Sallust

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Sallust, the Roman historian and politician born around 86 BC, left behind something almost paradoxical: the man who made moral decline the central obsession of his writing was also a man convicted of corruption by his own contemporaries. Gaius Sallustius Crispus came from a plebeian family in the Sabine hill country, probably from the town of Amiternum in central Italy. He rose through the rough channels of Roman politics, survived a senate expulsion, narrowly escaped death in a soldier rebellion, and ultimately became the earliest Latin historian whose work still survives in full. What did he actually write, and why does a man branded a hypocrite by ancient critics still shape how we picture the late Roman Republic today? The answers wind through battlefields in Africa, the gardens of Rome's Quirinal Hill, and manuscripts that monks copied out centuries after the empire itself had fallen.

• 2. A Life in Politics

  ›

  After what his own sources call an ill-spent youth, Sallust entered Roman public life as a military tribune in the 60s BC. He may have won election as quaestor in 55 BC, though scholars disagree on whether he actually held that post. The first moment historians can pin down with confidence is his term as plebeian tribune in 52 BC, the same year followers of Milo killed the politician Clodius. Sallust threw himself into that controversy on the anti-Milo side, organising street demonstrations that, by ancient accounts, unnerved Cicero badly enough to weaken the speech he delivered at Milo's trial. Milo ended up exiled.

  That same year Sallust joined the other ten tribunes in backing a law that would allow Julius Caesar to stand for a second consulship without physically returning to Rome. Even so, Ronald Syme argues Sallust was not initially a Caesar supporter; his anti-Milo stance probably drove him there more than any early ideological bond. In 50 BC, the censor Appius Claudius Pulcher expelled him from the senate on grounds of immorality. That charge was almost certainly a cover for political score-settling over the Milo affair. Losing his senate seat pushed Sallust firmly into Caesar's camp, and from that point forward his fortunes were tied to the dictator.

• 3. War and the Province

  ›

  When civil war broke out in 49 BC, Sallust was a Caesarian partisan, though not a notable one. Caesar's own account of the conflict, the Commentarii de Bello Civili, does not mention him by name. Plutarch, however, reports that Sallust dined with Caesar, Hirtius, Oppius, Balbus and Sulpicius Rufus on the night after Caesar crossed the Rubicon in early January 49 BC. That same year Sallust was moved to Illyricum, where he likely commanded at least one legion following a failed campaign by Publius Cornelius Dolabella and Gaius Antonius. Caesar probably made him quaestor in 48 BC, which automatically restored his senate seat.

  In late summer 47 BC, soldiers camped near Rome mutinied, demanding discharge pay. Sallust, serving then as praetor designatus and as one of Caesar's legates, was sent with several senators to negotiate. The mutineers killed two of those senators. Sallust barely got out alive. The following year he served as praetor and accompanied Caesar's African campaign, which ended with the Pompeians' defeat at Thapsus. He did not fight directly; he commanded ships and organised supply lines running through the Kerkennah Islands. Caesar rewarded him with the proconsular governorship of Africa Nova, held either in 46-45 BC or into early 44 BC. His successors were seasoned military men, which makes Caesar's choice of Sallust puzzling, though his logistical talent in Africa likely explained it. He used the post to make himself extraordinarily rich through corrupt and avaricious means, and only Caesar's personal influence shielded him from conviction on extortion charges when he returned to Rome in late 45 or early 44 BC.

• 4. The Gardens and the Writing Life

  ›

  Back in Rome, without prospects for advancement and under the cloud of corruption charges, Sallust channelled his accumulated wealth into two projects. He began laying out the Gardens of Sallust on the Quirinal Hill, which became famous enough that the emperors later inherited them. He also turned to writing history, framing that choice as a public duty: a way to record achievements for future generations when political office was no longer open to him.

  His political bitterness shaped the histories that followed. Ancient sources describe his surviving writings as containing few heroes, and a deep resentment toward the Roman elite runs through all of them. According to Jerome, Sallust became the second husband of Terentia, Cicero's former wife, though prominent scholars of Roman prosopography including Ronald Syme regard this as a legend. Susan Treggiari has suggested that if Sallust did marry someone from Cicero's household, it was more likely Cicero's second wife Publilia. Centuries later, according to the writer Procopius, when Alaric's army entered Rome, they burned Sallust's house.

• 5. What He Wrote

  ›

  Sallust's first published work, probably written around 42 BC though possibly drafted as early as 50 BC as an unpublished pamphlet, covered the conspiracy of Lucius Sergius Catilina to overthrow the Roman Republic in 63 BC. The monograph shows no sign that Sallust had personal memories of the conspiracy itself, which may reflect his having been absent from Rome on military service at the time. Some historians read it as a plea for restraint written during the bloody proscriptions of the Second Triumvirate, its portrayal of Caesar arguing against the death penalty standing in pointed contrast to the killings then underway.

  Sallust presents Catiline as a deliberate enemy of law and morality while still crediting him with courage in his final battle. He relied heavily on Cicero's own account of his consulship for details. His narrative centers on Caesar and Cato the Younger, held up as paired examples of virtus. Theodor Mommsen argued that Sallust shaped the work partly to clear his patron Caesar of any taint from the conspiracy. Sallust never fully explains Catiline's motives, partly because Catiline had allied himself with Sulla, whom Sallust despised.

  His second work, the Jugurthine War, written around 41-40 BC, covers Rome's conflict with Jugurtha in Numidia from 112 to 106 BC. Sallust appears to have drawn on annalistic history and the autobiographies of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, Publius Rutilius Rufus, and Sulla. The work's enduring value lies less in its geography and ethnography than in its introduction of Marius and Sulla to the Roman political stage and the rivalry between them. Sallust's time governing Africa Nova, which might have given him first-hand insight into the region, left no visible trace in the monograph despite a digression on the subject.

  His largest work, the Historiae, covered Rome from 78 BC. Only fragments survive, the latest from book 5 concerning the year 67 BC. Those fragments suggest Sallust continued his harsh treatment of moral decline after Sulla and was not generous toward Pompey. Historians have long mourned the loss of the full work, which would have illuminated the war against Sertorius, who died in 72 BC; Lucullus's campaigns against Mithradates VI of Pontus from 75 to 66 BC; and Pompey's eastern victories from 66 to 62 BC.

• 6. Style Against Cicero

  ›

  Sallust's prose was famous in its own time for not sounding like anyone else's. Where Julius Caesar wrote plain, direct Latin and Cicero built long harmonious periodic sentences, Sallust wrote short, abrupt, archaic. He deliberately avoided words common in contemporary public oratory, including honestas, humanitas, and consensus. He reached for unusual forms: lubido where others wrote libido, maxumum instead of maximum, and endings like -ere for the more common -erunt in the third-person plural perfect. Some words he used, among them antecapere, portatio, incruentus, incelebratus, and incuriosus, appear nowhere else in surviving Latin before him, suggesting they were either neologisms or deliberate revivals of forgotten vocabulary. According to Suetonius, a scholar named Lucius Ateius Praetextatus helped Sallust collect archaic words for this purpose.

  Ronald Syme has argued that Sallust's stylistic choices were sharpened by his antagonism toward Cicero, his political rival and a dominant force in Latin prose. Scholars have described the result as anti-Ciceronian, a pointed refusal of the ornate style then fashionable. John Burrow called him a master of economical, lucid, and dramatic narrative and of acid, if exaggerated, comment. Sallust also used antithesis, alliteration, and chiasmus. His debt to Thucydides shows in his emphasis on politics, his character analyses, and his selective omission of detail; Cato the Elder's old-fashioned devices of asyndeton and anaphora were likely a second influence. In Twilight of the Idols, published in 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche credited Sallust with awakening his own sense of the epigram as a style, praising him for being condensed, severe, with as much substance as possible in the background.

• 7. Moral Vision and Its Limits

  ›

  For Sallust, one moment above all others explains Rome's fall: the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC removed the foreign threat that had kept Roman virtue disciplined. The influx of wealth from the east following Sulla's First Mithridatic War compounded the damage. From that twin root sprang the civil wars, the corruption of the nobility, and the collapse of the republic. Before 146 BC, Sallust painted the republic in terms critics have called implausibly untrammelled virtue, a romanticised portrait of an ancient Rome that probably never quite existed.

  Ancient readers largely admired the analysis. Tacitus spoke highly of him and was influenced by him deeply. Quintilian called him the Roman Thucydides. Martial ranked him prince of Roman historiographers. In late antiquity Jerome praised him as very reliable, and his monographs entered the standard Latin curriculum alongside Virgil, Cicero, and Terence. Thomas Aquinas and Brunetto Latini cited his passage on the expansion of the republic in the 13th century. Leonardo Bruni, Coluccio Salutati, and Niccolo Machiavelli engaged seriously with his work during the Renaissance. During the French Wars of Religion, De coniuratione Catilinae circulated as a practical guide to uncovering conspiracies. Henrik Ibsen's first play, Catiline, written around 1849, drew directly on Sallust's story.

  Since the 19th century, though, the verdict has grown more mixed. Historians have pointed to Sallust's partisanship, geographic errors, and chronological mistakes. Christopher S. Mackay has written that Sallust paints an exaggerated picture of the senate's faults and analyses events in terms of a simplistic opposition between self-interest and the public good, showing little understanding of how the Roman political system actually functioned. His anti-corruption moralising strikes many modern readers as blunted by the fact that he himself was prosecuted for corruption and extortion. His focus on moral decline crowds out structural and socio-economic explanations for the republic's crisis. Even so, scholars credit him as a clear-sighted interpreter of his own age, and acknowledge that without his surviving work, the understanding of Rome in the 1st century BC would be far weaker.

• 8. The Manuscripts

  ›

  Sallust's survival through the medieval period was neither simple nor complete. The manuscripts of his writings divide into two groups: the mutili, or mutilated copies, and the integri, meaning whole or undamaged ones. The classification turns on a gap in the text of the Jugurthine War between sections 103.2 and 112.3. The mutili carry this gap; the integri do not. The oldest surviving copies are the Codex Parisinus 16024 and Codex Parisinus 16025, known to scholars as P and A. Both were produced in the 9th century and both belong to the mutili group. They contain only Catiline and Jugurtha; some other mutili copies add the invective against Cicero and a counter-invective attributed to Cicero. The oldest integri manuscripts date from the 11th century.

  A separate manuscript, the Codex Vaticanus 3864, designated V, stands apart from both groups. It preserves only the speeches and letters from Catiline, Jugurtha, and the Histories, and its creator rearranged word order and replaced archaic vocabulary with more familiar Latin. The Historiae survives primarily through citations in other ancient authors, which carries a specific risk: those authors sometimes quoted Sallust from memory and introduced distortions. Papyrus fragments of his work survive from the 2nd through the 4th centuries AD. In the 2nd century, Zenobius translated his works into Ancient Greek. His brief style went on to shape the prose of Widukind of Corvey and Wipo of Burgundy in the medieval period, and Fronto drew on the archaic words Sallust had collected to add what ancient readers called archaic coloring to his own writing.