procopius of Caesarea, 119 Psalms of David, Saint Augustine on, 179 Q Quo Vadis? (novel and movie), 258 R Ramsay, Andrew Michael, 190 Raphael, Frederick, 16 Renan, Ernest, 132, 151–153, 155, 157, 158, 221 Revelation, Book of, 138 Robertson Smith, William, 153, 154 Robespierre, Maximilien, 1, 4, 27, 33, 99

272 

INDEX

Robinson, John (Bishop), 130, 132 Roland de la Platiére, Madame Marie-Jeanne, 4, 33, 192 “Romanticism,” 17, 22, 238 Roper, William, 184 Rorty, Richard, 50, 51 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 3, 31, 95, 193, 223 Roxana, Princess of Bactria, 88 Runciman, Sir Steven, 119, 216 Russell, Earl Bertrand, 228, 228n10, 231 S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 176, 251 Sassoon, Siegfried, 237, 241 Saunders, E.P., 140n23 Saunders, Max, 231, 239 Schama, Simon, 33 Scipio Africanus, 234, 235 Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca), 2, 12, 246, 258 Severus, Septimius, 180 Shakespeare, William, 4, 13–16, 19, 32, 33, 53–55, 84, 85, 90, 91, 93, 94, 109n20, 193, 198, 214, 221 Shapiro, James, 14 Sierkiewicz, Hernyk, 258, 259 Smith, George, 214, 217 Smith, Sir William Sidney, 24, 26 Smith, William Robertson, 152–154 Socrates, 45–48, 57–60, 64, 81, 134, 251 Solon, 74, 75 Sophocles, 3, 20 Sosius, Quintus Senecio, 142n29 Soubrany, Pierre-Amable, 7 Spartacus, Gladiator, 84, 259, 260 Spartacus (novel and movie), 84, 259–261, 264 Stancliff, Mary, 190, 190n2

Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn (Dean), 205–209, 211, 212, 229, 247 Stendhal, 16–22, 24n56, 25, 27, 32, 37, 192, 262 Stephen, Leslie, 214–217 Sterne, Lawrence, 214 Stewarton, H. pseud, 23–25, 27, 99 Stoicism, 9, 12 Strachey, Lytton, ix, x, 67, 205, 206, 212, 217, 228–231, 228n10, 228n11, 249 Streeter, Canon Burnett Hillman, 131, 131n8, 132, 147 Suetonius, Gaius Tranquillus, ix, x, 2, 3, 14, 17, 22, 26, 28, 39, 44, 45, 55, 56, 59, 68, 99–126, 131, 134, 148–150, 165, 167, 170, 178, 215, 222, 226, 227, 230, 241, 245–252, 255, 257–259, 261, 263 De Viris Illustribus, 78, 100–103 De Vita Caesarum, 100, 103, 103n7, 109n20, 124, 125 Life of Augustus Divus, 22, 100, 102, 104, 105, 109n19, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 123, 124, 136, 222 Life of Claudius Divus, 116, 124, 245–247, 253, 261 Life of Domitian, 27, 99, 102, 111, 118n35 Life of Gaius (Caligula), 55, 112–116 Life of Julius Caesar Divus, 68, 100, 103, 106–110, 124, 226, 255 Life of Nero, 259 Life of Tiberius, 22, 28, 100, 104, 105, 110–112, 114, 115, 117, 124 Lives of the Famous Whores, 103 Ludricra Historia, 100, 103 Swain, Simon, 167n8 Syncrisis (in Plutarch), 78

 INDEX 

T Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 39, 107, 111, 214, 226, 246, 256, 257, 261 Tartt, Donna, 256 Tempest, Kathryn, 15, 250 Terence (Publius Terentius Afer), 103 Theodora, Empress, 119–122, 243, 256 Theophrastus, 45 Theoria, 63 Thevet, André, 83 Thomasius, Gottfried, 147 Thucydides, 51–53, 73, 75, 204, 209, 261 Tiberius Caesar, Emperor, 22, 28, 81, 100, 104, 105, 110–112, 114, 115, 117, 124, 246, 247, 255, 256 Timaeus, 75 Tiro, Marcus Tullius, 261 Tolstoy, Count Lev, 75, 141 Trajan, Emperor, 2, 17, 104 Trevelyan, George Macaulay, 212, 228, 228n11 Trevelyan, George Otto, 142 Trinity, Christian Doctrine of, 172, 177, 243n45 Trollope, Anthony, 122 Truth, the nature of, 37 Twardowska, Karmilla, 62n42 Typology, biblical, 206 U Uglow, Jenny, 54 V Varro, Marcus Terentius, 78 Vespasian, Emperor, 61, 100

273

Vidal, Gore, 113, 257 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 2, 3, 14, 19, 95, 230, 249 Voragine, Jacobus de, 206 W Wallace, Lew, 257, 257n4 Walsh, Robin, 59 Wardle, David, 110 Watt, Ian, 45 Waugh, Evelyn, 163, 164, 185 Weiss, Peter, 6 Whitby, Synod of, 181 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von, 44 Wilde, Oscar, 155, 156, 156n58, 223, 224, 227, 252 Williams, Bernard, 51, 51n27, 52, 73 Williams, Rowan, 173n16 Wilson, A.N., 134, 134n14, 156, 157, 157n60, 251 Winkworth, Catherine, 202 Winter, Simon, 55 Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas, 206 Woolf, Virginia, ix, x, 53, 200, 217, 239 Wouters, Cornélie, 22 Wright, N.T. (“Tom”), 133 X Xenophon of Athens, 46–49, 53, 56–58, 74, 94, 134, 190, 232, 235–237, 248, 251 Z Zosimus Historicus, 166, 166n6