saved the Roman state becomes all the more striking when Syme summons up a Roman perception of revolution to contrast with the way things would appear to those writing two millennia after the event. As longevity differentiates an Augustus from a Catiline, so the superiority of Syme’s historical judgment over Sallust’s derives from his temporal distance from the events he narrates.
Consider by contrast the last sentence of Sallust’s Catiline, describing the battlefield after the final defeat of Catiline’s forces: “and so throughout the whole army, variously, happiness, sorrow, mourning, and rejoicing were being enacted” (ita varie per omnem exercitum laetitia maeror, luctus atque gaudia agitabantur, Cat. 61.9). Here we find a very different kind of complexity, one that results not from the synthesis of apparently contradictory elements through the alchemy of time (ambition proving salvific) but from the simultaneous cacophony of opposed reactions to the same event (mourning and exaltation). If Syme’s verbs portray the trajectory of events as completed before they are viewed, Sallust’s use of the imperfect leaves us immersed in the description of an action in process. Where Syme drives home the virtual incomprehensibility of his analysis to those who witnessed events, Sallust’s position in relation to those contemporary witnesses remains more uncertain. He too of course had the benefit of hindsight and would have known that the emotions he represents foreshadow and may actually cause the more prolonged and devastating conflicts to come. Moreover, those future conflicts may have been so obvious to anyone in Sallust’s audience that the authorial judgment condemning partisanship would be no less clear for being left unsaid.
And yet the suppression of any perspective from after the past accomplishes more than irony by other means. While the view from the authorial present is, as we have seen, easily available to his audience, it does not inevitably displace the experiences described within the narrative. The reader who might have shared Sallust’s deep mistrust of the passions stirred by the sight of the battlefield could have been led from his present knowledge back to identification with those contemporary responses to the scene. Corresponding to the invisibility of the historian’s point of view in Sallust is the direct presence of these other more immediate reactions to events, which Syme by comparison has left implicit. And as with the temporal separation between actions and their representations, so the conceptual difference between what happened and how it has been perceived is made less distinct in Sallust. In a way that English cannot capture, the onlookers’ responses themselves suggest actions (agitabantur) and starting points, starting points not only for new acts of violence but perhaps for the responses those new acts will engender, for readings of events like Sallust’s own presumably tragic view of where Catiline’s defeat would lead.
The contrast between Syme and Sallust that this comparison illustrates cannot therefore simply be boiled down to privileging the surety that comes from viewing events as complete over participating in the uncertainty of direct experience. Rather it is a question of the visibility of these alternatives and the level of scrutiny directed towards the narrative methods of the historian himself. The Sallustian view of ambition arises simply as a foil to the truth revealed by Syme, while the voices of the past combatants at the end of the Catiline demand more strongly to be heard. Sallust in 43 bce may indeed understand Catiline’s defeat better than the spectators at the time, but, for all that, the relationship between these perspectives is left more open if only because the effect of the temporal contrast is made so much more explicit. And this in turn creates an awareness of the historicity of history, of the temporal situatedness of the historian in relation to events, that I will argue fundamentally structures Sallust’s representation of the past.
The advantage of hindsight upon which modern historians like Syme rely was of course widely recognized by ancient historians as well.2 One of the genre’s founding practitioners, Herodotus, practically begins his narrative with the Greek sage Solon advising a barbarian king not to judge human affairs before they reach their ends (1.32). Three centuries later Polybius would claim for his universal history an ability to depict events in their entirety, temporal as well as spatial (1.4). But the seemingly self-evident superiority of hindsight for understanding history has been challenged on several fronts. The distant perspective necessary to explain why things happened can, perversely, put effects before causes, and construct patterns in actions that were as meaningless and unknowable to those who witnessed or even participated in them as the prospect of salvation through ambition was to Augustus or to Sallust.3
These hermeneutic challenges to traditional historiographic narrative have provided an illuminating vantage point for re-examining the practices of ancient historians. Jonas Grethlein (2013) has recently used the opposition between “experience and teleology” to analyze the depiction of time in ancient historians and to complicate the genealogies that connect the ancient genre of history with the modern academic discipline. And his work contains a thought-provoking analysis of the Catiline, arguing for the priority of hindsight in the construction of its narrative while also identifying those elements, including the “tableau vivant” of the final scene, the historian’s use of counterfactuals, and professions of uncertainty, that pull the reader closer to the experience, rather than analysis, of events.4 While drawing its impetus from Grethlein’s taxonomy of historiography’s representational strategies, my attempt to flesh out Sallust’s approach to temporality will differ from his in two important respects. First, Grethlein largely treats teleology and experience as “etic” categories. While the opposition between them structures his understanding of Sallust’s practices, and certainly the terms would have been comprehensible to Sallust, he does not present Sallust’s temporal position in relation to events as something that the historian himself makes an issue for his readers.5 By contrast, I will assume that the mixture of representational techniques Grethlein finds in Sallust plays a crucial role in shaping the audience’s understanding not just of the historian’s enterprise but of the terms with which they themselves should engage with the Roman past. Where, for instance, Grethlein treats authorial ambiguity as a feature that Sallust uses to distance the reader from a teleological understanding of events, I see the contrast between an ex post facto understanding of historical crises and a participatory one as generating a fundamental ambiguity about the aims and nature of historiography.
I will also move beyond Grethlein’s interest in narrative form per se to ask how the choices with which these strategies confront the reader make sense in relation to the intellectual and political crises of the time when Sallust wrote. The perspectives constructed respectively by teleological and experiential understandings of events position the historian, his text, and his readers “after the past” in two contradictory senses. The assimilation of contemporary experience draws its audience closer to events and highlights also the continuities between actions and representations. The audience is “after the past” because they perceive how their present connects with that past, as for instance in perceiving the passions aroused by Catiline’s defeat as still driving civic discord. Audiences looking back at Sallust’s narratives as though completed can translate the analytic distance necessary to make judgments about the past into a separation from the political life of the state that forms history’s subject. To select another example from the Catiline, Sallust’s discussion of the crucial ethical term virtus goes together with the recognition that the two figures whose actions make virtus visible have passed from the scene (Cat. 53.6).
Modern investigations of perspective in historical narratives generally concern the epistemological validity of the representation of the past they offer: this involves both such traditional questions as “Is this narrative impartial enough to be credible?” and more radical ones such as “What is the ontological status of an event like World War I before its representation?”6 And this emphasis also emerges in Sallust, especially since actors’ perspectives on events often take on a rhetorical form that shows them as anything but impartial. Indeed, a crucial methodological passage of the Catiline suggests that the very proliferation of self-interested claims about who did what to whom makes the past unknowable (Cat. 4.2). But these issues about the credibility of different views of the past form part of a larger debate about the status of the historian and of historiography itself, which Sallust, as we shall see, positions ambiguously
