| Summary: | Greek works On Ways of Life have been seen to consist in either collections of biographies or proper philosophical treatises. Recently, a unitary reading of this literary phenomenon has been advanced, but some fundamental evidence has escaped attention. This evidence, along with what remains of Epicurus and Chrysippus' Peri biōn , suggests that in antiquity this label actually encompassed two essentially different genres: a mostly biographical one, which was cultivated by fourth/third-century BC Peripatetic philosophers and imperial writers, and a moral-philosophical one, which was first developed by Epicurus and Chrysippus and then cultivated by Academic and Peripatetic thinkers in the Hellenistic period and in later centuries.
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