After Ancient Biography

Modern Types and Classical Archetypes

Robert Fraser

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030351687
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030351694
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Marrying life-writing with classical reception, this book examines ancient biography and its impact on subsequent ages. Close readings of ancient texts are framed by an assessment of their influence on the age of the French Revolution and Napoleon, and on the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, of responses to ancient biography of modern critics, and of its visible legacy in art and film. Crucially it asks what modern biographers can learn from their ancient predecessors. Are the challenges involved in life-writing still the same? Have working methods changed, and in what ways? What in the context of biographical writing is truth, and how are its interests best served? How is it possible, now as then, honestly to convey a life?

© The Author(s) 2020

R. FraserAfter Ancient BiographyPalgrave Studies in Life Writinghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35169-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Paris in Parallel: Classical Biography in an Age of Revolution

Robert Fraser¹

(1)

Department of English and Creative Writing, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Robert Fraser

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Who does not know David’s painting of Marat in the bath? Done from the life—or rather from the death—it depicts the prolific author, one-time physician (MD, St Andrews) and now revolutionary journalist and self-styled “friend of the people” just a few hours after his assassination by the twenty-four-year-old Charlotte Corday in July 1793. Marat is lying on his side, a towel around his head, a quill in his dangling right hand. (Marat’s works included a Treatise on Light, An Essay on Slavery, and a helpful work on the treatment of gonorrhoea.) Before him is an improvised desk, a cloth-covered board on which he wrote while steeping himself in a medicinal salve of his own concoction. As a qualified and somewhat opinionated doctor he had decided that the skin complaint contracted in the sewers of Paris while hiding from his political opponents necessitated these ablutions for much of the day. In his left hand he holds a letter of introduction that Corday had brought under the pretext of exposing the enemies of the government. His face is so serene that he might be sleeping. There is more than a touch of the Christ from Michelangelo’s Pietà about him. His skin is smooth and white: no sign of the ravages of skin disease there. The light source is high up to his left and, again, it seems a sort of celestial beam. Here is a fit object for veneration as much as for lament: a martyr to the French Revolution then a mere four years old. A revolutionary icon, no less.

What are the messages implicit in this image? Since, depend on it, Jacques-Louis David, an associate of Robespierre and a vocal member of the Jacobin Club, intended his work to be didactic, and thus—despite earlier misgivings about this eccentric intellectual entertained by the Jacobin leadership—was it immediately received. That Marat died unjustly, certainly. That he was a thinker, a scholar, a hero probably, a martyr certainly, maybe even a secular saint. But it is the sculptural, clean-limned, neo-classical style of the picture that commands attention just as surely as its subject. Nineteen years earlier, David, then a student at the Académie royale, had won the academy’s coveted Prix de Rome with a depiction of a scene from Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius: “Eristratus Discovering the Causes of Antiochus’ Disease”. (Antiochus was in love with his mother-in-law, who had already borne him a child.) It had been David’s fourth attempt, having failed a third time the previous year with an equally lurid scene from Suetonius’s “Life of the Emperor Nero”: the suicide of the philosopher Seneca (also featuring a bath, but this time a foot-bath). The authorities at the Académie, naturally, chose the subject prescribed each year. Since 1775, when Louis XV1 had appointed Charles-Claude Flahaut de la Billaderie, Comte d’Angeviller as the new director with the instruction to found a new school of historical painting, preference had been given to classical themes.¹ In David’s case, this had often involved hunting for suitable sources in ancient biography. His eventual victory would far from exhaust his preoccupation the classics. After spending four years in Rome, he had painted a succession of episodes from Graeco-Roman literature. “The Oath of the Horatii” of 1784 drew on a scene from Livy; “The Dedication of the Eagles” copied images that the young David had observed on Trajan’s Column in the Forum. “The Death of Socrates” in 1787 derived its story from Plato, while in 1789, the year of the outbreak of the Revolution, “The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons” had extended a dramatic episode from the life of a founder of the Roman republic who features both in Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita and in Plutarch’s “Life of Poplicola”. In 1730 Voltaire had written a play about this particular Brutus, Lucius Junius Brutus, a remote ancestor of the more famous Marcus Brutus, the assassin of Julius Caesar. When revived in 1790, it gave rise to a fanatical wave of Republican enthusiasm and even a hairdo, la coiffure Brutus, copied from the curly crop sported by the actor who had played one of the fated sons. When in June 1820 an aspiring young painter asked the mature David how to choose a subject for a new canvas, the veteran master replied in three words “Feuillez votre Plutarque”: “Browse through your Plutarch”.² Understandably so, since it had been the lives of those designated, in Bishop Amyot’s sixteenth-century French translation of Plutarch, “hommes illustres Grecs et Romains” which had provided the most dependable source for his paintings.³ Which brings us back again to Marat and his young murderess Charlotte Corday.

Marie-Anne Charlotte Corday d’Armont had been born in 1768 in the village of Saint-Saturnin-des-Limoges in the commune of Écorches near Caen in Normandy. Her people were decayed gentry, royalist in sympathy, who had seen better days. The playwright Pierre Corneille (1606–1684), as she was only too aware, was a remote ancestor. He had drawn several of his plots from classical sources, frequently highlighting the dynamic role of his women characters. His first tragedy to be staged, Medéé (1635), had taken its story from Euripides, and it had stressed Medea’s plight and decisiveness. The storyline of La Mort de Pompeé (1642) showcased the would-be assassin Cornelia: it was derived from Plutarch, who had depicted her as a geometer, philosopher and expert player on the lyre. The plot of Oedipe, the Sun King’s favourite among his works, came from Sophocles. One of his last plays Tite et Bérénice (1670) drew on the Lives of the Twelve Caesars by Suetonius and vividly evoked the desolation of Berenice, the Jewish queen, who was banished from Rome by the Emperor to placate the xenophobia of the populace.⁴

So Corday had grown up beneath an ample shade of literature, much of it ancient and biographical, which she was disposed to read in a proto-feminist light. She had extended this debt to the classics in early adolescence. After her mother and elder sister died, her grief-stricken father had sent her to the convent of L’Abbaye des Dames in Caen, in the library of which she discovered works by Voltaire, Rousseau and Plutarch. Rousseau, as she would have read in his Confessions, had enjoyed an enthusiasm for Plutarch’s Lives as a young man.⁵ Since there is no evidence that she had been taught Greek, Corday must have read them in the sixteenth-century translation by Bishop Jacques Amyot, rendered from a manuscript in the Vatican. It was an internationally famous version on which even the Englishman Sir Thomas North had relied for his translation of 1579–1603. (North knew no more Greek than did Shakespeare who, consequently, had taken all of his Plutarch-derived plots from him.)

Corday had been twenty-one, and still at L’Abbaye des Dames, when the Revolution erupted. Two years afterwards, she left the Convent and lodged with her aunt and cousin in the centre of the town, where she imbibed a local, and distinctively provincial, view of national politics. She had never been to Paris, where the revolution was fast adopting a more extreme course.⁶ The local newspaper covered the whirlpooling events: the Tennis Court Oath, the calling of the Estates-General, the splitting of the Third Estate into factions. Notably among the cliques was La Montagne (The Mountain, thus named since they sat at a high bench) including the vocal Jacobin Club which championed the cause of the urban proletariat and insisted on the guillotining of the King. Against them were ranged the Girondins, provincial based, who counselled less desperate measures. Charlotte was strongly influenced by the Girondins, who were very active in Caen. Her aunt’s house where she now lodged overlooked l’intendance, their headquarters in town, and she had met some of their ring-leaders, notably Charles Jean-Marie Barbaroux. She was just twenty-two when news arrived of the execution of the King and Queen in the newly renamed Place de la Révolution, previously la Place Louis XV, now and ironically La Place de la Concorde. Though Charlotte had grown up in a royalist family, she now regarded herself as firmly republican. The Girondins offered a middle way, epitomised for her by the wife of one of their leaders, Madame de Roland, born Manon Philipion⁷ whose political education, like Corday’s, had owed much to Plutarch. At the age of nine she had carried a copy of his works to Mass each Sunday, and later wrote “It was at that moment that I date the impression of ideas that were to make me a republican”.⁸ Both women were very conscious that the balance of power in the Convention in Paris was shifting in favour of Les Montagnards. Robespierre was their ring-leader, Marat their mouthpiece: his newspaper L’Ami du Peuple was easily to be acquired in the streets of Caen.

The climax to the story is related by Jean Epois in his L’Affaire Corday/Marat: Prélude à la Terreur.⁹ In the second week of July 1793 Corday told her widowed father that she was going to pay a visit to England. Instead, on Tuesday 9th, her cousin saw her off on the Paris diligence. As she entered the carriage she held a copy—presumably an octavo, one-volume edition—of the Amyot Plutarch to allay the tedium of the two-day journey. At five o’ clock on the afternoon of the 11th she alighted in the capital. Then she and her Plut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Paris in Parallel: Classical Biography in an Age of Revolution
• 2. Ancient Biographers and Modern Classicists: “What Is Truth?”
• 3. Biography as Representation: Plutarch’s Parallel Lives
• 4. Biography as Censure: Suetonius and Procopius
• 5. Biography as Persuasion: The Christian Gospels
• 6. Biography as Inner Drama: Athanasius’s Life of Antony
• 7. Heroic Biography: Carlyle & Co
• 8. Caustic Biography: Strachey & Co.
• 9. Conclusion: “Beauty Is Terror”
• Correction to: Biography as Censure: Suetonius and Procopius
• Back Matter