In telling the story of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela , Ovid transformed tragedy—the Tereus of Sophocles1—into epic. The result was a narrative that followed the tragic plot but with a very different presentation. For example, Ovid incorporated into his episode events from the play's prologue, such as the marriage of Procne and Tereus , the birth of Itys , and the voyage of Tereus to Athens . In addition, he brought offstage action into the limelight, including the violation of Philomela (...) , the slaughter of Itys , and the metamorphoses of Tereus and the sisters . Finally, he explicated innermost thoughts, like the lust of Tereus and the rage of Procne — emotions whose external manifestations would have been clear in performance, but whose effects the reader perceives from the inside out. So sequential and immediate a treatment owes much to the shift from one genre to the other. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Art of Biography in Antiquity by Tomas HäggDan CurleyTomas Hägg. The Art of Biography in Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xv + 496 pp. Cloth, $110.We know less about the genre of ancient biography than handbooks and brief surveys would have us believe. Genres by their nature invite definition, and historiographical perspectives on this genre in particular promote tidy classifications and clear lines of influence. Tomas (...) Hägg’s Art of Biography in Antiquity, which undertakes close readings of some eight-hundred years’ worth of biographical authors and texts, not only recognizes but also embraces ancient life-writing as a vast, polymorphous, versatile, and lacunary enterprise. For those of us who, like this reviewer, prefer to read the works of ancient biographers in literary terms, this is the book we have been wanting.Hägg’s “Prolegomena” are brief but cover the critical issues surrounding ancient biography (and, by way of comparison or contrast, modern biography). Chief among these are the question of the biographical genre itself, which Hägg acknowledges “is more subject matter than form” (3), and the welcome recuperation of biography as the product of “creative imagination” from its traditional status as a “sub-branch of historiography” (3). Hägg distinguishes historiography from historicity—namely, the biographer’s evaluation of, and approaches to, his sources—and he enumerates what might be considered biographical biases, from [End Page 713] the emphasis on public rather than private life, to transference between author and subject, to the inventive bridging of gaps, to the tension between cradle-to-grave chronology and characterization in the moment. Brevity courts controversy, and Hägg cautions that “no systematic treatment of biographic theory and practice is intended” (1). Yet his prolegomena lay out clear guideposts for the case studies of later chapters, which make a more or less chronological exploration of the genre.Chapter 1, even as it postulates Xenophon as the most important (or, at least, the most prolific) proto-biographer, discusses a range of fifth-and fourth-century b.c.e. texts and the ways in which they are—and, just as often, are not— biographies: Ion of Chios, Epidemiai; Plato, Apology and Phaedo; Xenophon, Memorabilia; Isocrates, Evagoras; Xenophon, again, Agesilaus and Cyropaedia. It is no small task to trace the development of a genre given a vexed chronology, the differing purposes of these texts, and uncertainty as to how much influence their authors exerted upon one another. The Epidemiai offers a sympotic anecdote about Sophocles (preserved in Ath. 13.603e–4d) that illuminates the tragedian’s character. The Apology and the Phaedo together display and interpret the life of Socrates as “an ethical unity” (19), the former a retrospective defense of the philosopher’s career, the latter ending with a scenic description of his death. The Memorabilia, in turn, paints a “consistent, pregnant picture” (27) of Socrates’ persona with its serial anecdotes. The Evagoras confirms its own status as written encomium (graphein) and introduces what would become standard topoi, such as its subject’s genealogy, childhood, and methods of ruling. Likewise, the Agesilaus, which emphasizes writing to an even greater degree and dichotomizes the Spartan king’s deeds and their underlying virtues. The Cyropaedia, therefore, is a pinnacle of proto-biography, extending from Cyrus’ childhood to his fictional, idealized death. Although Hägg reads each work on its own terms, and avoids an overly simplistic taxonomy, his emphasis on the unbiographical qualities of his case studies is at times counterproductive. Furthermore, he tends to conclude his discussions with considerations of “the biographical,” as if the preceding analyses—frequently engaged with the aforementioned topoi—have had little bearing. This said, chapter 1 describes a genre developing along lines that later biographers, and their readers, would have recognized.Chapter 2, a survey of Hellenistic biographers, is on firmer (albeit more fragmentary) ground, perhaps because the texts of this era regularly have bios in their titles and therefore help to establish “an unmistakably biographical form” (67). Hägg considers examples from the three traditional sub-categories of Hellenistic “professional biography” (97), namely, the philosophic, the literary, and the political: Aristoxenus’ Pythagoras and Socrates; Satyrus’ Life of Euripides... (shrink)