Sallust’s historical writings are so familiar to students of Latin, and have exerted such influence in antiquity and beyond, that it is often hard to recognize just how exceptional they are. Both the surviving works are brief historical monographs, an unusual form in itself, and one not previously attested at Rome. The Catiline in particular is not only a monograph but also a remarkably short one: it is, for example, shorter than any one of Livy’s thirty-five surviving volumes. And what is more, that brevity in scale is accentuated by the fact that Sallust spends a significant portion of the work on matters outside his main narrative. He begins with a philosophical preface of unprecedented abstraction, in which he discusses in general terms the superiority of intellectual virtue over physical strength and of virtue in general over vice (1.1-2.9). From here he moves into a defense of history as a career, along with a short account of his own political career (though leaving out the embarrassing details: he was expelled from the Senate for three years, and subsequently forced out of political life when charged with extortion) and his abandonment of it in favor of writing (3.1-4.2). At that point he offers a brief account of his topic, followed by a character sketch of Catiline (4.3-5.8) which makes it appear that his narrative is about to begin - but instead he immediately digresses again, and summarizes the whole of Roman history from Aeneas onwards down to Sulla in order to explain the state that Rome had found herself in that made her a breeding-ground for Catiline’s revolution (5.9-13.5). Not until something like a fifth of the way into this short monograph do we actually begin the narrative. Even then the story is interrupted by a summary of the social and moral problems of the city (36.4-39.5); and then an astonishing portion of the last section - again, amounting to about a fifth of the total monograph - is devoted to the debate between Caesar and Cato on the punishment of the conspirators and a comparison between these two key figures in Roman history. Speeches and letters also occupy a significant proportion of the rest of the monograph, including two speeches and a letter from Catiline himself.
The Jugurtha is, relatively speaking, spread over a more expansive canvas - it is about twice as long as its predecessor - but here too the narrative is treated in far from a conventional fashion. Once again we have an abstract philosophical preface about virtue leading into a defense of Sallust’s own position as historian (1-4); once again a good proportion of the narrative is punctuated by digressions, notably the ones on Africa (17-19), on the history of social conflict at Rome (41-42), and on the foundation of Leptis Magna (78-79). Here too speeches play a substantial role: major speeches by Adherbal (14), Memmius (31), and Marius (85), as well as some shorter ones. It is true that all of this still leaves a much larger proportion of the text devoted to the main narrative than was the case in the Catiline. But what sets the Jugurtha apart not only from its predecessor but also from all other known historiography in antiquity is the way in which the major topic of the work is indicated to be not so much the war against Jugurtha itself, which was after all a relatively minor episode, but the entire sweep of Roman history in the last centuries of the republic. This is never narrated directly, yet Sallust repeatedly indicates to the reader that the true significance of the monograph lies in the unstated story of Roman decline and fall that lies beyond its chronological boundaries (see Levene 1992).
So, purely in formal terms, Sallust’s history is unique. This uniqueness of form is allied to a historical slant and writing style which are themselves highly distinctive. The overriding impression is of a pervasive pessimism: his central theme is Roman decline, which appears both dreadful and inevitable. For Sallust, while it is true that Roman power has never been greater, it is precisely because Roman power has never been greater that Rome is collapsing, as unchallenged power and wealth lead to appalling political and moral corruption. That corruption is repeatedly exposed, as bribery, theft, vice, and debauchery are seen as the direct consequence of Roman conquest and as the underlying motivators for social and political upheaval. And in order to narrate this tale of disaster, Sallust employed a style full of archaisms and innovations in vocabulary, forged into spiky and compressed phrases and sentences (cf. Woodman 1988: 117-128). Sallust had himself, as said above, been at the heart of Roman politics: he now turns to exposing its deepest and most vicious basis.
Moreover, we can see firm links between Sallust and other politician-historians of the Roman world. For his major Roman model he went back more than 100 years to Cato the Censor, as was observed in antiquity (e. g. Quint. 8.3.29) - Cato was the prime example of a leading politician who had become a leading historian, and also a man whose moral stance was a congenial touchstone for someone deploring the absence of morality in his own contemporaries. But Sallust can easily be seen as part of a more immediate tradition as well. Sisenna was likewise known for coinages in vocabulary (e. g., Cic. Brut. 259-260: it was this that made his work such a fertile quarrying ground for later grammarians); Sallust had cited him, broadly approvingly, as a predecessor at Jug. 95.2, and seems to have begun his own Histories at the point where Sisenna left off. Likewise, Sallust had a close connection to Pollio: the grammarian L. Ateius Philologus acted as assistant and advisor to both men (Suet. Gramm. 10.6). Another politician-historian of the period, Arruntius, was accused by Seneca of imitating Sallust to a ludicrous degree (Ep. 114.17-19). All of this appears to give good reason to see Sallust’s writing as distinctively connected with the insights acquired through his political career, and as part of a tradition of political history at Rome.
But while all that is true, there is another side to Sallust as well. As was said above, his major work, the Histories, is lost; but the surviving fragments of that work are sufficiently extensive to indicate to us a significantly different side to the historian. For one thing, it appears that, perhaps like Sisenna’s own work, but unlike the Catiline and the Jugurtha, it was organized annalistically. Whereas the monographs pay little attention to chronology, which is treated sometimes quite cavalierly, the Histories adopted a strict year-by-year framework, and the opening sentence of the work clearly gestures towards a formal annalistic approach (F 1.1); there are also some indications that other annalistic material was included, albeit treated flexibly (e. g., FF 1.66, 2.42-43; cf. Rich 1997). Moreover, Sallust appears to have abandoned the heavy reliance on analysis through speeches that marked the two monographs. A ninth-century manuscript now in the Vatican contains texts of all the speeches and letters from Sallust’s Catiline and Jugurtha, even relatively short ones; it also includes four speeches and two letters from Histories 1-4. FF 5.21-22 come from a speech of Gabinius in Histories 5, which suggests that Book 5 was not culled for the Vatican collection, but there is no other fragment from all the hundreds surviving from the Histories attesting to a direct speech other than those in the Vatican manuscript. It is therefore a reasonable deduction that this manuscript contains all the speeches and letters from Histories 1-4, exactly as it does for Sallust’s surviving works. In which case it is noticeable that the Histories contained only a little more than one speech or letter per book, not one of which is as long as either the speech of Caesar from the Catiline or that of Marius from the Jugurtha.
Moreover, the narrative scale of the Histories has moved away from the massive abridgment that characterized the monographs. The Catiline is astonishingly brief, as said above; the Jugurtha, while longer, covers a good thirteen years of events. The Histories, on the other hand, take five books to deal with just twelve years. This is comfortably on the scale adopted by earlier historical writers, and even comparable to that of most of Livy’s work (though in fact Livy spent ten books [90-99] on the specific period covered by Sallust’s Histories). In other words, a good number of the distinctive structural features of the monographs are abandoned in the major work, though of course we cannot tell for sure how pervasive this return to tradition was.
But even more important is that thematically, also, Sallust exhibits features that more traditionally have been associated with Livy. He may analyze recent events in grim and pessimistic terms; but this is offset by a remarkably starry-eyed and romantic picture of Roman republican history prior to 146 bce. In the Catiline and the Jugurtha that period is - at least on the face of things - presented as a time of implausibly untrammeled virtue (Cat. 7.1-10.1; Jug. 41.2). This picture is substantially qualified in the Histories (F 1.11), which admits that the earlier republic was marked by social strife, but even that work still allows pure virtue in the period 202-146 BCE. This tendency to romanticize the distant past, and to look back to it to get examples of virtuous conduct for one’s readers, is there throughout Sallust’s works - it is a common theme in the speeches, for example. While the current state of Rome may offer little hope to readers, the glorious past is always kept before their eyes to offer an alternative. Sallust provides interesting and politically informed analyses of many events, but this is set within a remarkably schematic and stylized overall framework, albeit one that is persistently subverted and complicated once one gets beneath the surface (e. g., Scanlon 1987; Batstone 1988, 1990; Kraus 1999a; Levene 2000).
World History
