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Biography and Autobiography |
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| Biography is, quite simply, the
account of a person's life as written by another individual. While an
autobiography is one's own account of their life or of events from their
own life.
Before the second half of the seventeenth century, biography was relatively rare. Notable exceptions include Plutarch's Parallel Lives and Tacitus' Histories and medieval hagiography (lives of the saints and martyrs). It is clear that biography evolved from ancient stories of gods and heroes. Even today. most biographies are written about individuals that society considers to have been heroic. Autobiography, on the other hand, first appeared as a term in 1809. Autobiography is more factually suspect than biography simply because one's memory is not always good and because negative events have a tendency to be re-written to favor the writer. The earliest surviving autobiography would appear to be Marcus Aurelius' Meditations from the second century AD. Some 600 years later Augustine's Confessions, proved to be the first autobiography of note in the Western tradition.
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A Branch of History |
Both biography and
autobiography serve as a branch of history in that they provide insight
into the characters that created the narrative that we call history.
Historian, biographer, and philosopher, born in Chaeronea, Boeotia, Greece. He studied in Athens and made several visits to Rome, where he gave public lectures in philosophy. His extant writings comprise Opera moralia, a series of essays on ethical, political, religious, and other topics, and several historical works, notably Bioi paralleloi (Parallel Lives), a gallery of 46 portraits of the great characters of preceding ages, each book consisting of a Greek and a Roman figure, sharing some resemblance. North's translation of his work into English (1579) was the source of Shakespeare's Roman plays. (From Biography.com) |
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 Augustine |
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