Arthur Urbano sets out a comprehensive and convincing account of the ways in which Christians and pagans (referred to as Greeks by Urbano) used biographical literature to contest with one another about the nature of philosophy. This reading of late antique biographies builds on earlier work (most notably Patricia Cox [Miller]'s 1982 classic Biography in late antiquity), but Urbano offers a more comprehensive and wide-ranging discussion of the question than any preceding study. He argues cogently that one should not look at Christian biography as a scavenging operation through which Christian outsiders lifted elements from the culture that predated them. Instead, pagan and Christian philosophers participated in a competition in which each asserted ownership over a largely common intellectual space. After an introduction laying out the nature of his project and the specific approaches that he will take, Urbano organises his study around pairs of thematically similar texts that show Christians and pagans using biography to define their particular versions of philosophical community. Some of these pairings (like the Life of Moses and the Life of Pythagoras) are not surprising, but others provide novel and intriguing analytical possibilities. The parallel analysis of the Life of Saint Macrina and Eunapius’ discussion of Sosipatra in the Lives of the sophists and philosophers, for example, shows how authors of biographies struggled to expand their paradigms to define the influence of female philosophers. In this chapter, Urbano does a particularly good job of explaining how the biographers of these women highlighted the difference between the teaching that they provided and the less elevated instruction offered by female teachers of letters. Overall, The philosophical life makes it clear that philosophy was a common heritage whose validity pagans and Christians accepted. Philosophical biography then represented a powerful literary weapon that both groups used to try to claim philosophy as their own. Urbano then suggests that philosophy belonged to neither pagans nor Christians in late antiquity, a claim that moves us closer to a conception of late ancient thought that takes seriously both groups’ claims to the classical philosophical legacy. This is perhaps the book's most important contribution.