Abstract

summary:

In Life of Atticus, Nepos offers amicitia as a defining feature of his subject’s remarkable life, yet a critical re-examination of the biography and a recognition of the terms of its intertextual engagement with Cicero’s De Amicitia and De Republica reveal that, for as much as Nepos valorizes Atticus’s practice of friendship, he also offers up a subtle critique of it. In so doing, Nepos presents Atticus as an exemplum of a new “prudential” form of amicitia—one that aids some friends and benefits himself at the expense of core Republican political values and civic virtues.

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