There must be a special place in hell reserved for biographers. And in the lowest part of the inferno suffer the biographers of ancient figures.

Plutarch wisely informed his readers that he was not a historian but a biographer, and was therefore more interested in the chance remark or anecdote revealing the subject's character than in the narrative of battles and great events. But Plutarch should have gone further, admitting that even the best descriptions of jokes, personal demeanor, and physical appearance cannot capture a human being's actual nature. A biographer – a word derived from Greek roots meaning “life writer” – remains a kind of charlatan, presenting depictions that may gain credence more by verisimilitude than by accuracy. By contrast, a historian who seeks to describe (say) a battle may have accounts of dozens of eyewitnesses and the testimony of commanding officers as well as the battlefield topography to help him reconstruct his nonetheless imperfect account of the event. But his object of study – the battle itself – remains insensate, without its own will or purpose, unconflicted by emotions and morals, without lost loves, false hopes, or crushed dreams. While a battle can be misrepresented, it cannot be defamed, its character or reputation cruelly twisted by the caprice, malice, or incompetence of the historian.

Perhaps this very fact about biography – its willingness to attempt the impossible while running the risk of either maligning or deifying its subject – has made it such a popular genre from antiquity to the present. Every reader of a biography knows (or should know) that the figure in the volume he is reading cannot be the real person, that something essential has been lost in the process of reducing a human life to a few thousand words. And yet we eagerly read on, gauging the written “life” against our own experience and estimates of plausibility.

Pericles of Athens lived before the creation of biography. Certainly during his lifetime and shortly thereafter Greeks composed works that included biographical information, especially anecdotes (often unflattering) about famous Athenians or other Greeks. Such stories often reflected the very obvious biases of their ultimate sources, a fact that will be helpful to keep in mind when we attempt to analyze them.