surprise us. As Richard Burridge points out: ‘biography is a type of writing which occurs naturally among groups of people who have formed around a certain charismatic teacher or leader, seeking to follow after him’. And later on he quotes Momigliano’s comment that ‘The educated man of the Hellenistic world was curious about the lives of famous people’.70 Which brings us back more or less to where we started (chapter 2, §6.2). To sum up, there is substantial circumstantial evidence on two points.