the practitioner of vituperation: “Often have I complained about the luxury and avarice of our citizens, and therefore I have made many men my enemies” (saepe de luxuria atque avaritia nostrorum civium questus sum, multosque mortalis ea causa advorsos habeo, Cat. 52.7). This language not only makes Cato amplify the moralizing elements of Sallust’s own history,13 it similarly puts him in the position feared by the very author of his praise, Cicero. On this single, “historic” occasion, however, he is not talking about virtue and vice but the condition of the republic. And, as praising him, according to Cicero, demanded emphasizing his later foresight of what Caesar’s victory portended, so in the Catiline his theme is not “whether to live with good or bad morals” but whether “the state, together with us, will become the possession of our enemy.” Again looking back at Cato looking forward must have brought many who knew their Catos to lose the distinction between the distant history of the conspiracy and more recent events, an effect prepared by the disorienting temporal perspectives of Caesar’s speech, where he imagines the audience’s actions in 63 BCE being judged from the perspective of the future. And a different intertext from this tradition would have abetted this impression. We know that Brutus’ Cato had included an account of his role in the punishment of the Catilinarians (Att. 12.21.1) and that, in making Cato’s rather than Cicero’s the decisive voice on that occasion, it must have had more in common with Sallust’s version than Cicero’s.14 For someone reading Sallust’s Catiline in, say, 41 BCE, the confusion might not have been simply between Cato’s stand against Catiline in the 60s and his stand against Caesar in the 40s, for their attention to the historical reality reported by Sallust would also have received interference from the experience of reading a tract in praise of Cato from after his death.
Other than this erosion of historical specificity, the blurring of the narrated “then” and events approaching “now,” and of reality and its textual representation, what might have been the significance of such superimpositions of epideictic on Sallust’ history? For one thing, it would have redoubled many times over the sense of historical rupture conjured by looking back at the Sullan period. Not only did the Caesarian civil war, thanks in part to the death or exile of so many major political figures like Cato, bring about a similar break, but if the act of commemorating Cato in 45 BCE had emphasized these losses, even that period of epideictic Catos would seem irretrievably distant when Sallust’s Catiline appeared, although only a few short years had passed. Anyone remembering Cicero’s or Brutus’ Cato, or Caesar’s or Hirtius’ Anticato, would likely have been struck by the reflection that not only was their subject dead but so were the authors themselves. This pattern of loss, not only seemingly infinitely repeating in time but moving outward from texts to their authors and readers, figures also a pattern of political fragmentation recalling the dissonant perspectives in the Catiline’s final scene. Cato in Sallust is already a divisive figure, someone whose ethical standards had made him enemies, and this divisiveness comes to involve the authors of the various written Catos. An audience’s view of Cato was colored not only by a sense of their own inadequacies, but by their own interests. Despite Cicero’s friendship with Brutus, he took offense at how his own role in events was diminished in his Cato. Indeed, the posthumous debates over Caesar and Cicero as well as Cato suggest that the perspective of and on the individual, arguably what killed the republic, will be what survives of it. And if the account of Cato’s death in any of those treatises approximated the graphic particularity of Seneca or Plutarch’s later versions (Sen. Prov. 10–12; Plut. Cat. Min. 70–1), the act of reading it must have itself further stoked partisan feelings. There is thus a connection between a narrative that focuses on the individual rather than the state and a tendency to interpret that narrative from the perspective of individual rather than collective interests. But while the literature of praise and blame could thus bear witness to the separation of present from past and advance the partisanship that brought that separation about, it also contained a key to transcending that sense of temporal and civic distance: the behaviors chosen out for praise become repeatable and so no longer limited to a specific historical instance and point to qualities that are independent of time and circumstance.15
If we hear Sallust’s proclamation of the novitas of the Catilinarian conspiracy as an Alexandrian claim to originality, the sudden reimagination of that event as a new subject, nothing could more strongly mark the deaths of the past years as an ending point. It had until just a few years ago been one of the most retold stories of the recent past. Perhaps by stressing its difference from epideictic, history can step outside this tradition by historicizing it and designating its ending. Perhaps the deaths of all of the protagonists of his story, and of all its narrators, look to a world where history can be seen as history, as the shared story of a collective rather than of competing individual perspectives on individuals. On the other hand, if Cato’s was the death of libertas, and if all these further deaths were similarly hypostasized in a way that confuses, as Thucydides (7.77.7) would have it, the state with the men living in it, what other perspective would exist for looking back at Roman history than that of the individual survivor? And what other use would there be for Roman history than as a lesson about fortune, and especially virtus?
Such a perspective puts the greatest distance between Sallust’s audience and the res gestae populi Romani and stakes it to a fundamental difference between remembering virtutes and remembering events. One ideal of Roman history, allegedly practiced by Cato and occasionally imitated by Sallust, records only deeds and not the men who performed them.16 And the distinction between obscuring individual men’s deaths within the history of the res publica and imagining that res publica itself as able to die with, even like, a Cato, whose own virtus survives his libertas, helps explain the divergent patterns of time within Sallust’s work. The most successful Roman statesmen could look forward not just to being remembered in history but to defining Roman time, to becoming part of the fasti whether as a triumphator or a consul. Yet, as Sallust will point out in the Jugurtha, winning the sort of honores that put you on the map of Roman time does not provide a sufficient index of virtus. He expresses his scorn for those who believe that “praetorships and consulates are bright and magnifying in and of themselves, and not measured according to the virtus of those who held them.”17Virtus and the res publica are not only moving on different trajectories, the one getting bigger as the other diminishes, but they operate on their own calendars.18 As opposed to perceiving the memorials of Roman history as transparent to virtus and predicating it of all those whose names it records, Sallust proposes a conception of virtus that cannot be read simply from monuments, but which, conversely, can live on after the res publica.
II
With the aid of Brutus’ lost works, I have completed the first two thirds of my argument. I used Brutus’ activity as historical epitomizer to connect the reader’s alternative sense of distance from and continuity with the narrated past to a perception, due not just to the civil wars but already to the impact of Sulla, that the course of Roman history had been interrupted, the mechanisms of memory altered, and perceptions of time challenged. Next, the comparison between Sallust’s history and the epideictic literature describing the life and death of Cato pointed to a new break from the past, resulting from the recent deaths of the major figures of Sallust’s narrative. This new separation now places the text even more strikingly at the point separating the past it recounts, the present in which it is written, and the future in which it will be read. And these competing perceptions of the text’s position in time correlate the question of the persistence of the res publica it describes not only with the shift from reality to representation but with the alternative of a story written about, by, and for individuals who live independently from and perhaps after that res publica. In this final section, I want to zero in on that fundamental tool Sallust uses to represent such a past, language, to demonstrate how Sallust creates an awareness of words themselves as responsive to different views of time. Thereby, the act of interpreting his text generates and responds to the readers’ consciousness of their position within history.
The impression of a misalignment
