Greek biography and panegyric

Some years ago A. Momigliano, in a series of lectures on the development of Greek biography, contended that biography and its partner, the encomium, were products of the new historical curiosity that developed in the Greek world of the fifth century, BC.

The encomium subsequently became the domain of the rhetorician, while it was the philosophers who developed the idealised biography of the philosopher and the monarch.¹ Nevertheless, further study has demonstrated that rhetoric clearly remained an important element in biography though, from the point of view of genre, biography remained separate from the very stylized encomium.² In practice, however, the distinction between the two genres is not so clear; biographies are often clearly panegyrical and panegyrics are, at least in part, biographical, with neither having an a priori claim to accuracy; rather “in both instances, the ‘writer’ was a dramatist, creating movement, posture, and costume, just as much as d