Roman author Cornelius Nepos wrote at a very dynamic time in Roman history, but oddly enough little has been said about what his surviving work as a whole can tell us about that period. In the scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the author was much maligned as inaccurate, simple-minded, and derivative, and thus it has been hard to make the case that the evidence he provides is important or even useful. John Lobur’s work rehabilitates Nepos to show that in fact he should ...

This book concerns the relationship between ideas and power in the genesis of the Roman empire. The self-justification of the first emperor through the consensus of the citizen body constrained him to adhere to ‘legitimate’ and ‘traditional’ forms of self-presentation. Lobur explores how these notions become explicated and reconfigured by the upper and mostly non-political classes of Italy and Rome. The chronic turmoil experienced in the late republic shaped the values and program of the i...