Part 2. Biographies and History
As previous chapters have noted (esp. ch. 5) and some subsequent chapters (esp. chs. 10–11) will elaborate, ancient audiences recognized that biographers would exercise some flexibility in how they recounted their stories. For full biographies in the early empire, however, this flexibility did not normally extend to creating events.
Authors of full biographies in the early empire used this genre in particular rather than, say, a nonbiographic moral essay, because they sought to learn and teach from the past. Although their purpose was often to collect moral illustrations, poetry and imagination could also supply these. Biography specifically drew its moral illustrations from the lives of figures of the past. Indeed, the historiographic side of ancient biography and the biographic side of ancient historiography overlapped considerably, especially in the early empire. Sometimes it even appears debatable to which of these two genres a work belongs, or whether the authors of such borderline works even considered such a distinction (see ch. 6).
Historical interests did not mean that ancient authors followed modern historiographic rules. Ancient readers expected their historians to tell a good story, to reconstruct and recount scenes the way they might have (or most likely) happened. Most principles of modern historiography, however, do have ancient precedent, and ancient historiography, for all its frequent rhetorical pretensions, was expected to deal in actual events (ch. 7). Many scholars assign Luke-Acts to the genre of ancient historical writing (ch. 8).
Biographers and historians admitted that material from centuries earlier could contain legends, but they expressed much greater confidence in reports of more recent events, especially those within living memory. This is the subject of chapter 9.