“He is one of the immortals”: The Reception of Cornelius Nepos

Molly M. Pryzwansky (Duke University)

Despite Cicero’s (to my mind) praise of Cornelius Nepos (ad Att. 16.5.5), the biographer has traditionally been held in low esteem by Classicists. Nepos’ style and research methods have been disparaged (e.g., Horsfall 1982, 290-2). Even when his Lives are considered to be inventive, credit for their originality is stripped from the author: Geiger, although he argues that Nepos launched the new genre of political biography (1985, 66), nevertheless suggests that Atticus came up with the idea (82, 99-101, 104, 107, 112). Nepos’ poor reputation is tied to three factors. First, until the 19^th c., Nepos’ work was largely misidentified. The Lives of Foreign Generals come to us in MSS bearing the name of a 5^th-c. complier, Aemilius Probus, which has led many to identify Probus as their author. For example, North’s popular Plutarch, published in 7 eds. from 1579 to 1676, also featured “lives of nine other excellent chieftaines of warre, collected out of Æmylius Probus.” Like North’s, the majority of eds. down to the 19^th c. cite Probus as the biographer (Marshall 1977, 1). Some scholars, in fact, still question the attribution of the Foreign Generals to Nepos (e.g., Schmidt 2001, who favors Hyginus). All of this means that Nepos has been largely anonymous, and that his work lacks the cachet of being a time-honored “Classic”.

Second, because Nepos’ Lives are often published as either single biographies or “selections,” readers (and commentators) tend to focus on “mistakes” in the individual Life rather than seek out broader themes from the corpus as a whole, the phenomenon of “not seeing the forest for the trees.” When one frets, for example, over Nepos’ confusion of the two Miltiades (the hero of Marathon and the colonizer of the Chersonese, Milt. 1-2), one misses the fact that forms of tyrannus and libertas appear multiple times across all the Lives (39 and 53, respectively). To my mind, such language suggests that Nepos was interested in political, not just military, themes in his Lives of Foreign Generals, aptly so considering that his contemporaries Pompey, Caesar, and Augustus all merged politics with military might (Dionisotti 1988).

Third, Nepos’ reputation has suffered for the simple fact that he is a biographer (Titchener 2003, 97-9). Biography is not a highly respected genre; historians tend to scorn it for being too gossipy (e.g. Syme 1971), while students of literature avoid it for being either too artless or too “historiographical.” As a result, sparse scholarly attention has been devoted to Nepos either as an historian or as a writer.

In closing, I offer some suggestions for how the study of Nepos might continue more profitably in the future. Increased scholarly attention to both Nepos’ historical circumstances and his place in the literary tradition—not only as a biographer, but also as a writer more generally—is welcome. But above all, I propose that we move beyond what Nepos has got “wrong” to look instead at what sort of information he repeatedly distorts, omits, and/or inserts across his Lives. This, in my view, will open many doors for it will allow us to hone in on not only Nepos’ themes, but also his literary influences, philosophical and political leanings, education, and sources, among other things.