Ancient biography


Ancient biography, or bios, as distinct from modern biography, was a genre of Greek literature interested in describing the goals, achievements, failures, and character of ancient historical persons and whether or not they should be imitated.

Genre

Ancient biography, or bios, as distinct from modern biography, was a genre of Greek literature interested in describing the goals, achievements, failures, and character of ancient historical persons and whether or not they should be imitated.
Authors of ancient bios, such as the works of Nepos and Plutarch's Parallel Lives imitated many of the same sources and techniques of the contemporary historiographies of ancient Greece, notably including the works of Herodotus and Thucydides. There were various forms of ancient biographies, including:
  1. philosophical biographies that brought out the moral character of their subject ;
  2. literary biographies which discussed the lives of orators and poets ;
  3. school and reference biographies that offered a short sketch of someone including their ancestry, major events and accomplishments, and death;
  4. autobiographies, commentaries and memoirs where the subject presents his own life;
  5. historical/political biography focusing on the lives of those active in the military, among other categories.

    The Four Gospels

The consensus among modern scholars is that the gospels are a subset of this ancient genre of bios, or biography.

Gospel of John

The consensus of modern scholars is that the Gospel of John was written in the genre of Greco-Roman biography. John contains many characteristics of those writings belonging to the genre of Greco-Roman biography, a) internally; including establishing the origins and ancestry of the author externally; promotion of a particular hero, the domination of the use of verbs by the subject, the prominence of the final portion of the subjects life, the reference to the main subject in the beginning of the text, etc.