but in almost the same breath presents it as a way of fulfilling the highest function of political action, indeed of all action, to provide scope for demonstrating excellence. These questions about historiography’s distance from and proximity to events are enacted in the narrative when the historian appears as alternatively participating in public achievements or as retrospectively translating these achievements into ethical universals. The central debate in professional scholarship on Sallust may be recognized as a version of the same question: Was Sallust a historian or a pamphleteer? Did he aim to explain and understand the past or to construct a version that would support his allies and defame his enemies?7 That this portrait of the political Sallust so resembles what he himself imagines hostile readers would say about him, namely that he attacks others’ faults out of malevolence, suggests the extent to which this debate itself arises from alternatives put forward in the text (Cat. 3.2). Some critics have tried to move beyond the Sallustian “problem” by presenting the conceptions of “historian” and “pamphleteer” it opposes as fundamentally modern conceptions that create a false dichotomy (see below). History, especially in the Roman world, was both more connected to political persuasion and deployed the tools of rhetoric. But if the basic oppositions, if not the particular labels we apply to the alternatives it presents, do emerge from Sallust’s own representation of his work then we may come to understand Sallust better by continuing to ask such questions about the ultimate nature of his activity as a writer than by settling them.
If the use I make of Grethlein’s mode of analysis accentuates contrasts and inconsistencies within Sallust’s text, these characteristics dominate analyses of other formal aspects of Sallust’s work. Antithesis, inconcinnity, and unmediated junctures (asyndeta) have been since antiquity among the most immediately recognizable features of Sallust’s style. Kurt Latte’s remarkable 1934 study of the author not only gave a full account of these compositional principles, from the smallest patterns of word arrangement to the structuring of the entire monographs, but made them the basis for a comprehensive interpretation of the historian’s work. Rather than treating Sallust’s political aims as the explanation of his style, Latte worked backward in constructing an intellectual biography of the historian based around contradiction. The restless energy of Sallust’s style bespeaks the frustration of a man excluded from participation in public life for whom literary activity could never count as an acceptable substitute, another manifestation of the duality between writing and acting with which Sallust confronts his reader. From then on, the Sallust “problem” (politician or historian?) was replaced by efforts at synthesis.8 Syme’s declaration that Sallust must be read as both a historian and a participant in public life would be shared by the two other large-scale monographs that appeared in the generation after Latte’s, those of Büchner (1982) and La Penna (1968). For all their different understandings of Sallust’s political views, these books combine stylistic and historical analysis to a degree matched in the study of no other Roman historian. Antithesis comes to the fore again in the next great wave of Sallustian scholarship, beginning in the late 1980s. As Woodman and Wiseman’s redefinition of historiography brought it closer to rhetoric than reporting and so authorized a new range of literary approaches to works in the genre,9 Sallust’s mode of writing became important as something more than a symptom, as for Latte, or even an indispensable tool for recovering the complexities of his political thought. In the works of such scholars as Batstone, Kraus, Levene, Gunderson, and Sklenář, to mention but a few salient examples, the striking comparisons Sallust’s writing exposes without resolving, in different ways, draw attention to representation itself. It is the manifestation of a political climate where the capacity of representing things in words has been compromised and the sense of a clear referent, or even a coherent intellectual connection between opposing terms, is laid open to question.10 These are the scholars who taught me to read Sallust, and my own emphasis on the experience of his text as itself fundamentally politicized owes more to their influence than citations to specific arguments can suggest.11
The issue of the author’s own distance from or proximity to public events also forms part of a larger transformation in the place and status of literary activity that becomes especially acute just in the years when Sallust turns from politics to history writing. The volatility and violence of the last decades of the Roman republic compelled many members of Rome’s ruling classes to withdraw from their careers, and often from the capital itself, temporarily or permanently. At the same time the opportunities to construct an alternative presence in the public eye through writing had never been greater. Rhetorical training, amid the trials and debates of these decades, was more obviously than ever a means of gaining influence and power, but this training also made it easier for those out of the spotlight to transfer the voice and persona they had forged in their oratory to the page. The elite networks by which money was made and provinces governed in the growing empire also provided a mechanism for the circulation of letters and treatises. Finally, the new cultural capital acquired through conquest and trade, in the form of books and highly literate slaves, at once opened up new forms of literary expression, contributed to the production and circulation of texts, and perhaps gave a new prestige to literary activity as a vehicle for displaying wealth and status.
No one mastered the new opportunities for self-fashioning thrown up by this cultural revolution more comprehensively and successfully than M. Tullius Cicero. As he had shown how rhetorical brilliance could propel someone from the peripheries of power to the highest office of all, his consulate of 63 bce, so, during the many periods of exile that followed on from his success, he relied on his writings about philosophy and rhetoric, not to speak of the published versions of speeches and likely thousands of letters, to keep his voice before the public. Indeed, the proliferation of philosophical writings from the last years of Cicero’s life constitute, in the words of Yelena Baraz (2012), nothing less than “a written republic,” projecting new models of social relations and personal ethics all voiced by Cicero and his circle of friends. These function not only as author, audience, and distribution network for the publications themselves but live also as characters within their fictions.12 By these means, Cicero turned what would ordinarily have been considered as the products of otium, that off-duty time that could only be defined negatively by a public man’s not doing his real “work” of exercising power, into multifaceted expressions of the status he had earned in public life.13
A pressure to compare Cicero with Sallust arises from the historian’s first choice of subject. Cicero had presented the expulsion of Catiline as his greatest deed, and one arguably accomplished by the power of his rhetorical voice. Yet, despite the fact that Cicero’s speeches were an inevitable source for, and alternative articulation of, Catiline’s conspiracy, the orations as historical events are scarcely mentioned in Sallust’s narrative, and, in a work that contains the highest proportion of direct speech of any ancient historical text, the orator hero remains silent. What this treatment of Cicero contributes to Sallust’s own self-presentation as a writer will be considered more fully in chapters 2 and 6. But if Cicero’s authorial presence obviously shadows Sallust’s emergence as a writer, we can gain an important complementary perspective on the historian’s literary career by comparing him to another Roman writer who, though some sixteen years younger, began his first major work at almost exactly the same moment as Sallust. Vergil’s Eclogues predict the strategies of a new generation of writers who faced an entirely different challenge from Cicero. As opposed to statesmen using literature to extend the presence of an identity forged in the “real world” of politics, Vergil and Horace owed their status and identity to their writings alone. If Cicero, not only in his speeches but in his philosophical writings as well, makes it easy for his audience to imagine a real space and occasion within which the texts before him were once performed, the Eclogues frustrate efforts to place them on any map. And yet the fictive speakers inhabiting this imaginary world have also made it possible to construct an identity for their historical author.14 Although the speaker of the first Eclogue is a purely textual creature, whose actions and attitudes are largely structured by the audience’s knowledge of earlier bucolic poetry, he nevertheless also becomes a mouthpiece for the author to address topics and figures from the world of the audience’s
