COLLOQUIUM: Loren Samons, Boston University, “What’s Wrong with Samons’ Pericles?”

Is it possible to write a “biography” of a fifth-century Athenian?  What justifies (or dooms) such an attempt? In the case of Pericles, problems of Thucydides’ composition and the historian's method of presenting speeches complicate the situation dramatically, rendering any attempted biography open to criticism on numerous levels.  Professor L. J. Samons will illustrate the weaknesses in his newly published Pericles and the Conquest of History while attempting to justify the attempt to write a “political biography” of this seminal figure in the history of democracy and imperialism.