De Viris Illustribus (Lives of Eminent Commanders)
De Viris Illustribus
Non-Roman military and political greatness, mostly Greek generals, deserves biography written for a Roman audience because virtue and achievement, not Roman citizenship, are what make a life worth recording.
- Latin biography as a genre founded here for Roman readers
- foreign, largely Greek, exemplars judged by universal virtue
- brevity and moral character over historical completeness
- survives mainly because bound with the Life of Atticus
The only substantially surviving portion of Cornelius Nepos's larger biographical collection covers the lives of foreign, chiefly Greek, generals and statesmen, from Miltiades and Themistocles through Hannibal, along with two Roman lives, Cato and his own close friend Atticus, that survived because they were bound with the foreign lives in the manuscript tradition. Written in a plain style explicitly aimed at readers without much Greek learning, the biographies are short, moralizing, and more interested in character and reputation than in full historical accuracy, marking Nepos as the founder of Latin biography, a genre later developed with far greater sophistication by Suetonius.
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