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

"Memoir, encomium, romance In diesem Sinne ist der ideale, ja der postexistente Sokrates der reale, und der Sokrates samt seiner Xanthippe, den etwa die photographis-che Kleinkunst zeigen konnte, ist bedeutungslos, jaim hoheren Sinne unwirklich. Adolf von Harnack 1.1 glimpses of a prehistory The single most important force for the emergence of Greek biography in the fourth century BC, it has been convincingly argued, was the personal and historical impact of the figure of Socrates, as reconstructed or invented by the Socratic writers.1 But the one individual writer -- the creative mind -- to whom Greek biography owes most is no doubt Xenophon of Athens (ca. 430--ca. 354 bc), who wrote not only a memoir of Socrates, but also a prose encomium of the Spartan king Agesilaus and a romantic Life of the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great.2 Each of his three works displays a distinct biographical strategy: the privileged viewpoint at work in the Memorabilia, the novel literary structure of the Agesilaus, and the imaginative mixture of fact and fiction in the Cyropaedia. Xenophon accordingly provides three different literary models for future life-writers to merge and develop. Now, interest in the character, acts, and lifespan of an important individual was of course not unknown in Greek society before the fourth century. Speculation about the identity of Homer, his birthplace, travels, and death, began early, as the many references show that we find scattered in poetry, drama, and early prose. The corresponding legends of Hesiod's life had a starting-point in first person statements in his own poems, those of Archilochus perhaps also in local tradition on his native island of Paros. Solon and Simonides are further, not so distant, figures who attracted early"--

A revealing look at ancient art in the Menil Collection that addresses the problem of objects lacking archaeological context This innovative anthology discusses a diversity of ancient Mediterranean objects--a Mesopotamian votive figure, a Egyptian relief from the New Kingdom, and a Greek Geometric fawn among them--in the Menil Collection and three other US museums. It offers new models for understanding works from antiquity that lack archaeological context. Essays by 13 authors written with the layperson in mind employ a creative mixture of iconography, technical studies, and modern provenance research to gain insight into the meaning of the objects themselves and what they can teach us more broadly aboutarchaeology, art history, and collecting practices. They take on complex issues of cultural heritage, legality, and taste to bring to life works that are often consigned to either the imperial past or a conceptual limbo. Essays on related groups or single objects introduce fresh frameworks to engage with the multilayered history these objects represent. The eight object biographies on ancient artifacts in the Menil are the first in-depth studies published on the collection. Essays by seven university professors probe works in their areas of expertise, while those by seven curators lay bare one object biography; frame provenance studies at the San Antonio Museum of Art, Getty Museum, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and survey war's effect on ancient works. The editors' introduction and an epilogue responding to the other 13 texts review theoretical and practical issues in the study of artifacts lacking archaeological findspots (provenience). Recommended for programs and libraries in museum studies, archaeology, and art history; art and heritage law programs; and readers fascinated by cold-case detective work on the material culture of the ancient Mediterranean. Distributed for the Menil Collection

"Translation of a foundational text for the disciplines of art history and archaeology. Offers a systematic history of art in ancient Egypt, Persia, Etruria, Rome, and, above all, Greece that synthesizes the visual and written evidence then available"--Provided by publisher.

How did the statues of ancient Greece wind up dictating art history in the West? How did the material culture of the Greeks and Romans come to be seen as "classical" and as "art"? What does "classical art" mean across time and place? In this ambitious, richly illustrated book, art historian and classicist Caroline Vout provides an original history of how classical art has been continuously redefined over the millennia as it has found itself in new contexts and cultures. All of this raises the question of classical art's future. What we call classical art did not simply appear in ancient Rome, or in the Renaissance, or in the eighteenth-century Academy. Endlessly repackaged and revered or rebuked, Greek and Roman artifacts have gathered an amazing array of values, both positive and negative, in each new historical period, even as these objects themselves have reshaped their surroundings. Vout shows how this process began in antiquity, as Greeks of the Hellenistic period transformed the art of fifth-century Greece, and continued through the Roman empire, Constantinople, European court societies, the neoclassical English country house, and the nineteenth century, up to the modern museum. A unique exploration of how each period of Western culture has transformed Greek and Roman antiquities and in turn been transformed by them, this book revolutionizes our understanding of what classical art has meant and continues to mean.

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