Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity
Poets, Artists and Biography

Examines how the biographical traditions of ancient poets and artists parallel the creative processes of biographers themselves, both within antiquity and beyond.

Richard Fletcher (Edited by), Johanna Hanink (Edited by)

9781316612040, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 19 August 2021

383 pages, 6 b/w illus.
21.5 x 14 x 2 cm, 0.488 kg

'Overall it is a study in receptions, and frequently the reception of receptions as audiences of one period or culture layer impressions upon those of their predecessors.' Eleanor Winsor Leach, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

What happened when creative biographers took on especially creative subjects (poets, artists and others) in Greek and Roman antiquity? Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity examines how the biographical traditions of ancient poets and artists parallel the creative processes of biographers themselves, both within antiquity and beyond. Each chapter explores a range of biographical material that highlights the complexity of how readers and viewers imagine the lives of ancient creator-figures. Work in the last decades has emphasized the likely fictionality of nearly all of the ancient evidence about the lives of poets, as well as of other artists and intellectuals; this book now sets out to show what we might nevertheless still do with the rich surviving testimony for 'creative lives' - and the evidence that those traditions still shape how we narrate modern lives too.

List of illustrations
Part I. Opening Remarks: 1. Orientation: what we mean by 'creative lives' Johanna Hanink and Richard Fletcher
2. 'Lives' as parameter: the privileging of ancient lives as a category of research c.1900 Constanze Güthenke
Part II. Dead Poets Societies: 3. Close encounters with the ancient poets Barbara Graziosi
4. Recognizing Virgil Andrew Laird
Part III. Lives in Unexpected Places: 5. A poetic possession: Pindar's Lives of the poets Anna Uhlig
6. What's in a Life? Some forgotten faces of Euripides Johanna Hanink
7. Lives from stone: epigraphy and biography in Classical and Hellenistic Greece Polly Low
Part IV. Laughing Matters and Lives of the Mind: 8. On bees, poets and Plato: ancient biographers' representations of the creative process Mary Lefkowitz
9. The life and philosophy of Aristippus in the Socratic epistles Kurt Lampe
10. Imagination dead imagine: Diogenes Laertius' work of mourning Richard Fletcher
Part V. Portraits of the Artist: 11. 'It is Orpheus when there is singing': the mythical fabric of musical lives Pauline A. LeVen
12. The artists as anecdote: creating creators in ancient texts and modern art history Verity Platt
13. Freud and the biography of antiquity Miriam Leonard
Envoi John Henderson
Works cited.

Subject Areas: Philosophy: aesthetics [HPN], History: specific events & topics [HBT], History: earliest times to present day [HBL], Regional & national history [HBJ], History [HB], Architecture [AM], Art treatments & subjects [AG], Art forms [AF], History of art / art & design styles [AC], The arts: general issues [AB]