HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

118 THOMAS J. HEFFERNANlargely absent from historical writing but was obligatory in biography.Nor could biography be covered by the epic genre, since it waswritten chiefly in prose and promoted the volitional act over that ofprovidence or fate. Biography inhabited a rhetorically ambiguousplace. Such liminal status allowed the form a freedom it would nothave otherwise enjoyed. Historical writing recorded what an individualdid; biography celebrated what he was. Biography emphasizedvirtue inherent in action outside the act’s meaning as a socio-politicalevent. Therefore, the rules governing evidence in biography weredifferent, although not necessarily less rigorous, than those governinghistorical writing. The focus of biography was on epideisis ratherthan authentication, on mimesis rather than reporting. 11In his Life of Pericles, Plutarch makes this distinction clear when hesays his purpose is to present virtuous deeds for contemplation sothat the reader will be filled with an eager desire to imitate themKa‹ proyum¤an ågvgÚn e‹w m¤mhsin §mpoie› to›w flstorÆsasin. 12 Classicalbiography recorded the exemplary deeds of virtuous men as modelsfor conduct. Men could aspire to imitate Pericles; God called Moses.Christian sacred biography fuses these two traditions, and the productis the righteous servant who by God’s grace chooses to imitateChrist. This twining of grace and will is fundamental to the constructionof agency in Christian sacred biography.Biography could serve as a forum of public moral suasion. Itsencomiastic tenor was a constant of the tradition from the earliesttimes. The Athenian orator Isocrates claimed his Evagoras (ca. 365B.C.) was the first to use this panegyric form in depicting a bios.Xenophon borrowed from Evagoras in his encomium of the Spartanking Agesilaus. Both authors depicted the life of their subject in twodistinctive ways: (1) with a chronological summary of the deeds, thepraxeis; and (2) with an interpretative scrutiny of the subject’s character,the ethos. 13 With the emergence of the Peripatetic School, andleading practitioners such as Aristoxenus, the emphasis shifted to theillustration of the ethical nature of heroic behavior, one’s ethos. InBioi Andron, Aristoxenus’s lives of Socrates, Plato, and others, the11Stancliffe (1983), 88; Heffernan (1988), 145–50.12Plutarch, Lives III.2–3, ed. and trans. B. Perrin, vol. 3, Loeb Classical Library(Cambridge, 1916).13Leo (1901), 91–92.