The latest publication in the NAPS Patristic Monograph Series.
Arthur Urbano, The Philosophical Life: Biography and the Crafting of Intellectual Identity in Late Antiquity (Catholic University of America Press, 2013).
Ancient biographies were more than accounts of the deeds of past heroes and guides for moral living. They were also arenas for debating pressing philosophical questions and establishing intellectual credentials, as Arthur P. Urbano argues in this study of biographies composed in Late Antiquity. With its origins in the competing philosophical schools of Hellenistic Greece, the genre of the “philosophical life” provided verbal portraits of paradigmatic figures – usually rulers and philosophers – that epitomized diverse approaches to knowledge, piety, and the virtuous life. An eruption of biographical literature in Late Antiquity attests to a similar, but more intense, struggle to influence the future directions of religion, education, politics, and morality in the Roman Empire as leaders of Neoplatonism and Christianity engaged one another through historical figures.