This essay seeks to reevaluate the traditional characterization of the Vita Karoli Magni as the first secular biography of the middle ages, a work which self-consciously used Suetonius in order to adapt the written traditions of hagiography and shape a distinctively "imperial" ideal of Carolingian kingship. Instead, it reconstructs the context of Ciceronian rhetoric to which Einhard is known to have been familiar and with which the writing of history and res gestae was closely associated. An awareness of the general rules of epideictic, deliberative, and, above all, forensic rhetoric, it is argued, sheds considerable light not just on Einhard's influential fusion of biography with annals but on the status of the text as an implicit critique of Louis the Pious. Focusing on the generally neglected presence of Charlemagne's will in the text, the essay locates at least the genesis of Einhard's composition in the disturbed politics of 828-829, thereby tying it born to the Epitaphium Arsenii and to Einhard's own Translatio et miracula sancti Marcellini et Petri as evidence of vocal and articulated opposition to Louis's political and ecclesiastical activity.
