Miracles in Greek Biography

Abstract

In archaic and classical Greece, stories about the lives of poets and philosophers strongly depended on oral traditions which were shaped according to the standards of folktale legend. Miracles were a customary component of such traditions. They mainly concerned phases of transition such as birth, death, initiation, and confirmed the otherness of the intellectual. Thanks to the antiquarian zeal of most writers of biographies after the creation of biography as a literary genre in the 4th cent. BC, motifs of this kind found access in written biographies. Patterns of the biographical tradition even appear in lives of contemporary and later philosophers such as Plato. In these scholarly oriented works miracles were either rationalized or treated in a way which subordinated the question of their historicity to the aesthetic aspects pertinent to their use in the new context. On the other hand, in historical biography miracle stories corroborate the text’s implicit rhetoric.