All his works which are mentioned by the ancients are unfortunately lost; but respecting the genuineness of that with which every scholar is familiar from his childhood, strong doubts have been entertained. His lost works were, (1.) Three books of Chronicles, or a short abridgment of Universal History. They are mentioned by A. Gellius,[901] and allusion is made to them by Catullus.[902] (2.) Five books of anecdotes styled “Libri Exemplorum,”[903] and also entitled “The Book of C. Nepos _de Viris illustribus_.” (3.) A Life of Cicero,[904] and a collection of Letters addressed to him.[905] (4.) “De Historicis,” or Memoirs of Historians.[906] The work now extant which bears his name is entitled “The Lives of Eminent Generals.” But besides the biographies of twenty generals, it contains short accounts of some celebrated monarchs, lives of Hamilcar and Hannibal, and also of Cato and Atticus. The Proëmium of the book is addressed to one Atticus, and to the first edition was prefixed a dedication to the Emperor Theodosius, from which it appeared that the author’s name was Probus. These biographical sketches continued to be ascribed to this unknown author until the latter half of the sixteenth century. At that time the celebrated scholar Lambinus, Regius Professor of Belles Lettres at Paris, argued from the purity of the style that it was a work of classical antiquity, and, from a passage in the life of Cato, that the Atticus, to whom it was dedicated, was the well-known correspondent of Cicero, and the author no other than Cornelius Nepos. The argument derived from the Latinity is unanswerable; that, however, from the life of Cato is a “_petitio principii_,” inasmuch as there is no more evidence in favour of the life of Cato having been written by Nepos, than the other biographies. The life of Atticus, which is a complete model of biographical composition, is ascribed to him by name in some of the best MSS. Of the rest nothing more can be affirmed with certainty, than that they are a work, or the epitome of a work, belonging to the Augustan age. The strongest evidence which exists in favour of the authorship of C. Nepos, is that Jerome Magius, a contemporary of Lambinus, who also published an annotated edition of the “_Vitæ Illustrium Imperatorum_,” found a MS. with the following conclusion: “Completum est opus Æmilii Probi Cornelii Nepotis.” These words would seem to assert the authorship of Nepos, and at the same time to admit that Probus was the editor or epitomator, and thus support the theory of Lambinus, without accusing Probus of a literary forgery. C. JULIUS CÆSAR (BORN B. C. 100.)