Catiline's War, The Jugurthine War, Histories

Sallust is the earliest Roman historian of whom complete works survive, although his last and reputedly most significant work, the Histories, has survived only in fragments.¹ His narratives disclose archaic words and forms, and the manuscript tradition preserves old-fashioned spellings. From this combination of circumstances one might infer that Sallust is an ‘early’ author, yet such an inference would be misleading. When Sallust began writing Catiline’s War in the very late 40s, Pompey, Caesar and Cicero - defining figures of the Roman republic - had already been murdered; Brutus and Cassius, the killers of Caesar, were probably also dead; the poet Catullus, an exact contemporary, had died a dozen or so years before. Within scarcely more than a decade the centuries-old republic would have ended and been replaced by the autocratic system of government which we know as ‘the Roman empire’. Sallust is very much an author of the fin de siècle.

Catiline’s War deals with the famous conspiracy which was mounted in 63 by L. Sergius Catilina and thwarted by Cicero, consul in that year.² The monograph is assumed to be Sallust’s first work from the fact that it begins with an unusually long preface which skilfully incorporates both a defence of the writing of history (Cat. 1.1-3.2., 8.2-4) and an account of the author’s own political career (3.3-4.2). This account is highly schematized: it includes no details of dates or of offices held but is presented in sweeping, moral terms such as those used to describe contemporary public life (3.3 ‘instead of propriety, self-denial and prowess, it was daring, bribery and avarice which were thriving’). In particular, Sallust portrays himself implicitly as a second Plato, whose career is described in the so-called Seventh Letter which goes under Plato’s name. Sallust’s entire autobiographical section is structured by and imitated from that letter. Thus, for example, he begins with the statement that ‘as a young adolescent (like many others) I was initially swept by enthusiasm towards politics, and there many things were against me’ (3.3), which is strikingly reminiscent of Plato’s opening: ‘As a young man once, I felt the same as many others: I thought that, as soon as I became independent, I would embark immediately on political life in the city. And certain developments in the affairs of the city confronted me, as follows ...’ (324b-c). Since Plato was widely regarded in the ancient world as almost divine,³ this was a shrewd move on Sallust’s part; but it also calls into question the very nature of his apparently veristic writing, since external evidence suggests that his career had been blighted by ignominy and that he turned to historiography only because he had been compelled to leave politics.

St Jerome tells us that Gaius Sallustius Crispus (to give him his full Latin name) was born in the town of Amiternum, now a series of ruins in the western foothills of the Gran Sasso, in 86.⁴ The Social War, in which Rome’s Italian allies (socii) fought against Rome and won Roman citizenship for themselves, had ended in the previous year. It is possible that, when he left his home town for a career in the capital, Sallust as a non-Roman will have encountered a similar kind of condescension as that illustrated by Catiline’s jibe against Cicero: ‘an immigrant citizen of the City of Rome’ (Cat. 31.7).⁵It is known that Sallust was tribune of the plebs in 52, having almost certainly held the quaestorship, which brought with it entry to the senate, three years earlier. Since no previous member of his family had entered the senate, Sallust was a ‘new man’ (nouus homo) according to one of the definitions current in the late republic.⁶

Sallust was beginning his career halfway through a decade whose political chaos is impossible to describe with any concision. In a standard account it is summed up as ‘the anarchy of the fifties, when violence, compounded by bribery, made the city of Rome at times unmanageable, and basic constitutional functions, such as elections, could not be performed.’⁷ Having survived satisfactorily for most of the second century, the relatively orderly system of government headed annually by pairs of consuls had begun to take on a different character when Gaius Marius, an earlier ‘new man’, held the consulship six times between the years 107 and 100 and thereby inaugurated an age of power-seeking which was dominated by the successive figures of Sulla, Pompey and Caesar. At the same time the radical proposals of the Gracchi brothers during their tribunates towards the end of the second century (133 and 123- 122), to say nothing of their violent deaths at the hands of the ‘guilty’ nobility (Jug. 42.1), had brought about a developing polarization in political life between those who supported the status quo (the optimates) and those who did not (the populares). These combined pressures culminated in the outbreak of civil war in 49 when Julius Caesar crossed the River Rubicon in northern Italy with his army.

Dio Cassius, a historian of Roman affairs who wrote in Greek in the early third century AD, tells us (40.63.4) that in 50 Sallust had been expelled from the senate: whether the opprobrious conduct alleged against him was true is not known. At any rate, after unfortunate experiences of command with Caesarian legions in Illyricum in 49 and in Campania in 47, Sallust returned to the senate as praetor in 46, having presumably regained his status through the influence of Caesar, whose magistracies in the years 49-46 included his second and third consulships (48, 46) and three appointments as dictator (49- 46). The anonymous author of The African War, which represents itself as a continuation of Caesar’s own commentaries on the Gallic War and the Civil War,⁸ says that as praetor Sallust performed valuable and successful service in Africa, where Caesar’s forces were engaged in fighting the Pompeians (African War 8, 34). After the Pompeians were defeated at the battle of Thapsus in that year, one of their leaders, M. Porcius Cato, famously committed suicide in the African town of Utica; Sallust for his part was rewarded when Caesar appointed him proconsul (governor) of the province of Africa Nova (New Africa) which Caesar had created in the aftermath of his victory (African War 97).

We are told by Dio (43.9.2-3) that Sallust capitalized on his appointment by plundering the province to amass a personal fortune. On his return to Rome, presumably in 45, he faced charges of extortion, which, along with the possibility of a second expulsion from the senate, he escaped, perhaps through having bribed Caesar to exert his influence once again (cf. Dio 43.47.4). In March of the following year Caesar was murdered, and it was no doubt round about this time that Sallust, as he tells us himself at the start of Catiline’s War, ‘determined that the remainder of my life must be kept far away from politics’ (4.I), another statement indebted to Plato’s Seventh Letter (325a ‘I withdrew myself from the evils of the time’).

Catiline’s War

Sallust says that he was drawn to the subject of the Catilinarian conspiracy because he thought it ‘especially deserving of recollection owing to the newness of the crime and of its danger’ (Cat. 4.4 memorabile ... nouitate). Such statements are conventional and in line with rhetorical theory, according to which a speaker would have an attentive audience if in his exordium he promised to speak ‘about important, novel or unusual matters, or about those which relate to the commonwealth’.⁹ Yet despite the novelty of the crime at the time, Cicero, who as consul in 63 was the principal protagonist in the affair apart from Catiline himself, had already ensured that the conspiracy was recollected on as many occasions as possible. He published his four speeches Against Catiline (the ‘Catilinarians’); he wrote two historical accounts of the episode, one in Latin and one in Greek, and an epic poem as well (Cicero was reputed to be the best poet of his day); his exile in 58 was precipitated by, and therefore revived memories of, decisions he had taken at the time of the conspiracy; and to the end of his life he maintained that he had been the saviour of his country. There was certainly no need for any third party to bring to public attention the definitive event of Cicero’s career.

Yet that, characteristically, was precisely what Cicero wanted. In 55 he wrote to Lucius Lucceius, a friend who was also a historian, begging him to write a monograph on the conspiracy (Letters to Friends 5.12):

I have often tried to raise the following matter with you in person, only to be prevented by an embarrassment which is uncharacteristic of my metropolitan temperament. However, now that we’re apart, I feel bold enough to broach the subject. After all, a letter can’t blush.

You won’t believe how much I want you to celebrate my name in your writings - a quite justifiable desire, in my opinion. I know you’ve often indicated that this was your intention, but please excuse my impatience. You see, I always had high hopes of your particular kind of writing, but it has now exceeded my expectations and taken me by storm: I’ve a burning desire for my achievements to be entrusted to your monumental works as quickly as possible. It’s not just that I can hope for immortality by being remembered by posterity: I also want to enjoy while I’m still alive the authority which only your work can provide - your seal of approval coupled with your literary distinction.

It’s true that even as I write I am only too well aware of the pressure you’re under from the material which you have embarked upon and already arranged. But, as I see that you’ve almost finished your account of the Italian and Civil Wars, and you told me yourself that you’ve made a start on the remaining period, I don’t want to miss the opportunity of asking you to consider this question. Would you prefer to incorporate my story into that remaining period or ... deal with the Catilinarian conspiracy separately from the wars with foreign enemies? As far as my reputation is concerned, I don’t see that it makes much difference either way; but I’m frankly impatient and don’t want you to wait till you reach the appropriate point in your continuous narrative: I’d much rather you got down to the period of the cause célèbre straight away and on its own terms. In addition, if you give your undivided attention to a single theme and a single personality, I can envisage even now the greater scope for rich elaboration.

Of course I’m well aware how disgracefully I’m behaving: having first landed you with this considerable responsibility (though you can always plead other engagements and turn me down), I’m now demanding elaborate treatment. What if you don’t think my achievements deserve elaboration? Still, once the limits of decency have been passed, one should be well and truly shameless. So I repeat - elaborate my activities even against your better judgement, and in the process disregard the laws of historiography: that prejudice, which you discussed quite beautifully in one or other of your prefaces ... well, please don’t suppress it if it nudges you strongly in my favour, but simply let your affection for me take a degree of precedence over the truth.

If I can persuade you to take on the responsibility, I’m sure you’ll find that the material will bring out the best in your fluent artistry. For it seems to me that a modest volume could be compiled if you start with the beginning of the conspiracy and end with my return from exile ...¹⁰

Sallust could be forgiven for thinking that his potential readers had been exposed to quite enough of Cicero’s view of the affair and that they were entitled to be given a different perspective. It is true that at one point Sallust describes Cicero as ‘the best of consuls’ (Cat. 43.1), yet this is the very description which, when used by Brutus in a pamphlet on Cato, Cicero himself in a letter to his friend Atticus regarded as faint praise: ‘He thinks he is giving me a fine tribute when he calls me “the best of consuls”. Which of my enemies has spoken more emptily?’ (Cicero, Letters to Atticus 12.21.1). Sallust mentions none of Cicero’s four Catilinarian speeches except the first, which he describes as ‘sparkling’ (31.6 luculentam): this is the very same adjective that Cicero himself, in the same letter to Atticus, had used to describe the speech which Cato delivered on 5 December. Moreover, since in Sallust’s account it is that speech of Cato (52.2-36) which has displaced Cicero’s Fourth Catilinarian, it seems that Sallust is attributing to Cato an importance which Cicero had denied when writing to Atticus.¹¹ Equally pointed is the fact that Cicero’s famous opening address to Catiline in the First Catilinarian (‘For how long, then, Catiline, will you exploit our endurance?’) is placed by Sallust in the mouth of the villain himself when addressing his fellow conspirators (Cat. 20.9 ‘For how long, then, will you endure these things, most courageous of men?’).

Sallust’s apparently ambiguous treatment of Cicero contrasts strongly with his treatments of Julius Caesar, his likely benefactor, and Cato, the future suicide of Utica (see above). After giving us his versions of the speeches which Caesar and Cato delivered in the senatorial debate on 5 December (Cat. 51 and 52 respectively), Sallust digresses to provide a contrasting sketch of both individuals (53.2-54.6), whom he describes as the only ‘two men of mighty prowess’ in his lifetime (53.6 ingenti uirtute... uiri duo), standing out amidst contemporary degeneracy (53.5). The story of Rome’s political and moral decline indeed provides the essential background and impetus for Catiline’s War. Decline is the subject of a digression in the body of the work (36.5-39.4) and its history is traced in the preface (5.9-16.5), where Catiline is presented as its worst and quintessential symptom (cf. 14.1). The same line seems to have been taken by Catullus roughly ten years before. In Poem 64, his ‘miniature epic’ on the theme of marriage, Catullus concludes with a denunciation of contemporary civil war (lines 397-402):

But after Earth was stained with crime unspeakable
And all evicted Justice from their greedy thoughts,
Brothers poured the blood of brothers on their hands,
Sons no longer grieved when parents passed away,
Father prayed for death of son in his first youth
So as freely to possess the bloom of a new bride.¹²

The Jugurthine War

In his second monograph, an account of the Jugurthine War in Africa (111-105) which he is thought to have been writing in the years 41-40, Sallust both sharpened and extended the picture of Rome’s decline (Jug. 5.1-2):

The war I am about to write is that which the Roman people waged with Jugurtha, king of the Numidians, first because it was great and fierce and of only sporadic success, then because that was the first time that the haughtiness of the nobility was confronted - and the latter struggle convulsed everything, divine and human alike, and advanced to such a point of derangement that only war and the devastation of Italy put an end to the citizens’ passions.

The first of these reasons centres on Jugurtha himself, who is introduced at the start of the work as a man of uirtus or ‘prowess’ (6.2., 7.2, 8.1, 9.2-3, 10.2, 10.8) and appears almost as an ideal young Roman. But eventual contact with actual Romans and their assurances of Roman corruption (8.1 ‘at Rome everything was for sale’) have the effect of corrupting him. He becomes ‘the embodiment of disorder‘, and his ‘manipulation of and affinity with money, deceit, motion, and delay enable him to defer any final settlement, either diplomatic or military, of the war with Rome.‘¹⁵ At the same time, however, the Romans gradually learn from Jugurtha how to beat him at his own game (48.1 ‘Jugurtha ... recognized that he was being assailed by his own techniques’), and in due course he is double-crossed and betrayed to them (113.3-7). The work thus describes two complementary ‘learning curves’, each indebted to the other.

Sallust’s second reason for choosing to write about the Jugurthine War was that it witnessed the first confrontation with the nobility, whose families had traditionally monopolized the magistracies in general and the consulship in particular. The confrontation was undertaken by Gaius Marius, the ‘new man’ whose service in the war against Jugurtha acted as a spring-board for his first consulship in 107. The monograph ends with Marius as consul for the second time at the very beginning of 104 and with the statement that ‘at that time the hopes and resources of the community rested in him’.¹⁶ But we have already been told that in due course Marius would be ‘toppled by ambition’ (Jug. 63.6): after five further consulships, the last of them in 86, he was merely the first in a line of dominant personalities who led up to the civil wars of Sallust’s own day. As in Catiline’s War, the downward course of Roman politics is the subject of a powerful digression embedded in the work (Jug. 41-2).¹⁷ The digression, however, seems to offer a rather more complicated analysis than that implied by the preface: Sallust makes it clear that Marius’ confrontation with the nobility had been anticipated by that of the Gracchi. While the Gracchi ‘had begun to champion the freedom of the plebs and to expose the crimes of the few’, the nobility for its part ‘confronted the actions of the Gracchi’ (42-1). Perhaps Sallust resolved the apparent discrepancy to his own satisfaction by the fact that Marius was successful where the Gracchi failed. Yet, whatever the case, the antagonistic division of Roman society into ‘the people’ and ‘the nobility’ maintains in the digression a theme which Sallust had already introduced in his earlier work (Jug. 41.5; cf. Cat. 38.3-4).

Though modern scholars seem agreed that the Jugurthine War deserves the prominence and significance which Sallust attributes to it, there is perhaps more to his choice of subject than allowed in his preface. The modern phrase ‘out of Africa’ has as its immediate derivation the elder Pliny, who in his Natural History referred to ‘the common Greek expression that Africa always brings something new’ (8.42 uulgare Graeciae dictum, semper aliquid noui Africam adferre); but Pliny in his turn was borrowing from Aristotle, who in two works refers to the ‘proverb’ that Africa is always the source of something new (Hist. Anim. 606b20, Gen. Anim. 746b7). Though the saying is almost unattested between the times of Aristotle (384-322) and Pliny (AD 23/24-79), its evidently proverbial nature suggests the likelihood that it remained current in popular thought. As has been pointed out,¹⁸ the term ‘new’ in the proverb connotes ‘something strange, even undesirable’ or ‘revolutionary’, and this is exactly how Jugurtha’s Numidians are described by Sallust: Jug. 46.3 ‘Metellus had already found out from earlier experience that the Numidian race was untrustworthy, of volatile temperament, and hungry for revolution [nouarum rerum auidum]‘, 66.2 ‘Their public - as is usually the case, especially with Numidians - was of volatile disposition, rebellious and disaffected, desirous of revolution [cupidum nouarum rerum] and hostile to rest and inactivity’. It seems likely that, in choosing to write a monograph about the Jugurthine War, Sallust was at least to some degree taking advantage of popular perceptions of Africa. It was Africa, after all, that had produced Hannibal, whose very name is described as ill-omened by Sallust’s younger contemporary, Horace (Epode 16.8); and Hannibal’s Carthage had been destroyed only thirty-five years before the Jugurthine War started: it was easy to talk of Carthage and Jugurtha in the same breath, as Horace again attests (Epode 9.23-6), and indeed Carthage features quite prominently in The Jugurthine War. In short, Africa was a country of intrinsic and abiding interest.

And there is of course a further consideration: the historian was no doubt drawn to the subject because of his own personal experiences in Africa in 46-45. But this raises a paradox. Sallust provides an extended description of Africa in chapters 17-19 which he introduces as follows: ‘The context seems to demand that I explain briefly the layout of Africa and touch on the peoples with whom our dealings were those of war or friendship.’ The modern reader might assume at this point that Sallust’s topographical description would be informed by his governorship of Africa Nova, but not only is there no reference to autopsy in the whole of the account, but, as Sir Ronald Syme remarked, no benefit seems to have derived from the author’s presence in the country.¹⁹ Instead, Sallust appeals to a translation of Punic books which were said to have been written by King Hiempsal, a nephew of Jugurtha (17.7). Since modern historians capitalize on autopsy and often go to great lengths to survey personally the land or countryside in which past events have taken place, Sallust’s apparent difference strikes today’s readers as exceptionally curious and invites questions on the nature of Sallust’s historical narratives.

In 55, the year in which it is assumed that Sallust held the quaestorship, Cicero set out his views on how history should be written (On the Orator 2.63-4):

The actual superstructure [of historiography] consists of content and style. It is in the nature of content, on the one hand, that you require a chronological order of events and topographical descriptions; and also that you need - since in the treatment of important and memorable achievements the reader expects (i) intentions, (ii) the events themselves, and (iii) consequences - in the case of (i) to indicate whether you approve of the intentions, of (ii) to reveal not only what was said or done but also in what manner, and of (iii) to explain all the reasons, whether they be of chance or intelligence or impetuousness, and also to give not only the achievements of any famous protagonist but also his life and character. The nature of style and type of discourse, on the other hand, require amplitude and mobility, with a slow and regular fluency and without any of the roughness and prickliness associated with the law-courts. - These points are both numerous and important, but do you see them covered by any of the rules to be found in books entitled Art of Rhetoric?

Many readers of this passage have believed that ‘Cicero is not expressly advocating a type of historical exposition different from that commonly employed by modern political historians’. ²¹ Yet Cicero has merely transferred to the writing of history the precise same elements which went into writing the so-called ‘narrative’ section of a forensic speech: for example, the ‘chronological order of events’ (ordinem temporum), which perhaps sounds particularly appropriate for history, is simply lifted, and in the same words, from his On Invention, an earlier work on rhetorical theory (1.29 temporum ordo). It is significant that Cicero discusses this element under the heading of ‘invention’ (inuentio), a technique in which rhetoricians were expected to be expert and which Cicero defines as ‘the devising of matter true or lifelike which will make a case appear convincing’ (On Invention 1.9). In an adversarial system of justice, such as that practised in ancient Rome, it was inevitable that the defence and prosecution would say different things. If the defence alleged that the chronological order of events was ABC, the prosecution might argue that the order was ACB. One of these might be true; but, if so, it follows that the other cannot be true. Cicero’s point is simply that, whether or not one of them is true, both must at least be ‘convincing’.²²

Sallust in his works gives every impression that he has taken to heart Cicero’s advice on the content of historiography. The prominence which he gives to describing the personalities of Catiline (Cat. 5.1-8) and Jugurtha (Jug. 6.1), for example, seems to correspond to Cicero’s insistence on the importance of giving character sketches of ‘any famous protagonist’. However, since the significance of Cicero’s discussion lies in his transfer of rhetorical techniques to historiography, the same underlying assumptions are transferred also. This immediately makes sense of Sallust’s account of Africa: it was more important that his ‘topographical description’ (to use Cicero’s phrase) be convincing than that it should claim to be autoptic. ‘A man’s own experience‘, remarked Syme, ‘might seem less attractive and convincing than what stood in literary tradition, guaranteed by time and famous names.’²³ Likewise the autobiographical introduction to Catiline’s War. Sallust hoped to present to his readers a convincing case, made stronger by the allusions to Plato; the fact that his career (as far as one can tell) had been quite different from his self-presentation is neither here nor there: collective memory is very often partial and of limited duration, and the testimony even of eyewitnesses is notoriously prone to error. Sallust had every reason for confidence that his self-presentation would be found acceptable; and by the same token he stood every chance of convincing his readers with his account of a conspiracy which had taken place more than twenty years in the past.

The Jugurthine War was an even more distant event, having begun over seventy years before and now beyond the memory of anyone alive. Scholars have naturally debated what sources Sallust might have used to compile a narrative which in the Latin of the Oxford Classical Text is almost one hundred pages long. The latest commentator on the work, after a largely negative appraisal of the investigations of other scholars, concludes that Sallust himself ‘has made a distinctive contribution to the finished work’.²⁴ This seems to be a euphemistic way of saying that, while the historian no doubt had some kind of framework with which to operate, a significant portion of his narrative was the product of ‘invention’. It mattered little whether a given battle took place at X or Y, since each site had a strange local name and no one in Rome would be any the wiser. Nor need Sallust know the details of the battle, since invention ‘is simply the “discovery” of what requires to be said in a given situation, the implied theory being that this is somehow already “there” though latent’.²⁵ There were various stereotypical ways in which battles and other events were expected to be described (‘historiographical motifs’²⁶); and, if a historian exhausted the possibilities of these, there were always other sources of material to which to resort. At one point during the treacherous events at the town of Vaga, Sallust tells us that ‘women and boys on the roofs of buildings vied with one another in casting down rocks and other things with which their location provided them’ (Jug. 67.1). The vivid detail has the ring of truth precisely because it is a vivid detail; but Sallust has simply adapted a well known moment from the Peloponnesian War as described by the Greek historian Thucydides (2.4.2), when at Plataea in 431 ‘the women and slaves on the house-tops ... kept pelting them with stones and tiles’.

Histories

The events of Sallust’s last work, the Histories, fall between the periods of the Catilinarian conspiracy and the Jugurthine War. His starting point was 78, the year in which Sulla, the former dictator, died; it is also likely to have been the year with which another historian, L. Cornelius Sisenna, brought his (now fragmentary) history of the two preceding decades to a close: if so, Sallust was following the well established convention of starting his work where a previous historian had stopped.²⁷ The incomplete survival of Sallust’s Histories - his ‘lost masterpiece’, in the words of Syme²⁸ - makes it difficult to know whether he intended to stop at the latest attested date, namely 67, in Book 5. Of the original work, chance has preserved more than 550 items which are conventionally called ‘fragments’.²⁹ These range from single words or phrases (1.151 = 137 ‘rustic’, 131 = 118 ‘to Corycus’, 132 = 119 ‘at Corycus’) through longer phrases or complete sentences (2.17 =18 ‘moderate in all other respects except domination’, 1.120 =104 ‘he took up position in a scrubby and copsy valley’) to four whole speeches (1.55 = 48, 77 = 67, 2.47 = 44, 3.48 = 34) and two letters (2.98 = 82, 4.69 = 67).

The problems posed by a fragmentary work are clear and grave.³⁰ Some ‘fragments’ are not fragments at all but references or allusions embedded in the text of another author: when Servius, the fourth-century AD commentator on Virgil, says that ‘Pelorus is a promontory on Sicily, called, according to Sallust, after the burial of Hannibal’s helmsman there’ (Hist. 4.29 = 25), it is impossible to tell which of these words, if any, is actually Sallustian. Very often a quoting source, even if transmitting an item genuinely Sallustian, does not identify the book of the Histories to which the item belongs: if the item is of a reasonable length and/or contains some historical information, an editor may be able to guess roughly where to place it in Sallust’s presumed storyline, but often the item is preserved (by a grammarian or scholar of similar interests) for its linguistic curiosity, as with the otherwise unexampled ‘scrubby’ (uirgultus) above, and in such cases an editor will usually have no clue as to the original context of the fragment. Occasionally the ancients’ practice of literary allusion will help. A fragment of the Histories (‘in the manner of a cavalry battle, resorting to and giving up the rear’) was placed by Maurenbrecher in the context of fighting in Armenia in Book 4(75) but by McGushin amongst the ‘Fragments of Uncertain Reference’ (29). A baffling sentence of Tacitus’ Annals on fighting in Armenia (6.35.1 ‘in the manner of a cavalry battle, it was the turn of front and rear’) is recognized to allude to this fragment and is followed shortly afterwards by an explanation of the name Mesopotamia (6.37.3 ‘the plains which, encircled as they are by the renowned streams of the Euphrates and Tigris, have received the name of Mesopotamia’). Since Sallust also has a fragment which explains the same name and which is placed by both editors in Book 4 (77 = 74 ‘which [the rivers], going in different directions, are widely separated by an area of many miles in the middle; and the land which is surrounded by them is called Mesopotamia’), it seems highly likely that Maurenbrecher was right to place both fragments in close proximity to each other.

In view of the very considerable difficulties presented by the Histories, I have translated only the following: (a) some fragments of the preface, (b) a few other more lengthy fragments and (c) the speeches and letters. Sallust’s preface was an extremely important text, seemingly more pessimistic than even the monographs, and influencing the preface of Rome’s next great historian, Livy. The lengthier fragments are those which require the least in terms of editorial intervention and emendation. The speeches and letters choose themselves, as being both substantial and complete. But it is in the nature of fragments to pose problems. For example, it can be inferred that, either as part of an extended preface or in the form of a digressive flashback, Sallust provided a survey of the previous decades (1.19-33 = 16-46), just as Thucydides had done with his famous ‘Pentecontaetia’ or summary of the years 480-430 (1.89-119). Then, after the interposition of a single fragment (1.54 = 47), we are given the very first speech (1.55 = 48), which is an attack by the consul of 78, M. Aemilius Lepidus, on Sulla: Lepidus speaks as though Sulla were still in power, yet he had resigned the dictatorship three years before and may even have been dead when the speech which Sallust puts into Lepidus’ mouth was delivered.³¹ This anomaly is inexplicable without the original narrative context in which the speech was placed.

When Sallust died, probably in 35, he left to his great-nephew and adopted son the Horti Sallustiani, the great gardens in Rome which he had evidently acquired and developed with the ill-gotten gains from his year’s governorship in Africa.³² Meanwhile his historiographical legacy attracted widespread comment for the style in which it was written. A younger contemporary - the brilliant but curmudgeonly Asinius Pollio, general, politician, playwright and historian - wrote a book in which he criticized Sallust’s writings as being ‘smudged with an excessive affectation of archaic words’ and alleged that Sallust had employed a research assistant, Ateius Philologus, to make ‘a collection of archaisms and figures of speech’ for him. These criticisms did not, however, prevent Pollio from employing the same assistant himself when Sallust died, whereupon Ateius advised Pollio (somewhat paradoxically, in the circumstances) that in his own history he should employ ‘familiar, unassuming and literal speech and should avoid in particular Sallust’s obscurity and boldness in metaphors’.³³ Sallust’s attraction to archaisms became notorious and doubtless explains the numerous references to his ‘stealing’ words from the elder Cato, great-grandfather of the Cato who committed suicide at Utica (see above). Consul in 195 and famously censor in 184, Cato was author of the Origines, the first work of history to be written in Latin. One author, now anonymous, directed at Sallust the following couplet: ‘You frequent thief of words from ancient Cato, / Crispus, composer of the Jugurthine history.’³⁴

Besides metaphors and archaisms, the third feature of Sallust’s style to provoke special comment was his brevity: ‘that famous Sallustian brevity and abrupt form of speech’, as it was described by Quintilian (4.2.45), who elsewhere refers to ‘that famously immortal rapidity of Sallust’ (10.1.102.). During Sallust’s lifetime, according to the younger Seneca, ‘chopped-off sentences and expressions ending before one expects and an obscure brevity were the fashion’ (Letters 114.17). Seneca’s observation, which indicates that the Sallustian manner was very different from the smooth and ample style recommended for historiography by Cicero (see above), is strikingly reminiscent of what was said about Thucydides by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the Augustan critic and historian (On Thucydides 24):

The most conspicuous and characteristic features of the author are his efforts to express the largest number of things in the smallest number of words, and to compress a number of thoughts into one, and his tendency to leave his hearer still expecting to hear something more, all of which things produce a brevity that lacks clarity.³⁵

Style was not the only aspect of Thucydides’ work on which Dionysius commented. In his Letter to Pompey (3) Dionysius wrote as follows:

Thucydides starts with the incipient decline of the Greek world, something which should not have been done by a Greek and an Athenian ... In his malice he finds the overt causes of the war in the conduct of his own city ... The attitude ... of Thucydides is severe and harsh and proves that he had a grudge against his native country because of his exile. He recites a catalogue of her mistakes, going into them in minute detail.

Sallust for his part had provided, over the course of his three works, an almost continuous account of the years 111 to 63 which entitled him to be called ‘the historian of decline and fall’.³⁷ He was regarded in antiquity as one who ‘criticizes his own times and attacks their failings’.³⁸ We can never know whether Sallust’s disaffected history of Rome’s decline was motivated by his twice-enforced exile from politics or whether he saw the circumstances of his own life as reflecting those of Thucydides, who had been exiled from his native Athens in 424; but there can be no doubt that the disaffection of his narratives is brilliantly complemented by his adaptation of the harsh and contorted style of Thucydides.

Sallust’s historical writing seems to have had an immediate impact, the influence of the Histories being detectable in such works of the thirties as Horace’s epode on the civil war (16) and the preface to Livy’s history.³⁹ But by the end of that decade the nature of Roman politics had changed completely and for ever: the victory of Octavian (the future Augustus) over Mark Antony at the battle of Actium in 31 ensured that hence-forward Rome would be ruled by an autocrat. Obsessively preoccupied with the security of their own position, successive Roman emperors did not welcome historians whose narratives betrayed signs of the disillusion and disaffection with which Sallust was identified. The result was that, though in the late first century AD the epigrammatist Martial (14.191) and the critic Quintilian (2.5.19) could express a high opinion of Sallust, for more than a hundred years no historian of imperial Rome chose to imitate Sallust as his principal model. It was therefore a radical and shocking moment when, early in the second century AD, Tacitus began his Annals with the words ‘The City of Rome from its inception was held by kings’. The sentence is an allusion to the words with which Sallust had introduced his flashback of early Roman history in Catiline’s War (6.1): ‘The City of Rome ... was founded and held initially by the Trojans’. In classical literature such opening allusions function as a kind of ‘code’, alerting readers to the tradition in which a writer is working: readers will have inferred that Tacitus’ narrative of the years AD 14 to 68 would in no sense be conformist but would interact with, and capitalize on, the subversive style and voice of Sallust.

It should go without saying that it is impossible to reproduce in an English translation the features of Sallust’s style which attracted such attention in antiquity. There is simply no way in which a different language can achieve the effect of ‘chopped-off sentences and expressions ending before one expects and an obscure brevity’; all I have attempted to do in this new translation is to keep as close to the Latin as is consistent with readability. ⁴⁰ There is one difficulty in particular which is worth noting. Sallust’s analysis of Rome’s social, political and moral decline is seen against an idealized system of values and concepts which is especially evident in the prefaces to his works. The key concept in this system is uirtus, which may be defined as ‘the functioning of ingenium to achieve egregia facinora, and thus to win gloria, through bonae artes’.⁴¹ This definition poses problems, however, because most of the terms involved are very difficult to render in English. The word uirtus itself is notoriously hard to translate. It is etymologically connected with uir, which means ‘man’: hence the first of the dictionary definitions as ‘The qualities typical of a true man, manly spirit, resolution, valour, steadfastness’; since the Romans expected a uir to display uirtus especially on the battlefield, the word also means ‘courage’ or ‘bravery’ and is thus synonymous with fortitudo. However, the word also comes to have a wider meaning: ‘excellence of character or mind, worth’ and ‘moral excellence, virtue, goodness’ (and hence close in meaning to probitas).⁴² Wherever possible in the translation I have tried to render uirtus by the English noun ‘prowess’, which means both ‘manly courage’ and ‘exceptional ability or talent’;⁴³ but at Hist. 1.55.15 I have felt obliged to be more explicit in using the phrase ‘manly prowess’ because the speaker, as is clear from the context, is emphasizing the derivation of the word from uir.

It may be inferred from the above that in my opinion one should attempt to render each Latin word by the same English word wherever possible; but, although this is especially desirable when an author is as rigorous in his argumentation as is Sallust in the prefaces to his monographs, a term such as ingenium cannot always be translated consistently. ingenium means ‘disposition, temperament’ (as at Cat. 5.1) and ‘intellect, talent’ (as at Cat. 2.1): from the latter it comes to be used in a concrete way, ‘talent’ in the sense of ‘a man of talent’ (as at Cat. 8.4); but the word is also used of the ‘inherent quality or character’ of things (such as that of a particular countryside, e.g. Hist. 3.28= 15).⁴⁴ facinus (derived from facio, ‘I do’) means ‘a deed’: hence one can equally well say malafacinora(‘wicked deeds’, as at Cat. 16.1) or egregia facinora (‘exceptional deeds’, as at Jug. 2.2). Yet facinus by Sallust’s time had also come to mean ‘a crime’ and even, in an extended sense, ‘a criminal’ (as at Cat. 14.1).⁴⁵ Sallust, who likes alliteration, several times combines the word with flagitium, for which my usual translation is ‘outrage’; but clearly it is impossible both to be consistent with these translations and to reproduce the alliteration (hence ‘depravity or deed’ for flagitium aut facinus at Cat. 14.2). bonae artes constitutes a set phrase meaning ‘cultural pursuits, liberal studies’; but ars can also mean ‘a quality, practice’ (as at Cat. 2.9) and, in the plural, ‘behaviour’ (thus equivalent to mores, also plural).⁴⁶ Though Sallust was not the first author to use bonae artes in a moral sense, his repeated deployment of the phrase (e.g. Jug. 1.3) is one of his distinguishing characteristics.

Sallust’s ‘politico-social terminology’, as it has been called,⁴⁷ is by no means restricted to the cases mentioned so far. ambitio, for example, is another key term and, ‘though a fault, was nevertheless closer to prowess [uirtus]’ (Cat. 11.1). In this passage ambitio seems directly equivalent to the English ‘ambition’; but the word is derived from the verb ambire, ‘to go round’, and can also mean ‘canvassing (for votes)’ and hence, more broadly, ‘striving after popularity’,⁴⁸ which I have rendered by ‘ingratiation’ (e.g. Hist. 2.98.5 = 82.5). In a quite different category is Sallust’s predilection for such basic verbs as facio (literally, ‘I do’ or ‘I make’) and habeo (literally, ‘I have’ or ‘I hold’). The younger Seneca (Letters 114.17-18) tells an amusing story about L. Arruntius, the consul of 22, who wrote a history of the Punic War:

He was a Sallustian and strained after that style. There is in Sallust’s work ‘he made an army with silver’, that is, he procured it with money. Arruntius began a love-affair with this, putting it on every page: in one place he says ‘they made flight for our men’, and in another ‘hearing this made the Panhormitans surrender themselves to the Romans’. I only wanted to give you a taste; his whole book is shot through with it.

Our earliest independent witnesses to Sallust’s three works are a few scraps of papyrus which are dated to the fourth or fifth centuries AD and which contain relatively small amounts of text. Catiline’s War and The Jugurthine War have come down to us more or less complete in a variety of manuscripts, of which the two oldest (called P and A) were copied in the ninth century; however, like some of the later manuscripts, P and A depend upon a now lost archetype from which a sizeable section towards the end of The Jugurthine War (103.2-112.3) was already missing. (This section has to be supplied from other later manuscripts which have supplemented their texts from another lost archetype.) A further ninth-century manuscript (called V) is responsible for the four speeches and two letters which comprise the longest fragments of the Histories; but the almost total loss of the rest of the Histories constitutes an apt reminder that the very survival of classical texts to the modern day was never guaranteed.⁵¹

Despite the eventual loss of the Histories, Sallust was one of the most popular and quoted authors in antiquity. The second century AD developed a taste for archaizing which is associated particularly with M. Cornelius Fronto, correspondent of emperors and consul in 143, and Aulus Gellius, author of Attic Nights.Both writers were extremely familiar with Sallust’s work, which they quote liberally. The spread of Christianity throughout the Roman empire brought Sallust new readers who were attracted by his severe moralizing: well known examples are Jerome and Augustine, whose lives spanned the later fourth and early fifth centuries.⁵² ‘The fame of Sallust endured to the end,’ Syme has remarked. ‘The whole range of literature in late antiquity acknowledges his spell, from Ammianus to the Historia Augusta, from Church Fathers to the lowly grammarians and scholiasts. Only Cicero and Virgil surpass him in estimation.’⁵³

Throughout medieval times interest in Sallust only increased. Writing in the middle of the ninth century, Lupus of Ferrières in the Loire valley has several references to the historian.⁵⁴ The tenth-century Vatican manuscript known as ‘N’ displays interlinear glosses in Old High German, showing that Sallust was being read intently, and perhaps used in teaching, both in that century and later.⁵⁵ If we may judge from the number of copies that were made of Sallust’s works (a number which rose even more impressively than that of most other classical authors), there was a dramatic surge of enthusiasm in the eleventh and (especially) the twelfth centuries.⁵⁶ William FitzStephen appealed to Sallust’s description of Africa (Jug. 17- 19) in order to defend his own inclusion of a description of London in his Life of Thomas à Becket (L1 ),⁵⁷ for example, while the anonymous author of the Vita Heinrici IV ‘writes excellent Latin in a Sallustian style ... Sallust is also the model for parts of the narrative, notably wars and sieges, and has influenced some of the author’s key concepts, such as avaritia and fortuna’.⁵⁸ Later, this trend continued throughout the Renaissance and beyond. For the century between 1450 and 1550 Sallust was the most popular ancient historian, attracting the attention of such readers as Machiavelli, and for the next century and a half he was never out of the ‘top three’.⁵⁹ Justly has it been observed that ‘Sallust, whose importance was of the first rank in antiquity for his qualities as historian, thinker and stylist, has continued to radiate in literature.‘⁶⁰

2 The title of the work is disputed. The manuscripts offer a variety of titles including Bellum Catilinarium (‘The Catilinarian War’) and Bellum Catilinae (‘Catiline’s War’ or ‘War with Catiline’). On the basis of Cat. 4.3 ‘de Catilinae coniuratione’ (‘on Catiline’s conspiracy’), many scholars make that or some similar phrase into a title (thus the OCT has De Coniuratione Catilinae, ‘On the Conspiracy of Catiline’), despite the lack of manuscript authority. I think that Bellum Catilinae is supported both by Sallust’s presentation of events as a (civil) war (e.g. Cat. 16.4, 17.6, 2.1.1, 26.5, 2.9.1, 29.3, 32.1-2, 33-1, 36.1-3, 56-61) and by the late first-century AD critic Quintilian (3.8.9 ‘Sallustius in bello Iugurthino et Catilinae’, ‘Sallust in the Jugurthine and Catiline’s War’).

20 A selection from the First and Third Catilinarians (references to Catiline’s War come first): 5.3patiens inediae, algoris, uigiliae~ 1.26 illam praeclaram patientiam famis, frigoris, 2.9 frigore et fame et siti et uigiliis; 5.7 conscientia scelerum~ 1.17 conscientia scelerum; 12.3 templa deorum ~ 1.12 templa deorum; 14.3 manus atque lingua ~3.16 neque lingua neque manus; 15.2. uacuam domum~ 1.14 domum uacuefecisses; 15.5 colos ... oculi ... uoltu ~ 3.13 color, oculi, uoltus; 20.9 emori~ 1.20 emori; 21.1 opis aut spei~ 3.16 spes atque opes; 26.4 praesidia amicorum~ 1.11 amicorum praesidio; 28.1 pollicitus ... ea nocte paulo post ... salutatum ... domi suae~ 1.9-10 illa ipsa nocte paulo ... pollicerentur ... salutatum, 32 domi suae; 31.5 in senatum uenit~ 1.2 in senatum uenit, 1.16 uenisti ... in senatum; 32.1 in Manliana castra profectus ~ 1.10 proficiscere ... Manliana castra, 30 in Manliana castra; 32.2 caedem, incendia (also at 43.2, 48.4, 51.9, 52.36)~ 1.3 caede atque incendiis (also at 1.6, 2.6); 44-5~ 3.12; 45.2 occulte pontem ... legati cum Volturcio~ 3.5-6 occulte ad pontem ... legati ... unaque Volturcius; 46.6 Volturcium ... introducit~ 3.8 introduxi Volturcium; 47.1 fide publica ~ 3.8 fidem publicam; 47.3 signa sua cognouissent ~ 3.10 signum cognouit (twice); 47.3 abdicato ... Lentulus itemque... custodiis ~ 3.14 Lentulus ... abdicasset ... custodiam ... itemque; 48.1 mutata mente ~ 1.6 muta ... istam mentem; 55.1 optumum factu (and elsewhere) ~ 1.29 optimum factu.

Sallust

Catiline’s War

The Jugurthine War

Writing History

Histories

Style and Attitude

The Translation

Text and Transmission

NOTES