in medias res. For Sallust has provided his own account of the first beginnings of the conspiracy and located them in two contrasting frames of reference for understanding time. First, these events which we could measure from the middle of the consulate of Caesar and Figulus become manifestations of causes better traced through the life story of Catiline, and Sallust similarly imposes a biographical structure to his narrative, by beginning the story of Catiline at his birth and ending with his death. These causes must also be explained by a longer digression on the development of the republic, one that does not emphasize its extent through the proliferation of named magistrates but collapses that history into a short story. Its pattern moreover seems not distinctively Roman but comparable to what other empires have experienced.
But Sallust’s use of consular dating not only contrasts the shared Roman convention for measuring the extent of time with the alternatives of a life story and a universal pattern of rise and decline. The consular date is itself made part of the narrative in a way that connects its use with a sense of belonging to the res publica. Catiline’s plot aims at his obtaining a place for himself in the Roman fasti by becoming consul. When Catiline outlines his plans for the future, beginning with the programmatic “new accounts,” he ends with the promise that he as consul, with his partner Antonius, will make a beginning of action, of doing:
tum Catilina polliceri tabulas novas, proscriptionem locupletium, magistratus sacerdotia rapinas alia omnia quae bellum atque lubido victorum fert. praeterea esse in Hispania citeriore Pisonem, in Mauretania cum exercitu P. Sittium Nucerinum, consili sui participes; petere consulatum C. Antonium, quem sibi collegam fore speraret, hominem et familiarem et omnibus necessitudinibus circumventum; cum eo se consulem initium agundi facturum. (Cat. 21.2–3)
Then Catiline promised cancelation of debts, the proscription of the wealthy, magistracies, priesthoods, plunder, and all the other things which war and the pleasure of the victors brings; besides, Piso was in Nearer Spain and P. Sittius Nucerinus in Mauretania with an army, both fellow conspirators; C. Antonius was also seeking the consulate, whom he hoped to have as a colleague, for he was both a close friend and a man beset by every sort of need; he himself as consul with this man would make a beginning of action.
Here is a counterfactual consular date that would provide not only the beginning of an ideal historical subject, a deed, but perhaps would restart a new res publica. Sallust’s choice of the conspiracy as a subject depends on “the newness of the crime and the danger.” Newness here implies a contrast with the old, with the Roman past constituted as a norm to measure Catiline’s exclusion from its traditions. But the Catilinarians themselves view time differently in looking not backward but forward to this new beginning. The conspirators see the promise of living after the past as positive good. And we may contrast Cicero’s efforts to ensure that any sense of the conspiracy as a new beginning was contained and refuted by his own consular insistence on precedent (cf. Cic. Cat. 1.3–4). Far from being really new, Catiline was just another rebel, with all too many antecedents in the early republic, each checked by the appropriate consul. And so the defeat of this conspiracy is both assured by the past and destined to take its place “in the date of my great consulate” (Juv. 10.122), within the ongoing flow of time that the open annalistic form guarantees. The consul, and consular dating, equally defeat Catiline.
Mention of Catiline’s implicit promise to refound the republic provides an appropriate cue for the entrance of the actual liberator, Marcus Junius Brutus. I will later return to Brutus’ potential similarities to Catiline, but for now I want to compare him not to the work’s protagonist but to its author. It may seem that Brutus can best illuminate Sallust by contrast: Brutus was an active figure who aimed to free the republic through his deeds; Sallust can be a historian because he already possesses a “free mind,” animus liber, one achieved through his own escape from the partisanship of the republic (Cat. 4.2). However, like so many of his contemporaries, Brutus also managed a varied and extensive literary production.6 And the particular works he wrote, historical epitomes, epideictic works, including a life of the Younger Cato, and philosophical treatises on duties, virtue, and endurance, echo precisely the generic alternatives that especially complicate a sense of time in the Catiline. Is Sallust’s work an excerpt from Roman history, an epideictic life of its protagonist, or a treatise on virtue? The accomplishments of Brutus the author remind us that these were no abstract categories but important and proliferating forms of literary composition in the decade when Sallust worked. Sallust places his Catiline between all these writings, offering each as a competing template for understanding his own priorities. But a focus on Brutus also allows us to measure the aims of these literary exercises together, to give a snapshot of what writing at Rome was for, and to make clear how all these forms themselves mirror different understandings of the relationship between past and present.
I
Let me begin with the historical epitomes we know Brutus undertook. Three are attested, of the Gracchan historian Fannius (Cic. Att. 12.5B), of Coelius Antipater’s seven-book monograph on the Second Punic War (Cic. Att. 13.8), and of Polybius. These could easily be construed, like Sallust’s own work, as time off, an escape or alternative to action. Thus, on the eve of the battle of Pharsalus, Brutus, when not with Pompey, was sitting in his hot tent preparing a summary of Polybius (Plut. Brut. 4.8). We can also explain the vogue for epitomes by their utility for Romans with limited time, and perhaps irregular access to libraries, thanks to the demands and disruptions of the period. But there are larger ideological and historical factors that explain why these decades saw such a proliferation of epitomes. The first point to make about Brutus’ summaries is that they are described not as a breviary of events but specifically as the epitome of specific literary works. The epitomizer stands in relation to earlier events as the reader to a text, and this can reinforce the sense of separation and temporal distance between the recipient and the history described. Sallust similarly seems to survey all of Roman history when he chooses to “excerpt” the story of Catiline (res gestae populi Romani carptim, Cat. 4.2).
This impression of separation and the new importance of writing as a medium for history make particular sense in light of Harriet Flower’s recent arguments for a reperiodization of the Roman republic.7 Key for Flower is the position of Sulla. She demonstrates that Sulla’s new constitution, far from restoring republican institutions and practices, represented a radical break from the past in its attempt to legislate what had previously been matters of custom. And this move away from a politics internally regulated through the shared values of a closed nobility went together with a radical transformation of the physical environment of the city and the loss through civil wars, proscription, and exile of the dramatis personae of political life. If the combination of violence and institutional disruption provoked a desire to assert continuity and connection with the past, the means by which this connection could be established would themselves have to be new. The monumental fabric of Rome that preserved memories of the past had itself been largely remade, and many of the patres whose oral instruction would have given meaning to monuments were dead or in exile. In the inevitable damage to the cultural practices that made Roman history part of a living tradition, texts must have taken on a new role, together with an increased recognition that for the new ruling classes after Sulla history was something more to be made than received. Mary Jaeger uses the phrase “Written Rome” to signal how Livy’s text constructs the city it represents. We are accustomed to viewing this phenomenon in tandem with the Augustan rebuilding of the actual city itself as well as the expansion of the audience who had to see Roman history as their history beyond those who had any direct experience of that city. But Flower shows that the combination of radical change in places, practices, and persons, and the expansion of power to new classes without a share in traditional media of commemoration was a recurring phenomenon in Roman history, and particularly acute in the aftermath of Sulla’s dictatorship. Sallust himself makes Sulla responsible for a new break with the moral traditions of the past, and, as we will discuss more fully in chapter 5, Sulla becomes the center of the chronological pattern that
