a record, reputation, trace, or memory to the thing itself. In the strongest reading of the sentence, eternal virtue stands out like a beacon from the language and the argument that has preceded it, promising an immortality that comes not through historiography’s concern with preserving memory, but from the quality of virtus directly, possessed and held as though it were a thing.
Yet the very verb that seems to produce the epiphany of virtue as a materially apprehensible manifestation of the divine, something that is both eternal and that we can hold, also suggests that the biggest claim made by the sentence is both the most contested and the least authorized. Habetur can refer to the process of judgment—virtus is held or considered such.27 The present tense of “is being held” looks as much like a description of an immediate struggle engaging author and audience now as it does a generalizing description of virtus always and everywhere.
In the sequence that follows, historiography itself becomes quite literally the field of combat for continuing this contest. When Sallust refers to a great “certamen,” he seems to gesture towards the traditional form of historiographic opening, which from Thucydides often centered on a war greater than any other war. But Sallust describes a competition to determine not the course of events but rather their interpretation. Its participants struggle not for virtue nor with virtue, but rather about its value:
Sed diu magnum inter mortalis certamen fuit vine corporis an virtute animi res militaris magis procederet. nam et prius quam incipias consulto et, ubi consulueris, mature facto opus est. ita utrumque per se indigens alterum alterius auxilio eget. igitur initio reges—nam in terris nomen imperi id primum fuit—divorsi pars ingenium, alii corpus exercebant. etiam tum vita hominum sine cupiditate agitabatur; sua quoique satis placebant. postea vero quam in Asia Cyrus, in Graecia Lacedaemonii et Athenienses coepere urbis atque nationes subigere, lubidinem dominandi causam belli habere, maxumam gloriam in maxumo imperio putare, tum demum periculo atque negotiis conpertum est in bello plurumum ingenium posse. quod si regum atque imperatorum animi virtus in pace ita ut in bello valeret, aequabilius atque constantius sese res humanae haberent, neque aliud alio ferri neque mutari ac misceri omnia cerneres. nam imperium facile iis artibus retinetur quibus initio partum est; verum ubi pro labore desidia, pro continentia et aequitate lubido atque superbia invasere, fortuna simul cum moribus inmutatur. Ita imperium semper ad optumum quemque a minus bono transfertur. (Cat. 1.5–2.6)
But for a long time there was a great contest among men whether military affairs succeeded better through bodily force or the virtue of the mind: before you begin, there is need for planning, and, when you have planned, for timely action. So each, insufficient in itself, wants the aid of the other. Therefore, at first the kings—for that was the first title of command on earth—were divided, with some working at their mental ability and others exercising their bodies. In that age, moreover, human life was still led without desires, and one lived content with one’s own possessions. After Cyrus in Asia and the Lacedaemonians and Athenians in Greece began to subjugate cities and peoples, to make their lust for being masters the cause of war, to count the greatest glory in the greatest power, then at last it was learned by danger and efforts that mental ability is worth most in war. But if the virtue of mind of kings and commanders had been as strong in peacetime as in war, human history would have been managed more evenly and consistently; you would be observing neither things being borne here and there nor all undergoing change and confusion. But when sloth bursts in in place of work and lust and arrogance in place of moderation and fairness, outcomes change along with character. And so power always passes to the best from the less good.
Sallust’s metahistorical perspective on the past itself suggests quite an optimistic trajectory, at least for the progress of human understanding. This trajectory inscribes the emergence of virtus in the first paragraph within all of human history. Sallust here not only views history teleologically, with a knowledge of how things will end. He steps further away from the perspective of the actors in his narrative in that the knowledge he gains from hindsight affirms a universal truth about human nature. From this vantage point, men win knowledge from the outcome of events, and they can apply that knowledge to shape the future. But this requires a curious approach to both events and their representation. Obviously, the contestants whose battles Sallust learns from were not fighting for knowledge but out of a desire for power. So too, Sallust’s knowledge demands a view of human development that seems breathtakingly schematized and abridged especially in comparison to the historiographic texts to which he makes reference. All of Herodotus and Thucydides run together to become a single turning point: “after Cyrus in Asia and the Athenians and Lacedaemonians in Greece began to subjugate cities and nations, etc.”28
If Sallust gains his wisdom by positioning himself not only after events but after the representation of events, it puts him in the place of his own reader and allows him strongly to influence the reception of the work to come.29 The reader can convert the lubidines imperii of the characters within the past into a further affirmation of what Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ narratives now turn out to prove, even if their own authors did not know that was what they were doing. Again, progress into the eternal requires hindsight. But this conceptual key to all historiography appears immediately complicated by two factors. First, the difference between the contestant and their post-historical observer at this point seems to shrink. The combatants may have started out aiming only for power, but they gain wisdom nonetheless. “It was learned by danger and struggles that ingenium has the greatest power in war.” The fortunate reader can acquire the knowledge without the danger, but by an inverse identification their learning gets put back into history in the assimilation of the audience with participants. Just as knowledge itself prompts competition, learning itself becomes a struggle. The meaning of the past can be disputed and misunderstood.
The second complication comes with the recognition of a deeper separation between Sallust’s interpretation of the past and the reality that history ought to record. For just at the moment when we expect the union of philosophy with history to proclaim its triumphant payoff, when humans apply what they have learned to avoid the errors of the past, the verbs shift to counterfactual subjunctives. The world where people apply what they learned in war to the peace that comes after war is not one that matches present reality. And at the same time, Sallust’s text has crossed the barrier that defines historiography by its distance from philosophy—he has moved from the indicative account of what did happen to describe what might happen. For people really are what they were in the beginning, motivated by lubido and a desire to be superior. These are, we may recall, the real motives of the real Cyrus and the real Athenians and Spartans, which appear at odds with the post eventum analysis of the post-historical historian. Yet a reading of history that attends not to the conclusions drawn from events but to the events themselves will yield a different view of human consistency, one that ends not in triumph but in the inevitable failure and decline signaled by the final eternally valid gnome presented in Sallust’s opening. Imperium, that object of their lubido, always passes to the best from the less good.
The philosophical reading of the past may offer a way out of this pattern, if Sallust’s readers can position themselves at a further distance from a narrative (Sallust’s) that already signals its own place after other narratives of events. But if everyone is a part of history, and history really implies the transience of power, the confusion of everything through a consistent human desire, if the historian must always contest the conclusions he draws, and the readers be unable or unwilling to translate learning to action because of who they really are, then history and philosophy will always offer fundamentally different maps of how the past becomes the future. Indeed, as Batstone points out, from a historical perspective closure is impossible, for to decide finally that virtue should be used to describe a Caesar or a Cato would be to take sides in a struggle to which we are condemned by the very nature of language.30 An alternative is to posit a world of words outside of history, that virtus means something that applies to both Caesar and Cato, even if it is impossible to say what it is. Historical reality struggles to impose its limits on how the text is read, even as the text struggles to change that reality. At stake will be the position of virtus
