Cornelius Nepos

He added them to the other existing biographies, despite the fact that the writer speaks of himself as a contemporary and friend of Atticus, and that the manuscript bore the heading E libro posteriore Cornelii Nepotis ('from the last book of Cornelius Nepos').

This view has been tempered by more recent scholarship,[citation needed] which agrees with Lambinus that they are the work of Nepos, but that Probus probably abridged the biographies when he added the verse dedication.

While the historical Cornelius Nepos does not appear in fiction, his name is used by the German Romantic author Achim von Arnim for one of the characters in his novella Isabella of Egypt [de; fr].

Desiring to be a Field Marshal in the Holy Roman Empire, Cornelius serves the title character, Isabella, helping her by digging up treasures for them, while rejecting the very notion of being considered a Mandrake in society.

An analogy to historical contexts, Arnim names the mandrake Cornelius Nepos, in an effort to implement what Tzvetan Todorov calls "the fantastic",[4] a genre that sets what is real against what is imaginary or supernatural; to transmit to society that life is not as simple as we make it out to be.