with the cogency of the final judgment it offers of the past. The antithesis and ellipses that characterize Sallust’s style also place a special interpretative burden on his readers. Sallust’s antithetical presentation of his subject extends to the inclusion of opposed interpretations of events, like those of the witnesses to Catiline’s defeat. Individual audience members will make different assumptions about whether these alternative voices constitute mere foils to Sallust’s, rival visions the historian expects to be rejected, or whether they are powerful enough to challenge the historian’s own historical representation.
Whether or not such challenges were intended by the author, and whether, if they were not, they can nevertheless be made part of a reader’s interpretation of the work, are issues that require further choices on the part of the audience. I consider it axiomatic that each reader will negotiate these possibilities differently, seeing for example Catiline as Sallust’s historiographic rival and Caesar as his ally, and for that reason I try to focus my argument on the implications of such decisions rather than treating dissonance and ambiguity as problems to be solved or setting limits to texts’ interpretability.
The circumstances that may have encouraged such reflectiveness among Sallust’s audience include not only the many and contradictory political positions inspired by the events Sallust describes but an equally revolutionary diversity in the media through which those events were represented.25 While history had been written in Rome for close to two centuries before Sallust began to write, Cicero’s repeated complaints that the genre had not yet reached an adequate literary form give evidence of a contemporary rethinking of what the aims of the genre should be (see Chapter 2). His particular insistence that the author should manifest his oratorical skills reminds us not only of the literary imperialism of rhetorical training but that history had already been rhetoricized in the public oratory of the period, both as a source of precedent and thanks to the inevitable role of narrative in forensic and deliberative speeches as well as epideictic ones. Changing distributions of power in Rome encouraged monographic treatments focusing on single actions, often, at least to judge from Cicero’s plans, on the deeds and experiences of a particular individual.26 The overlap of public authority and authorship took new forms in the proliferation of memoirs and autobiographies; those of Sulla and Caesar were especially important examples.27 Varro’s writings on Roman institutions and the Latin language also constitute a historiographic project, and several of Cicero’s treatises represent history in their richly significant dramatic settings and also take historiography as a foil for their distinctive applications of Roman historical traditions to address general questions about ethics and politics.28 Beyond the competition among such literary forms of representing the past, and my list could be considerably expanded, public monuments and spectacles, including triumphs and dramatic performances, also offered distinctive ways of experiencing recent events and placing them in history. Each of these media put forth its own claims about the shape of the Roman past, why and to whom it mattered, and related its representations differently to the expression of political authority. The chapters that follow will argue that specific contrasts to competing ways of portraying history play important roles for Sallust and his readers in defining the effect of his own works. My point here is to stress how the proliferation and diversity of historical representation in general made such questions inevitable and necessary.29
While I have not set out to offer a general introduction to Sallust or provide an overview of all the important aspects of his writing, I hope that the variety if not the comprehensiveness of the textual features brought into the orbit of my approach will contribute to a reader’s sense of the richness of his work. The topics I have chosen are also ones that have attracted a lot of general attention from scholars of ancient historiography: intertextuality, constructions of space, the role of the emotions in historical narrative, and above all the relationship between history and rhetoric. And, though focused on Sallust, the discussions here aim to contribute to these ongoing debates. One important limitation of the book’s scope comes from my decision to leave out of account the fragments of Sallust’s Histories, his final and most ambitious project as a historian. These fragments are substantial enough to suggest tantalizing connections with the issues I foreground in the monographs, but to attempt to use them to illustrate and advance my approach would have required far too much speculation and supplementation. No reference will be found either to the treatises offering advice to Caesar or the invective against Cicero also attributed to Sallust. This is worth mentioning because, if genuine, these treatises might be thought to give access to the real views of the historical Sallust and so contribute to interpretations of the monographs based on authorial intention. I am, however, sufficiently persuaded that all of these works are later rhetorical exercises not to feel the need to engage with such arguments.30 My readings also frequently presume an intertextual relationship between the two monographs, so that echoes of the language of the earlier Catiline become meaningful as such within the Jugurtha and, conversely, allow for it to be reread through the lens of the latter work. It is in the nature of such arguments to be circular in that the meanings discovered by presuming such connections are the most powerful evidence for their presence, but they are, equally, irrefutable.31
Sallust’s condemnation of the morality of his time can appear so vehement and comprehensive as to raise the question of why he writes history at all. If people are as bad as he says, who is there to profit from his exhortations to virtue or to take seriously his criticisms of vice? Conversely, the very fact that he does write has sometimes been taken to affirm that his pessimism had its limits. “It is not that Sallust believes that history has no power. He must do, as he continues to write it.”32 However, in addition to emphasizing the premise that to write history at all is a sign of hope, the “must” in this quotation makes clear that finding such a purpose in Sallust’s work requires a leap of faith on the part of his reader.
My own engagement with Sallust has from the first been inspired by wanting to understand why he writes. And, indeed, this book represents the answer I have arrived at. Perhaps inevitably I have come to believe that the question itself is not imposed by contemporary academic categories (What kind of a historian is Sallust?), but that the monographs compel their audience to address it by withholding any clear statement of authorial purpose. There are to be sure many good answers available, assumptions about why Sallust writes as he does, that can consistently guide a reading. And yet even where he perhaps comes closest to defining what his work will do for its audience, in his evocation of the example of ancestral images as prompts to virtue, the crucial equation with his own history is never quite stated.33 As elsewhere, the compression of his writing requires the reader to supply what he has left unsaid, and by doing so invites scrutiny of what might seem obvious and fundamental.
Hence the most important aspects of my understanding of Sallust’s aims are at once their openness and the engagement they consequently demand of his audience. It is by no means unparalleled for a contemporary historian to recognize that his work will offer something different to readers with different backgrounds and interests. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing a few decades after Sallust, proclaims as much: “Those interested in political speeches will find them, those studying philosophical speculation will find it, and if any seek from historical reading undisturbed diversion, my work will seem sufficient to them as well.”34 Indeed, as we shall see, the alternatives of models for political action, philosophical speculation, and diversion align quite closely with the reading strategies I will be considering for making sense of Sallust. But, again, the absence of a clear invitation to multiple readings, as with the avoidance of an explicit declaration of Sallust’s own intentions, means that the choices individual readers make involve a more uncertain negotiation with the author. For in addition to the familiar alternatives of utility and pleasure, Sallust’s readers may be drawn by the nature of his material and the account he gives of himself to more oppositional assumptions about the historian. Perhaps he writes to mask his own complicity in the worst vices of his times, avarice and ambition, and to settle scores against those who have condemned him.35 The kind of decisions we make in reading about the power the author has over our interpretation take on, in his case, a political charge that draws them back to the history
