Introduction: Nepos in His Context

Rex S. Stem (University of California, Davis)

Serving as an introduction to the panel as a whole, this paper will have three parts. The first part will survey the current state of scholarship on Nepos, documenting the arguments of both his detractors and his admirers, and suggesting that the way forward is to examine Nepos not so much for the historicity of his extant work but for the cultural context of the attitudes contained within his work.

In the second part, I will advocate the importance of considering Nepos in his own historical context as a voice for the fractured cultural moment that was the Triumviral period (for the approach, see Osgood 2006). On the one hand, Nepos was a friend of Cicero who imbues his extant biographies with republican ideals (Dionisotti 1988), yet on the other, he passively awaits the decision of Actium and does not even mention the death of Cicero in his biography of Cicero’s best friend Atticus. Although au courant with the leading intellectuals of the period, Nepos wrote at least some of his biographies for an audience not presumed to know that a medimnus at Athens was the equivalent of six modii at Rome (Att. 2.6). These contradictory indicators cannot and need not be fully reconciled, for it is precisely because Nepos does not neatly fit into one category (e.g., Republican or Augustan, elite or populist) that he can enlarge our perspective on the transitional Triumviral years.

Of particular interest is Nepos’ praise for Atticus’ political neutrality, which suggests a “third way” among intellectual circles during the civil wars that brought the Republic to an end (see Millar 1988). Nepos even has Atticus say that duties for friends should be fulfilled without regard to political alliance (officia amicis praestanda sine factione existimaret, Att. 8.4), a position of principle that complicates Cicero’s assertion that a friend should never ask a friend to do anything contra rem publicam (De Amicitia 36-44). Also instructive is comparison with Gaius Matius, who claimed to have followed Caesar into civil war for reasons of personal friendship regardless of political aims (Cic., ad fam. 11.27-8). Atticus similarly privileged the personal, but nevertheless always appeared the optimate (Att. 6.1). One must not simply equate Atticus’ views with Nepos’, but the tone of the Atticus is personal and defensive and Nepos does not conceal his own sympathy for Atticus’ habits (Att. 13.7). Both men pursued scholarly lives involved only indirectly in politics and both successfully negotiated the dangers of the civil wars. Hence Nepos’ defense of Atticus’ life suggestively applies to his own life. Nepos should not be assumed to be apolitical or morally simple, but rather a patriotic and moralizing author looking to maintain and demonstrate his integrity in a very rapidly changing political and social climate. Examining Nepos in his context yields rewards denied to those who ignore him as an undistinguished thinker.

The third part of this talk will move from this conclusion to introduce the themes and shared assumptions of the following panelists, and in particular the ways in which the combination of the speakers on the panel offer a more rounded picture of Nepos’ work and achievement than previous scholarship has done. (For more on parts one and three, see the panel proposal.)