The classical art of life-writing persuasion always embraced persuasion as much as verisimilitude. Developed in ancient Athens to celebrate the dead and exemplify the morality of the philosophers, perpetuated in Rome to inspire public virtue and commemorate great men, biography resembled other forms of portraiture, stylised and conventional perhaps, but exposing none the less the artist's intentions, his skill, and his relations with both his subject and the conventions of his genre. The idealising tendencies of the pagan bios and vita were reinforced by a complementary tradition, that of epideictic rhetoric, formulated by Aristotle in his Rhetoric I.9 and summarised by Cicero in Ad Herennium. Here orators were to attribute praise and blame according to received categories, heightening observed characteristics to rhetorical and moral effect ‘for all speakers praise or blame in regard to existing qualities, but they also make use of other things, both reminding [the audience] of the past and projecting the course of the future’. Biography reached the libraries of the early Middle Ages in processed form, contained by the efforts of late antique hagiographers who rendered the old tradition in the light of Christian philosophy and created a canon for the consumption of contemporaries and future readers. Like the pagan bios and vita, the lives of saints offered anecdote and exemplification, they commemorated departed heroes, linking the living and the dead, but after the end of antiquity increasingly they served to bridge a cultural gulf, giving human form to a Christian message from an increasingly alien culture.