Sallust

Roman historian

• Born: 86 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Amiternum, Samnium (now San Vittorino, Italy)
• Died: 35 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Rome (now in Italy)

Sallust’s most important accomplishments were influential works of history composed after his retirement from a checkered political career. The tone, style, and subject matter of his writings reflect the perils and disenchantments of his earlier career.

Early Life

Gaius Sallustius Crispus, or Sallust (SAL-uhst), was born in 86 b.c.e. in the town of Amiternum in the Sabine uplands, some fifty-five miles northeast of Rome in the central Italian peninsula. Though likely a member of a locally eminent family, Sallust was in Roman terms nonaristocratic, that is, a plebeian. As a politician, he was thus a nouus homo (new man). Although by the first century b.c.e. plebeians regularly attained political office and senatorial rank, the highest offices—the praetorship and especially the consulship—remained almost exclusively the preserve of a few wealthy, aristocratic families and such men as they chose to support. To fulfill his political ambitions, the new man needed skill, sagacity, tact, perseverance, luck, and, most particularly, powerful friends. This helps to explain both Sallust’s general dislike of the entrenched conservative aristocracy and his affiliation with Julius Caesar.

Sallust was elected quaestor (a junior official with financial responsibilities) around 55 and tribune of the people in 52. In the latter position, he was involved on the side of the prosecution in the murder trial of a notorious right-wing politician (defended by Cicero) who habitually used intimidation and mob violence. This involvement, along with various other anticonservative actions, gained for Sallust numerous political enemies, who retaliated by having him expelled from the senate in 50 on apparently trumped-up charges of sexual immorality.

Hoping for a restoration of status, Sallust sided with Julius Caesar against Pompey the Great in the civil war that broke out in the year 49. He was rewarded with a second quaestorship (c. 49), a praetorship (47), and various military commands. His service in these posts was undistinguished and occasionally incompetent. He failed to quell a troop mutiny, for example, and was not entrusted with a battle command during Caesar’s African campaign. Caesar did, however, see fit to appoint Sallust as the first governor of the province of Africa Nova in 46, a fact that implies at least minimal faith in his administrative abilities. After his governorship, Sallust was charged with abuse of power—extortion and embezzlement—but saved himself from conviction by sharing his spoils with Caesar, who was by then dictator. Still, the scandal severely limited Sallust’s political prospects and forced him into an early retirement, from which the assassination of Caesar in 44 made it impossible to return.

Life’s Work

Sallust’s inglorious political career was marred by factional strife, sensational scandals, sporadic ineptitude, and outright misconduct. Whatever he may have lost in public esteem, however, Sallust handsomely recouped in property and possessions. The wealth he amassed in office ensured an opulent style of retirement. Sallust purchased a palatial villa at Tivoli, said to have been owned at one time by Caesar himself. At Rome, he began construction of the famed Horti Sallustiani (gardens of Sallust), in which an elegantly landscaped complex of parklands surrounded a fine mansion. The loveliness of this estate in the capital city later attracted the attention of Roman emperors, whose property it eventually became.

Sallust did not, however, simply settle into a genteel life of disillusioned and indolent leisure. He used his knowledge of the dynamics of Roman government as a lens through which to examine the gradual disintegration of the political system in the late republican period.

The personalities and events in Sallust’s historical works are typical of a period of decline and fall. His first work, the Bellum Catilinae (c. 42 b.c.e.; The Conspiracy of Catiline, 1608), is a historical monograph devoted to the failed conspiracy of Catiline, a disgruntled, impoverished aristocrat who intended to make good his electoral and financial losses by resorting to armed insurrection. The planned coup d’état was quashed by the actions of Cicero during his consulship in 63. The story of the exposure of the plot and of the measures taken by consul and senate to eliminate the threat—ultimately in battle—is familiar from Cicero’s four Catilinarian orations.

Sallust’s telling of the Catiline story differs from Cicero’s in several respects. He sees the conspiracy in the context of a general moral deterioration within the governing class in Rome. Many in the senatorial nobility placed their own advancement ahead of concern for the commonweal. Catiline found supporters not only among disaffected political have-nots but also among members of the ruling elite who—at least for a time—saw in his machinations opportunities for furthering their own selfish interests. This was not surprising in an era that had seen the bloodshed and confiscation of property that marked the dictatorship of Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix. In The Conspiracy of Catiline, two men of strong moral character—Marcus Porcius Cato (Cato the Younger) and Julius Caesar—stand out in contrast to the surrounding moral decay. Though representing very different political persuasions, both men are portrayed as admirable for their integrity. Sallust is sometimes accused of being an apologist for his erstwhile patron, Julius Caesar, but his favorable portrait of Cato argues a more nonpartisan outlook. Cicero, too, though not the triumphant savior paraded in his own writings, is given his due by Sallust.

Sallust’s second work, the Bellum Iugurthinum (c. 40 b.c.e.; The War of Jugurtha, 1608), recounts the war between Rome and an upstart king of Numidia (now eastern Algeria) between 111 and 105. This was an apt subject, in part because of Sallust’s familiarity with North Africa and because of the many hard-fought battles, but especially because it afforded another case of mismanagement and corruption among the Roman ruling elite. In The War of Jugurtha, the handling of the conflict by the senate and its representatives is portrayed as ineffective, again largely because of divisions among the aristocrats who had allowed their own lust for power or money to displace their obligation to govern well. Some in the government were willing to accept bribes in return for their support of Jugurtha over other claimants to the Numidian throne. The phrase “everything at Rome has its price” rings like a death knell in the monograph. It was finally a new man—Gaius Marius —who succeeded in gaining victory for Rome. Marius, too, in Sallust’s account, had flaws of character: He is depicted as a demagogue who connived to damage the reputation of his predecessor in command. Furthermore, though he would have other spectacular military successes (against invading Germanic tribes on Italy’s northern frontier), Marius’s long career ended in civil war against Sulla.

Sallust’s other major work, his Historiae (begun c. 39 b.c.e.; English translation of fragments, Histories, 1789), survives only in fragments. It was more extensive in scope than the monographs, covering in annalistic fashion the years from 78 apparently to the early 60’s; a continuation to perhaps 50 may have been envisaged, but Sallust’s death in 35 prevented it.

Sallust does not meet the standards of modern historical scholarship. His chronology is sometimes awry; he neglected or suppressed relevant information, while including long digressions. He sometimes perpetuated patently distorted reports of personalities and events and, in general, did not assess available sources with sufficient care. Still, no ancient Greek or Roman historian is entirely free from such shortcomings, and Sallust’s works are historically valuable despite them, particularly as a check against the record furnished by Cicero, who has so colored the modern picture of the late Republic.

Sallust is most compelling and influential as a stylist and moralist. His language is deliberately patterned on the ruggedly direct and archaic syntax of the stern Cato the Censor and, among Greek precedents, on the brevity and abnormal grammatical effects of the greatest Greek historian, Thucydides. His terse sentence structure contributes to a forceful and dramatic progression of thought. This style is well suited to the moral outlook of a historian of decline and fall. Like Thucydides, Sallust wrote from the vantage point of a man of wide experience forced out of an active political life into that of an analyst of the causes of deterioration of character and commitment in the ruling elite of a great imperial power. This analysis is achieved by remarkably concise and trenchant sketches of, and judgments on, persons and motives. The historical figures who are Sallust’s subjects act out of clearly defined and exhibited passions—sometimes noble, mostly base, never lukewarm.

Significance

Sallust’s qualities as stylist and moralist have always won for him readers, admirers, and imitators. In classical antiquity, he was recognized as the first great Roman historian; the eminent teacher and critic Quintilian even put him on a par with Thucydides. This judgment is a literary one. The most brilliant classical Roman historian, Cornelius Tacitus, was profoundly influenced by the Sallustian style of composition. The poet Martial concurred with Quintilian’s high estimation of Sallust, and Saint Augustine’s favorable opinion helped to ensure the historian’s popularity in the Middle Ages. German and French translations of his work appeared by the fourteenth century, the first printed edition in the fifteenth, and the first English versions early in the sixteenth. The great Renaissance Humanist, Desiderius Erasmus, preferred Sallust to Livy and Tacitus for use in school curricula. In modern times, Sallust has appealed to many, including Marxist readers who find in him an indictment of decadence in a corrupted aristocracy.

Sallust produced the first true masterpieces of historical writing in Latin. His political career served as preparation, in the school of hard experience, for his work as a writer. In modern times, some have charged him with hypocrisy, noting the glaring inconsistency between his own quite dismal record as a public servant and the lofty moral tone he adopts in his histories. Moreover, doubts tend to arise regarding the presentation and interpretation of facts in the writings of a retired politician. Nevertheless, these considerations do not detract from the worth of Sallust’s writings in and of themselves. His works are valuable inquiries into and reflections on sociopolitical developments in an exciting and critically significant period in Roman history.

Bibliography

Earl, D. C. The Political Thought of Sallust. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1961. Earl discusses Sallust’s views of the political environment of the late Republic, in particular his attitude toward moral degeneracy (declining virtus) as a fatal element. Explicates the individual works as reflective of this political perspective.

Gruen, Erich. The Last Generation of the Roman Republic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Account of the last years of the Roman Republic provides a context for understanding the career and motivations of politicians of the day.

Kraus, Christina Shuttleworth, and A. J. Woodman. Latin Historians. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Describes and assesses the works of Sallust.

Laistner, M. L. W. The Greater Roman Historians. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Contains a chapter on Sallust giving a harsh assessment of his worth as a historian.

Syme, Ronald. The Roman Revolution. Reprint. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. An important and influential scholarly work on “the transformation of state and society at Rome between 60 b.c.e. and a.d. 14.”

Syme, Ronald. Sallust. Reprint. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. An authoritative work on the life, times, and writings of its subject.