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Nepos, Cornelius

Nepos, Cornelius

c. 110 BCE–c. 25 BCE · Rome

Cornelius Nepos (c. 110 – c. 25 BCE) was a Roman biographer and historian from Cisalpine Gaul who spent his working life in Rome, where he associated with Cicero, Atticus, and Catullus. He is best known for De viris illustribus, a multi-book collection of comparative biographies of notable Romans and foreigners; the surviving portion, De excellentibus ducibus exterarum gentium, contains lives of foreign (mostly Greek) generals, including those of Chabrias and Conon. As the earliest known biographer to write in Latin, he produced concise prose that made the work a long-standing school text. He also wrote a now-lost universal chronicle (Chronica) and other historical and biographical works that survive only in fragments.

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RomeרומאItaly

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About Rome

Rome, on the Tiber in central Italy, grew from an Iron Age settlement into the capital of the Roman Republic and then of an empire that by the 1st century CE ruled the whole Mediterranean. Its Jewish community, attested from the 2nd century BCE, is among the oldest in Europe. Christian tradition holds that the apostles Peter and Paul died there, and the city became the seat of the popes. After the Western Empire ended in 476 it passed to Gothic kings, to Byzantium and then to papal rule as capital of the Papal States, until it became the capital of unified Italy in 1871. Vatican City, independent since 1929, lies within it.

In Rome at the same time

Posidonius of Apamea, Cicero, Quintus Tullius Cicero, Lucretius, Sallust, Parthenius of Nicaea

Across the traditions, in Rome at the same time

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In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Nepos, Cornelius’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

Across the traditions

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Nepos, Cornelius’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(25)