Editing Autobiography (section)

=== The classical period: Apologia, oration, confession ===
In antiquity such works were typically entitled ''[[apologia]]'', purporting to be self-justification rather than self-documentation. The title of [[John Henry Newman]]'s 1864 Christian confessional work ''[[Apologia Pro Vita Sua]]'' refers to this tradition.

The historian [[Flavius Josephus]] introduces his autobiography ''Josephi Vita''  ({{Circa|99}}) with self-praise, which is followed by a justification of his actions as a Jewish rebel commander of Galilee.<ref>Steve Mason, Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary. Life of Josephus : translation and commentary, Volume 9</ref>

The [[rhetor]] [[Libanius]] ({{Circa|314}}–394) framed his life memoir ''Oration I'' (begun in 374) as one of his [[orations]], not of a public kind, but of a literary kind that would not be read aloud in privacy.

[[Augustine of Hippo]] (354–430) applied the title ''[[Confessions (St. Augustine)|Confessions]]'' to his autobiographical work, and [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]] used the same title in the 18th century,  initiating the chain of confessional and sometimes racy and highly self-critical autobiographies of the [[Romantic era]] and beyond.  Augustine's was arguably the first Western autobiography ever written, and became an influential model for Christian writers throughout the [[Middle Ages]]. It tells of the [[hedonistic]] lifestyle Augustine lived for a time within his youth, associating with young men who boasted of their sexual exploits; his following and leaving of the anti-sex and anti-marriage [[Manichaeism]] in attempts to seek sexual morality; and his subsequent return to [[Christianity]] due to his embracement of [[philosophical scepticism|Skepticism]] and the [[New Academy]] movement (developing the view that sex is good, and that virginity is better, comparing the former to silver and the latter to gold; Augustine's views subsequently strongly influenced Western theology<ref>Fiorenza and Galvin (1991), p. 317</ref>). ''Confessions'' is considered one of the great masterpieces of western literature.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Chadwick|first1=Henry|title=Confessions|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=9780199537822|pages=4 (ix)|date=2008-08-14}}</ref>

[[Peter Abelard]]'s 12th-century ''[[Historia Calamitatum]]'' is in the spirit of Augustine's ''Confessions'', an outstanding autobiographical document of its period.