Cornelius Nepos

Cornelius Nepos (b. c. 110–d. c. 25 bce) is the first biographer in Latin whose works survive and the first biographer from antiquity whose surviving works include a series of lives of political men. He is not known to have been involved in politics, and he seems to have lived a quiet, scholarly life. He was friends with some of the distinguished literary minds of his time: Catullus dedicated a collection of poems to him, two books of his correspondence with Cicero were later collected, and Atticus shared his interest in chronological and antiquarian research. Most of his attested corpus is lost: the Chronica in three books, an Exempla in at least five books, and a very large biographical collection titled On Famous Men, which probably contained over three hundred brief lives in at least sixteen paired books comparing Romans and non-Romans in different areas of achievement. All that survives of On Famous Men (and, in fact, of Nepos’s entire corpus) are two individual lives (Cato [the Elder], Atticus) from the book On Roman Historians and the complete book On Foreign Generals, which contains the lives of twenty-two subjects (averaging less than four pages each). His style is plain and his tone moralizing, but he brings the Greek past to bear on his Roman present in a direct and highly accessible way. No ancient author cites the surviving portion of Nepos’s corpus, yet his influence can be perceived on later biographers such as Suetonius and Plutarch as well as on other scholarly Latin writers such as Pliny the Elder and Aulus Gellius.