The existence of two monographs and only the fragments of his five-book history might suggest to us that Sallust’s work only barely clung to survival from antiquity. On the contrary, a glance at commentaries and manuscript traditions from late antiquity onwards shows us that this historian of the late republic was never out of fashion, and influenced our views of Roman history and imperialism perhaps more than any other. The stylistic comments of Seneca, Fronto, and Quintilian and the commentaries of Asconius attest to the high status of Sallust’s work in the first and second centuries ce. The extensive Sallustian quotations in St. Augustine’s City of God show that he continued in favor through late antiquity. His work shows up in fourth - and fifth-century manuscripts, in seventh - and eighth-century palimpsests, in copies circulated among Carolingian libraries. By the end of the ninth century Sallust occupies an undisputed place among those classical authors ‘‘so well entrenched in the literary and educational tradition, and so thick on the shelves of libraries that their survival was no longer in question’’ (Reynolds and Wilson 1991: 89). This remains the case for the next millennium: Sallust is, now and always, a classic.
The endurance of the Sallustian texts becomes more striking when we set it alongside the fate of the historian of the principate with whom he is most often paired, and whose work replaced Sallust’s in favor during the late Renaissance: C. Cornelius Tacitus. The works of Tacitus were never as popular as Sallust’s under the Roman emperors (except during the brief reign in the third century of his supposed descendant, the emperor M. Claudius Tacitus). By the end of the Carolingian era, manuscripts of the Tacitean texts, always rare, had dwindled to one copy each. Tacitus’ works, his three monographs, the Histories and the Annals, were gradually unveiled to the humanists of Renaissance Italy. In the late fifteenth century his imitation of Sallust is noted; Andrea Alciato in his 1517 commentary has Tacitus replace Sallust as the exemplar of this style of historical writing, in opposition to the smooth richness of Livy’s history (Schellhase 1976: 87).
Since the Renaissance it has become habitual to think of Sallust’s work in the light of how Tacitus developed the style. In this light, Sallust appears not just as archaic (one feature of his style was, after all, self-conscious archaism) but perhaps as undeveloped, immature, a figura awaiting realization in the full flowering of Tacitean historiography. This effect can be seen in other literary traditions: for example, in the way that the existence of Vergil’s Aeneid shapes our sense of earlier Roman epic as no more than a prelude to the great work. When considering Sallust’s histories, therefore, it is salutary to remember that for most of their afterlife they stood alone, as Tacitus was ignored or forgotten. At the time of the Tacitean manuscripts’ emergence in the late fourteenth century there were two great Roman historians, antithetical in style: Livy and Sallust.
In terms of style Sallust is above all understood as anti-Ciceronian. Although a contrast with Livy’s historical narrative might seem preferable to turning to oratory, nevertheless we must remember that, first, Sallust was for centuries read against the Ciceronianism which shaped the reading and writing of Latin, and, secondly, that Sallust himself formulated his mode of writing in reaction to the famous orator. Despite differences in genre, therefore, a comparison with Cicero is essential for outlining the features of Sallustian style. For this purpose we turn to both authors’ representations of the Roman desperado, L. Sergius Catilina. Both of these character sketches are famous and influential passages; Sallust’s Catiline becomes a model for Livy’s Hannibal (Clauss 1997) and Tacitus’ Sejanus (Martin and Woodman 1989: 84-85). Both Cicero and Sallust are expansive on Catiline; there is space here only for a comparison of a few sentences. (A more extensive analysis can be found in Woodman 1988: 117-128.)
Erant apud illum inlecebrae libidinum multae; erant etiam industriae quidam stimuli ac laboris. Flagrabant vitia libidinis apud illum; vigebant etiam studia rei militaris. Neque ego umquam fuisse tale monstrum in terris ullum puto, tam ex contrariis diversisque atque inter se pugnantibus naturae studiis cupiditatibusque conflatum.
He had many incitements to lust at his disposal; he also had some spurs to application and hard work. The vices of lust burned within him; also there flourished an impulse towards military action. Never, I think, has there been any such monster on this earth, so conflicted between opposing, contradictory, and mutually warring impulses of human nature.
(Cic. Cael. 5.12)
Corpus patiens inediae algoris vigiliae supra quam quoiquam credibile est. animus audax subdolus varius, quoius rei lubet simulator ac dissimulator, alieni adpetens sui profusus, ardens in cupiditatibus; satis eloquentiae, sapientiae parum. Vastus animus inmoderata incredibilia nimis alta semper cupiebat.
His body: enduring hunger chill wakefulness beyond what is credible for anyone. His mind: daring treacherous fickle, a pretender and concealer of whatever it will, desirous of other’s goods, profligate with his own, fiery in his desires; enough eloquence, wisdom insufficient. This monstrous mind always desired extremes, the unbelievable things, set too high.
(Sall. Cat. 5.3-5)
There is much concordance between the two characterizations. Terms like cupiditas (desire) and libido (lust) occur in both, as well as fire imagery in delineation of Catiline’s passionate nature and a sense that his character contains a mixture of good and bad elements. The first difference appears in the archaic spellings of some words by Sallust: libido in Cicero is rendered elsewhere in the Catiline as lubido, and here we see lubet for libet. (We also see quoiquam and quoius for cuiquam and cuius.) As well as archaic spellings Sallust shows a predilection for old-fashioned or more unusual words. Hence he uses the relatively rare algor (chill) instead of the more familiar frigus (cold), and subdolus (treacherous) instead of perfidus or fallax. (Livy in his imitation of this passage shows his stylistic preferences by his choice of frigus and perfidia:. Hannibal displays caloris ac frigorispatientia par and, famously, perfidia plus quam Punica: 21.4.6, 21.4.9.)
But it is in syntax and sentence structure that the distinctive Sallustian style becomes most evidently anti-Ciceronian. Every sentence of the Cicero passage is constructed in an ordered and harmonious fashion. The first two sentences both fall into two halves, each half illustrating the contrarities of Catiline’s character. The first half of each sentence provides the structure for the second half:
1. flagrabant 2. vitia 3. libidinis = 1. vigebant 2. studia 3. rei militaris.
Repetition from the first to the second sentence (apud illum... etiam) signals that here too the structures are in parallel. The final sentence, more complicated in structure, keeps its two halves in control by framing each: the first with neque.. .puto; the second with tam... conflatum. As well as balance and order, Cicero’s sentence structure tends towards harmonious conclusions, in which the rhythm of the final words underscores their importance in his portrait of Catiline: laboris; militaris; conflatum.
Turning to Sallust the reader first notices the absence of conjunctions between lists of nouns and adjectives, such as immoderata incredibilia nimis alta, in contrast to Cicero’s ex contrariis diversisque atque inter se pugnantibus. The effect is one of rapidity but also of intensity, as the high color of these words is not diluted by connectives or excessive particles. The balanced structure of Cicero’s writing is replaced by shorter periods, some of which display a parallelism of their own, such as the highly compressed chiasmus satis eloquentiae, sapientiae parum. This short extract does not provide any clear example of Sallustian variatio, where the expected structure of the sentence is suddenly subverted. What we do encounter is an absence of verbs as an ordering mechanism within the sentences. The long middle sentence, for example, has animus as its main subject (with erat understood), and a series of nouns and adjectives in apposition. By the end of the sentence, with the reference to eloquentia, it seems that the subject has become Catilina, but how far back we should place the transition is unclear. Finally, the unbalance and disharmony is compounded by the avoidance of Ciceronian diligence in concluding sentences; while every phrase of the middle sentence has a resounding final word, the sentence as a whole abruptly halts on a less memorable adverb - varius, dissimulator, profusus, cupiditatibus... parum - perhaps reflecting the ultimate failure of Catiline’s vices to bring him success. This Sallustian brevity, disjuncture, and abruptness combines as inconcinnitas (as Gell. 2.26.4. called it), deliberate awkwardness. Yet the sense of Sallust’s writing is clear, even vivid.
Choice of vocabulary and word order might seem to us a personal or perhaps an aesthetic matter, but it is important to remember the political implications of writing, and the direct political consequences of two such genres as these. The orator and the historian could make (political) worlds possible by the language that they used. Style created a way of seeing the world, and drew the reader into that way of seeing. Ciceronian style presented the world in terms of balance and order, but Cicero was not complacent about this; a monster like Catiline could encompass such contradictions within himself that he became an embodied war zone, reminiscent of the civil wars that had disturbed Rome in the past and would do so again. Sallustian style betrays a different attitude, a profound suspicion for the language of politics and its perversions. If Cicero fears Catiline as a monstrous mass of contradictions which threatens to subvert the meaning of his world, Sallust sees the world itself as engaged in the destruction of meaning, and Catiline as a symptom of that world.
This comes out elsewhere in the two character sketches, where Cicero concludes that Catiline’s fickle and many-sided nature made him adaptable to the friendships of good and bad alike. Sallust, by contrast, suggests that Catiline was spurred on to evil by the corrupt morals of the Roman state itself, dragged into degeneracy by luxury and greed. The response of Sallustian style is to appeal to an archaic (and implicitly virtuous) past by choice of language, calling for a ‘‘return to values’’ in both a semantic and a moral sense. The amplitude and adornment of Ciceronian prose is implicitly (and unfairly) equated with the luxury of present decadence, while Sallust’s harsher, abrupt mode of writing is made to recall the austere life of the idealized ancient Roman. Thus style signals important moral and political interpretations of history. Sallust’s archaisms are matched by his nostalgia for ancient virtue, while Cicero’s ordered language strives to create order in the present.
Sallust’s stylistic opposition to Cicero also has a historical dimension. Cicero’s speeches against Catiline and defense of M. Caelius Rufus were delivered in 63 and 56 respectively. (Exactly when they were published is not known - Cicero tended to revise before publication - but it was certainly within Cicero’s lifetime.) Sallust did not turn to history until after the assassination of Caesar, in the triumviral period during which Cicero fell from favor and was killed. Sallust therefore engaged with an orator whose work had within his lifetime become school texts, but whose political world had vanished beyond recall. Sallustian style, it could be said, marks the disappearance of Ciceronian prose and of the idea of the Ciceronian statesman.
For Sallust the dynamics of internal affairs at Rome are attuned to those of Rome’s conquests abroad, the acquisition and management of empire. His understanding of Roman history is structured around this double theme. The decline of Roman politics into factionism and eventually civil war is traced back to the influx of wealth from conquered cities, the increasing absence of serious military threats from rival states, and (implicitly) the creation of professional armies less loyal to Rome than to individual generals, who themselves took command out of self-interest rather than for the good of the state. The familiarity of this analysis testifies to the extent to which Sallust shapes our understanding of this historical period.
Two events mark the points of decline for Sallust: the destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE, and the dictatorship of Sulla after his conquests in Asia, where he and his army amassed great wealth. Sallust’s judgment of Roman military action, however, is not simply negative. The necessity for a worthy enemy against which the Roman army and general can exercise their virtus (military virtue) is both explicitly stated and implicit in the high degree of attention that Sallust gives to warfare in the Jugurtha and the Histories. But the inevitable consequence of the success of virtus, namely conquest and empire, is at the heart of the Roman malaise. Hence Sallust turns to the narrative of external wars not merely to celebrate the proper exercise of virtue but to track the symptoms of Roman corruption.
The monograph on Jugurtha, king of Numidia, provides us with a full-length study of such symptoms. Far from being a ‘‘noble savage’’ (a term too freely used by Claassen 1993), Jugurtha stands as a very Roman creation. This comes out in the delineation of his early character and ‘‘education’’ in Numantia, in Spain, as a Roman ally under the command of the younger Scipio Africanus. Here Jugurtha is exposed to those aspects of Roman political immorality for which he will later stand as a symptom: factional intrigue, greed, and bribery. The lesson passed on by the Romans is that ‘‘at Rome everything can be bought’’ (Romae omnia venalia esse, the words of anonymous Romans: Jug. 8.1); Jugurtha repeats the lesson back years later when he departs from Rome after abortive negotiations: ‘‘a city ready to be bought, and soon to fall to a bidder, if one can be found’’ (urbem venalem et mature perituram, si emptor invenerit: 35.10).
The extent to which Jugurtha is shaped by Roman concerns comes out in the other aspect of his education in Numantia, when Scipio attempts to counter the baneful effects of the bad Roman advice already given (8.2):
He privately advised Jugurtha to cultivate the friendship of the Roman people as a state rather than to rely on individual friendships, and not to get into the habit of bribing people: it was perilous to buy from a few men what was the possession of many.
The emphasis is on public amicitia, a relationship which encompasses states rather than (factious) individuals. Yet Scipio’s remarks, coupled with the letter he sends to Jugurtha’s uncle, king Micipsa, reminds us of the role played by the Scipios in the history of Numidian amicitia. Scipio’s letter to Micipsa concludes, ‘‘you will find Jugurtha to be worthy of you and of his grandfather Masinissa’’ (9.2). Masinissa, whose memory is evoked several times in the monograph, was created as king of Numidia by Scipio’s grandfather, the elder Scipio Africanus, and the friendship attested to between the Scipios and the Numidian kings cannot be described as purely private or public. The existence of Numidia is already circumscribed by Roman imperialist concerns, and its ills are not just symptoms of contemporary decline but the unfolding consequences of earlier generations of Roman conquest.
In the mouths of both Jugurtha and, in the Histories, Mithridates, Sallust places savage indictments of Roman imperialism as lubido imperandi (the lust for domination, Jug. 81.1) and cupido profunda imperi (‘‘insatiable desire for empire,’’ Hist. 4.69.5) - terms which map back onto Sallust’s moral interpretation of men like Catiline, symptoms of the corrupt state. The complaint of both kings is that in this unilateral drive for conquest the Romans see each successive race as just another enemy to be conquered. Jugurtha makes this point to king Bocchus of Mauretania (Jug. 81.1-2): ‘‘The Romans are... the common enemy of all peoples... now they are the enemy of Jugurtha, a while ago of Carthage, then king Perseus, and next whoever seems most wealthy.’’ Mithridates, appealing to the king of Parthia for support, makes the same point with different historical examples (Hist. 4.69.20): ‘‘The Romans take up arms against all peoples, most fiercely against those from whom the spoils will be greatest.’’ The heterogeneity of Africa and of the Black Sea, evoked in Sallust’s ethnographic digressions (Jug. 17-19; Hist. 3.62-80), becomes flattened, as Moors, Carthaginians, Numidians, Macedonians, Pontics, and Parthians each take their turn as enemy of Rome. The very fact that Sallust has both the Numidian and the Pontic kings utter the same sentiments contributes to this homogenizing of the many peoples of the world under Roman discourse. Even this indictment of imperialism propagates the causes of empire. Sallust’s vision of the Roman empire in the late republican period, morally distasteful yet politically inescapable, remains the peculiar inheritance of European historical and political thought.
FURTHER READING
On Sallust’s life and career see Syme 1964: 29-59. Essential general works on Sallust are Kraus and Woodman 1997: 10-50 and Syme 1964. See also Scanlon 1987.
For the Catiline Syme 1964: 60-82 gives the historical background and Drummond 1995 provides further details. The most important literary analyses are Batstone 1988 and 1990; Kraus and Woodman 1997: 13-21; and Levene 2000; see also Feeney 1994; Sklenar 1998; and Spath 1998.
On the Jugurtha Syme 1964: 138-177 is useful, especially for filling in the details of the minor historical figures in the monograph, which has enjoyed a recent resurgence of literary interest, especially from Kraus and Woodman 1997: 21-30; Kraus 1999b; and Levene 1992. See also Green 1993; Oniga 1995; Scanlon 1989; and Wiedemann 1993.
Woodman 1988: 117-159 discusses style and attitude in Livy and Sallust. On Sallust’s influence in early modern political writing see Wood 1995.
The text of Sallust used here is that of L. D. Reynolds (Oxford 1991). All translations are my
Own.
World History
