CORNELIUS NEPOS ÜBER DIE JUGENDSÜNDEN DES ALCIBIADES UND SEINE VERHÄLTNIS ZU CATULL: KARL NIPPERDEYS VERGESSENE KONJEKTUR ZU NEP. ALC. 2.3.

In his Life of Alcibiades Cornelius Nepos presents his readers with a classic praeteritio: when dealing with the love affairs of Alcibiades' youth he changes his mode into the vague referremus nisi and tells us that he will move on to maiora potiora (Nep. Alc. 2.3). As he characterizes Alcibiades' affairs as something done delicate iocoseque, he draws a line between his own serious biographies, dealing with important issues of politics and military action and a genre that focusses on delicate and funny things. That Nepos calls these things odiosa in the same sentence aroused the justified suspicion of Karl Nipperdey, who in 1846 proposed reading otioso (governed by the preceding quoad licitum est) instead of the - at least odd - odiosa. The present article first and foremost tries to corroborate Nipperdey's sound emendation by providing contexts and parallels for quoad licitum est otioso from Nepos' extant writing. In a second step the three keywords of the passage (otiosus, delicatus, iocosus) are juxtaposed with the usage of this vocabulary in Nepos' contemporary and fellow countryman, Catullus, who writes (mainly in Catull. 10.12.50.56) about the very issues Nepos is skipping so pointedly in the praeteritio of Alc. 2.3. Showing how two potential rivals in the literary field find a way forward by clearly defining their own territory (love poetry and invective vs. historiography and biography) may help to further call into question the unjust but widespread opinion of Catullus' ironical superiority over the dedicatee of Catull. 1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]