the Ur-account of it in the Histories of Asinius Pollio. To see Pompey’s head in the alluding texts connects their narratives more directly to this momentous and shocking occurrence, while an awareness of the intertextual history of the scene may tend to generalize and distance it.25 25 Sandberg and Smith (2017) offers a rich collection of recent discussions of various modes of representing the past throughout the republic. For the diversity of the literary tradition, see esp. Levene (2007).
26 26 Crucial evidence in Cic. Fam. 5.12, discussed in Chapter 2.
27 27 For an overview, see Riggsby (2007). On Caesar, see esp. Riggsby (2006) and the recent collection by Grillo and Krebs (2019); on Sulla, Smith (2009) and Flower (2015).
28 28 On the latter aspect of Cicero’s writings, see esp. Rawson (1972).
29 29 The interpenetration of historiographic interpretation and historical action throughout Roman history, and especially during the triumviral period in which Sallust wrote, is particularly well captured in Henderson (1997, esp. pp. 91–3). However, where he asserts that “historical narratives blur their stake in their own hermeneutics with their interest in the legibility of the social text for the actor-participants, who must read events as they occur” (p. 92), I will argue instead that Sallust’s narratives expose the stakes of the different reading strategies they make available both by dramatizing them within the narrative and by never losing sight of the potential distance between readers and “actor-participants”.
30 30 Decisive demonstration in Syme (1964, 314–51), with earlier bibliography. Key defenses of the authenticity of the Invective and the Letters include Vretska (1961, 12–15 and 38–48) and Büchner (1967 and 1982, 20–88 and 468–72). There is also a very useful overview in Schmal (2001, 24–30), whose own position that the controversy is insoluble is challenged in turn as defeatist by Woytek (2004), himself convinced that Letters cannot be Sallustian. Samotta (2009) is a recent example of an interpretation of Sallust’s political beliefs that does employ evidence from the Letters; see esp. p. 18 n. 22, with further bibliography. See also Santangelo (2012).
31 31 Therefore, Santangelo’s caution (2019, 110) against taking account of such “cross-references” seems untenably restrictive.
32 32 Kraus (1999, 244).
33 33 Jug. 4–5. See my discussion in section 1 of chapter 2. On Sallust’s deferral of a declaration of why he writes history as a strategy of audience engagement, see also Tiffou (1973, 249). Also very important for this question is Due (1983), esp. pp. 121–2 on the inconsistencies in the justification of history writing in the Jugurtha preface. However, he concludes that the passage is largely, therefore, irrelevant for understanding Sallust’s true motives while I argue that the image it offers of historiography remains an important alternative for his readers to bear in mind.
34 34 Ant. Rom. 1.8.3 (άλλ’ έξ άπάσης δέας μικτν ναγωνίου τε κα θεωρητικς < κα δείας >, να κα τος περ τος πολιτικος διατρίβουσι λόγους κα τος περ τν φιλόσοφον σπουδακόσι θεωρίαν κα ε τισιν οχλήτου δεήσει διαγωγς ν στορικος ναγνώσμασιν, ποχρώντως χουσα φαίνηται). See Schultze (1986, 135).
35 35 So even in the generally favorable assessment of Syme (1964, 2) “his writing is … a kind of revenge.” See also Due (1983, 137).
36 36 Latte (1935, 47–59).
37 37 Note his first sentence (Syme 1964, 1): “Sallust conquered a new domain for the literature of the Latins”.
1 Lives and Times
I would like to introduce the approach to Sallust’s monographs developed in this chapter with an image, to be found on the cover of this book: a photograph by Giorgio Sommer showing the gesso casts of two bodies found on the Via Stabiana in Pompeii. I do so because the contrasting ways of understanding this photograph as a representation of the past at once figure the effects I want to claim for Sallust’s work upon its first audience and suggest their continuities with modernity’s experience of the classical world. My own initial impression of the photograph was of temporal distance. This derived from the already antique-looking sepia tones of the image itself, in conjunction with the battered and fragmentary aspect of the figures, and recalled to me the kind of self-conscious archaism so notable in Sallust’s diction. But if the picture looks old now, it was also clear how modern it must have seemed at the time it was made, around 1875. Had the casts simply been set against a black background, the effect might have been one of timelessness. But the way that background resolves into a cloth spread out on a pavement summons up the entire process of excavation and display. The very modern medium of photography, and indeed the technique of using plaster to fill the spaces in the ash the dead bodies had occupied, evokes the recent discovery of the figures themselves as part of a scientific program of exploration. Sallust’s emphasis on his impartiality and other evocations of the newly recuperated models of Thucydidean historiography give a similarly cutting-edge quality to his accounts of the past.1 The image comments on the promise of modern technology to capture history as it really was, with an objectivity no recovered work of art or ancient text could match. It is ultimately the combination of the sense of being in the presence of the real thing—and again at a moment of emotional exposure that strips away cultural difference—with a deliberate evocation of the distance that makes the past recoverable that I found so urgent in the image. A contemporary observer unwittingly highlights the same paradox when he comments on similar but earlier images that “while looking at the pictures, it is difficult to divest the mind of the idea that they are not the works of some ancient photographer who plied his lens and camera after the eruption had ceased, so forcibly do they carry the mind back to the time and place.”2
Again, the final scene of Sallust’s first monograph provides a specific point of comparison.3 His account of the corpses of Catiline’s defeated army combines a physical description of where they lay and the front-facing wounds on their bodies with an effort to depict the emotional forces that animated Catiline—Sallust’s words transform the breath his body still expels into the ferocity of spirit he had possessed while alive:
Sed confecto proelio, tum vero cerneres quanta audacia quantaque animi vis fuisset in exercitu Catilinae. nam fere quem quisque vivos pugnando locum ceperat, eum amissa anima corpore tegebat. pauci autem, quos medios cohors praetoria disiecerat, paulo divorsius, sed omnes tamen advorsis volneribus conciderant. Catilina vero longe a suis inter hostium cadavera repertus est, paululum etiam spirans ferociamque animi quam habuerat vivos in voltu retinens. … neque tamen exercitus populi Romani laetam aut incruentam victoriam adeptus erat. nam strenuissumus quisque aut occiderat in proelio aut graviter volneratus discesserat. multi autem, qui e castris visundi aut spoliandi gratia processerant, volventes hostilia cadavera amicum alii, pars hospitem aut cognatum reperiebant; fuere item qui inimicos suos cognoscerent. ita varie per omnem exercitum laetitia maeror, luctus atque gaudia agitabantur. (Cat. 61)
But when the battle was finished, then you might have beheld how much boldness and how much force of spirit had been present in the army of Catiline. For the very position which each while alive had fought to hold, his corpse was occupying even after death. A few in the center, whom the praetorian cohort had dislodged, lay at some distance, but all had fallen with wounds facing forward. Catiline himself was discovered far from his own troops amid the bodies of the enemy, still breathing a little and retaining in his expression the ferocity of mind that he had in life. …
