Commento al Liber de excellentibus ducibus exterarum gentium di Cornelio Nepote. I comandanti del V sec. a.C.

The dissertation proposes a philological, stylistic, grammatical, and historical commentary to Cornelius' Nepos Liber de excellentibus ducibus exterarum gentium, trying to fill a gap in Latin studies. The Liber, part of a more extended De viris illustribus now extensively lost, is composed by twenty-two biographies (chronologically arranged) of non-Romans commanders and a short section De regibus. This commentary will focus only on the first eight Lives: the eminent generals of the Vth century B.C., respectively Miltiades, Themistocles, Aristides, Pausanias, Cimon, Lysander, Alcibiades, Thrasybulus. The achievements are summarised in an introductive note divided into five chapters. A methodological survey and a synopsis of the status of the manuscript tradition (with a complete list of the textual passages here discussed) are followed by a third chapter about the structure of both De viris illustribus and Liber: the re-assignment of fragmentary sources and the analysis of inter-textual references contained into Nepos' biographies have simplified the too numerous and complicated hypothesis about the content of the lost sections ascribed to the De viris illustribus; furthermore, it has been observed that the Lives follow two different narrative strategies, the first one more biographical, organised according chronological criteria (youth, important military actions, epilogue), the second one more anecdotic, focused on the description of single episodes, often quite far one from another. Sources and main topics are analysed in the fourth chapter: the idea that Nepos re-used narrative material from Hellenistic biography is here scaled down; indeed, Nepos' biographies depend on the Greek historians of the Vth and IVth century B.C., particularly on Ephorus, Thucydides, Timotheus, Callisthenes, Xenophon, Theopompus; in this section there are also preliminary observations about: I) the relationship between rhetorical teaching and biographical use of anecdotes; II) the main topics of Nepos' biographies; III) the allusions to the politics of Late Roman Republic. The fifth and final chapter concerns Nepos' style: the too severe and strict judgments about his prose have been here reduced; the analysis of stylistic peculiarities and figures of speech confirms that Nepos uses a simple but correct language (sometimes also quite elaborated), close to the rules of ancient Latin biography, genus scripturae leve. The commentary notes examine Nepos' grammar and analyse both single expressions and extended phrases, trying to understand their value and diffusion, so to propose a new survey of Nepos' language. Also metrical clauses have been sometimes evaluated, especially for textual reconstruction. The historical data have been compared with other extant sources in order to understand the importance of the Liber for the knowledge of ancient Greek history: although Nepos' biographies have to be considered strongly summarising and anecdotic texts, these are witnesses of historical traditions not elsewhere attested. Some of the most significant data are: I) the description of Greek army before the battle of Marathon; II) the date of Aristides' death (462 B.C.), deduced by a comparison with the biography of Themistocles; III) an evidence of the discussed decree of Troezen (Them. 2, 8) about the evacuation of Athens during the second Persian war.