Sallust (1)

Sallust is surely one of the most fascinating fellows of the ancient world. Here's a taste of his biography: he attacked Cicero in 52 (failed), was kicked out of the senate in 50. He backed Caesar (smart), but when Caesar sent him to help Antonius, he, well, failed. Two years later he was sent to deal with a mutiny and, as you can probably guess, failed. His punishment for repeated failure was being made a governor in 46. One year later, enormously rich, he quit. In 44 he was tried for show more extortion (acquitted). Having failed so egregiously at literally everything (but consistently failing up) he thought he'd take up history writing, and became one of the most influential historians and stylists of the ancient world. We all know someone like Sallust, the type of person who could beat their bosses with a lead pipe and be given a promotion the next day.

Luckily, Sallust really was a pretty good writer. Batstone's translation smooths off the extreme difficulty of Sallust's style, but keeps the pithiness (compare: every other historian before Sallust, all of whom wrote eighteen thousand volume monsters; Tacitus apparently learned from Sallust). The two major histories (I exclude The Histories, since they're in here for completeness and scholarly respectability; I can't imagine too many people reading those fragments with pleasure) each include fascinating philosophical prologues and a wonderful old-man odor of crankiness. The people are always far more interesting in Sallust's depiction than they are in, e.g., Cicero; Catiline seems like a pretty reasonable guy gone wrong, as does Jugurtha. And in general it's nice to read a Roman who doesn't have time for the pretensions of the aristocrats of the senate. The comparison with today casts an interesting light on all the neoclassical buildings that dot America's administrative districts.

Also, this is a very good edition if, like me, you don't know that much about the events Sallust is writing about. Batstone has encouraged me to read more about the late Republic, which is the best thing one can say about an editor/translator. show less

The Jugurthine War is a particularly good read. An interesting story, well told. Jugurtha starts off as a kind of ideal Roman-type youth, but is corrupted by Rome. The Romans attempt to defeat him but cannot due to their own corruption. Eventually they win by deploying Marius, who represents a return to traditional plebeian values. There’s a neat artistry to the whole thing. So neat that it reads more like a novel and made me wonder how much of it is actually true. I should think it would show more be quite easy to spin the story otherwise. I’ve read Livy’s account of Masinissa. He’s surely the coolest monarch ever to mount a horse. All the effort he put in to keeping his country independent while the Romans made war on his neighbour. And he pulled it off. Now here are his grandchildren screwing it all up. Yet you can see Jugurtha is something of a chip off the old block, and the story could be spun as a tragedy. But Sallust has a set agenda. He’s interested in the rot at the heart of the Roman republic.

Catiline’s War shares the same interest but is very obviously a first book. My understanding is that Sallust tried to write using as few words as possible. It’s painfully apparent here. The speeches given by the consul at the time have survived and they run to many times the length of Sallust’s account of the whole affair. Sallust doesn’t come off particularly well. He was a corrupt politician who got away with it because he was friends with Julius Caesar. After Caesar was murdered he retired and took to writing about a corrupt politician. He tells us how sorry he is for having been corrupt. Well, at least he knows about his subject matter. But is he really sorry, or is he just trying to improve his public image? I note that he didn’t stop enriching himself until he was forced to. Now, the passages where he talks about this are not long but they stand out because the whole book is so short. In Jugurthine’s War he’s learnt a bit about writing and his viewpoint in incorporated into the artistry of the book. Still, it’s an interesting account of an interesting time. Life-defining for everyone involved, but of little consequence to the flow of Roman history. And from what I can see Sallust was correct about the rot at the heart of the republic. It was about to fall. show less

I read Woodman’s Penguin translation. Unless you need the Latin I’d recommend that one as it has better notes. However, what this edition has is the Pseudo-Sallustian works. I thought I’d give them a go in the spirit of ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’. I didn’t expect much and there’s really not much to them. They’re all fake. Rhetorical exercises written much later. You’ll literally be reading someone’s homework. The Oration Against Cicero might be a political pamphlet show more from the time. Interesting if so, but its provenance can’t be proven. I have to admire what Loeb is doing here. No one else is going to translate this sort of thing and without them those of us who can’t read Latin would never be able to descide for ourselves what from the ancient world is or isn’t worth reading. show less

Sallust had a long political career, siding with the populists, who would eventually become the triumvirate of Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey. In many ways, Sallust's history resembles Caesar's memoirs twenty years later, but Caesar's biases are much more difficult to ferret out. If Sallust had been a more clever man, we might have taken his word for it and entered his works as pure history, but his bias is so evident that we can almost fill out the rest of the story by it's absence.

There are show more fairly self-evident motivations for the men Sallust presents as incorrigible villains, and we may also compare his view of history to Cicero's; for even though they were of like opinion, Cicero tends to be more equitable in his explanations.

This difference between the two authors rather perfectly encapsulates the difference between them as men, and the central point of their disagreement. Cicero was a pacifier, a placator, but one of enough skill and vigor to change his opponent's course in the midst of deference. We might expect him to be in perfect agreement with Ben Franklin who, when once asked for advice by Thomas Jefferson, is supposed to have said "never disagree with anyone".

Sallust, on the other hand, was an incurable idealist. We are treated to long passages on the particular moral qualities a man ought to have and how Sallust's opponents lack them and how Sallust's friends all have them. There is a constant sense of injustice being perpetrated throughout the politic sphere, but it is always by Sallust's political and ideological enemies.

Though the reader rarely doubts such depravity and greed went on, Sallust's self righteous displays of humble innocence strike as false. His history is not informed enough to serve us--indeed, it is filled with errors in dates, places, and people. But neither is his rhetoric so impressive that it saves his tract from being more than the lamentations of a man who retired to complain for posterity's sake.

As a historical view, he is useful, but moreso within the context of other writers. show less