ne historiam scribere videar:
Nepos as Historiographer

John H. Starks, Jr. (SUNY, Binghamton)

Though Nepos, like his successor Plutarch, pointedly distinguishes his lives as biography rather than history (Pelop.1; Plut. Alex. 1), his programmatic pronouncement of genre acknowledges and promotes new perspectives on history and historians. As a writer of synchronistic history, geographical phenomena, rhetorical exempla, poetry, letters, and hundreds of biographical sketches, Nepos matches many of the literary interests and output of his contemporary polymath Varro and helps pave the way for later encyclopedists, including Pliny, Gellius, and Solinus who cite him frequently; unlike Varro, Nepos maintains his primary focus on comparative historiography in a Roman world digesting the Mediterranean past as contributory to its increasingly imperial present (see esp. Dionisotti 1988, Millar 1988).

Whether Catullus’ praise (1.5-7) for Nepos’ ‘uniquely daring’ three volumes of Chronica is a fully genuine acknowledgment of a friend’s success in scholarship of Alexandrian quality (Cairns 1969, Wiseman 1979, Decreus 1984) or a playfully sardonic jab at the incompatibility of neoteric sensibilities with stodgy or pedantic historicism (Elder 1967, Gibson 1995, Rauk 1996/7) (or most likely a typically Catullan blend of the two), the poet’s recognition does highlight the value of Nepos’ comparative, synchronistic approach to condensing annalistic history. In fact, Catullus’ brief comments appear to highlight several hallmarks of Nepos’ historiographic style and subject matter as frequently represented in the Lives: antithesis grounded in cultural comparison; comprehensive history with a methodology focused on chronology and condensation of events for rhetorical effect; the Italian provincial perspective of a political outsider at a time of great upheaval in Roman cultural institutions.

Nepos’ famous prefatory remarks on the importance of cross-cultural ethnography and especially his appeal to read normative behaviors from the perspective of the culture under consideration run throughout the extant biographies, but also in fragments of the Chronica (fr. 4-5,7-9 Marshall) and other works such as the Exempla and geographical works (fr. 12, 14-34). To this end, Nepos’ extant biographies often follow a standard rhetorical structure beginning with a statement of the individual’s national heritage, a broadly stated authorial assessment of the individual’s character standing as a rhetorical exordium, and a generally chronological accounting of the rise and fall of that character with particular attention to how many of them fell victim of their fellow-citizens or others whom they had aided significantly during their careers. The fickleness of these individuals’ fortunes, especially in the collection on foreign generals, is often the product of inter-cultural strife followed by domestic unrest. The resulting effect can be a rapid- fire succession of twists and turns, stratagems and plots, behaviors and actions that end tragically (cf. esp. Alcibiades, Datames, Hannibal). But such attention to sensational highlights for the sake of focused brevity does not prevent Nepos from attending to careful details when necessary, such as citation of multiple sources for an important date (Them. 9-10; Hann. 13). His facts are not always corroborated, but he does have a method.

In his attempts to avoid pure historical writing, but also while escaping the pitfalls of fawning encomia, Nepos offers Mediterranean history and cultural studies in different packages designed for a newly emerging Roman world.