Nepos, Atticus, and the Quiet Life

Cornelius Nepos’ Life of Atticus shows its author as living a life of deliberate withdrawal from politics. This paper compares that life to other models of political withdrawal in Greco-Roman thought and finds that it does not cohere very closely with any of them. Nepos, the paper proposes, deviates from these existing models in showing Atticus as avoiding politics not out of a desire to transcend human life, to reorder politics, or to create a substitute politics of his own, but rather to live what the paper calls ‘social life.’ Atticus embraces human interdependence while rejecting the civic forms in which that interdependence was traditionally expressed in Greece and Rome.