to text, Vergil’s in the Eclogues travels in the opposite direction.
As we shall see, Sallust’s presence in the Catiline stands poised between these two trajectories. Like Cicero, he too had had a multifaceted public career, including the offices of tribune and, after Caesar’s victory, of governor of the province of Africa.15 There was, therefore, a Sallust before there was a Catiline. Yet the story he tells about himself in that work is a tissue of literary allusions (Cat. 3.3–4.2).16 We can easily explain why Sallust’s self-presentation might require particular artifice: unlike Cicero’s, Sallust’s career included not only exile but disgrace and featured charges of extortion that would hardly add authority to the historian’s attacks on avarice. But a decision to explain Sallust’s literary strategy by reference to his historical biography itself begs a question that we would never feel the need to ask when reading Cicero: Is the author of this text to be identified with the Sallust we know from his public actions? And indeed the impulse to explain the text by reference to the actual misfortunes of the author (Sallust had to write this way because of his disgrace) may be balanced by an opposite tendency to redeem the reputation of the historical Sallust by attributing to him the much more laudable moral perspectives he voices as a historian. Such judgments equally involve the reader in deciding where the author stands in relation to historical reality.
The reason Sallust has not generally figured as he should in the story of how the boundaries of Latin literature were renegotiated in this era is, I suspect, the genre in which he wrote. Historiography has long been considered one of the rare forms of literary expression that were appropriate for members of Rome’s political elite to engage in seriously, as opposed to as pastimes for their leisure. Thus the challenge that Cicero faced of reconciling otium with public rank might seem not to have existed, at least to the same degree, for a historian.17 Yet, even within this generic tradition, the defense of history as a product of otium had an influential precedent in the opening of Cato’s Origines (F2 FRHist).18 From this perspective, far from being exempt from cultural pressures to proclaim its public utility, historiography helped establish the imperative of such positioning, and Cato’s gesture would become a point of reference in winning favor for other practices associated with leisure (cf. Cic. Planc. 66). Even so, it is striking that Sallust seems to exaggerate the dilemma, and indeed the paradox, of construing historiography as distinct from the res publica and as a mode of participation. In the Catiline, as I shall argue in Chapter 2, his assertions of withdrawal from public life can also be read as mapping a return to the res publica through writing. And, in the introduction to his second treatise, the Jugurtha, he rejects earlier apologies for the virtus of history in favor of confronting hostile readers with the claim that “greater advantage will come to the state from my leisure (otio) than from others’ occupations” (negotiis, Jug. 4.4). Here the very notion that writing history is a “pastime” is subjected to attack by being placed in the mouths of his opponents.19 Both the ambiguities of the Catiline preface and the staged confrontation at the opening of the Jugurtha not only make clear that the place of historiography in the hierarchy of occupations was available for debate; they compel readers to judge whether it belongs in the realm of leisure or duty.20
Such questions about the social value of history combine with aspects of its reception, and with its intrinsic literary properties, to make it, in fact, a genre ideally suited for scrutinizing the place of literature in Roman public life. While the Eclogues offer glimpses of historical figures, and the real situation of wartime Italy fades in and out of view, reality is ideally a constant presence to history’s audience, who, unlike readers of poetry, were expected in the words of Cicero to relate everything they read to truth.21 But if public life formed the subject matter of history and if it could be lent authority by the political distinction of its authors, what we know about its reception make it indistinguishable from philosophical dialogues or most other literary forms. We have no evidence for any officially sanctioned performances of historical works during the republic.22 The one contemporary glimpse we have of the audience for a reading of history, in fact, specifically notes the genre’s appeal precisely to those whose rank or age made it impossible for them to take part in any of the deeds described (Cic. Fin. 5.51–2). Indeed Quintilian, writing over a century later, speaks of Sallust’s style in particular as unsuitable for actual rhetorical performances because its concision demands too much expertise and attention on the part of the reader, and is so ideal for “ears at leisure” (aures vacuas, Inst. 10.1.32).23 In both these respects the remoteness of the historical text as an artifact exists in tension with the object of its representation. So too in more abstract terms, I suggest, the experience of reading history makes constantly available the contrast between the historical events it conveys and its own status as an artistic representation.24 Such an approach to reading history explains how the conceptual opposition between history as a vehicle for experiencing the past and as a product of ex post facto reflection translates into a very Roman, and very Sallustian, concern about whether the writer of history was in fact a man of action. The mimetic powers of the text balance its self-evident verbal crafting, especially when the style is as distinctive and as unrhetorical, in Quintilian’s sense, as Sallust’s.
The six chapters that follow illustrate how various aspects of Sallust’s works construct contrasting perspectives on the Roman past and trace out some consequences of these alternatives for the reader. I aim to show how different ways of understanding the continuities and trajectories of Roman history in equal measure create and depend upon readers’ perceptions of their own position in relation to the res publica and of how the actions of writing and reading history are themselves a part of history. The first chapter continues the work of the introduction by focusing on the depictions of time in the Catiline. It correlates divergent ways of locating the conspiracy in time with Sallust’s disorienting choice to begin the work by asking questions that seem more philosophical than historical. Because the internal discursive rivalry Sallust sets in motion parallels the prominent alternatives available for the literary self-expression of Sallust’s peers and contemporaries, these internal questions about the composition and emphasis within Sallust’s narrative lead also to judgments about the author’s own political and ethical choices. The topic of the second chapter, which again concentrates on the Catiline, will be Sallust’s positioning of historiography in relation to its greatest generic rival of all, rhetoric. The idea that classical historiography was itself a fundamentally rhetorical enterprise has provided the enabling premise for most literary analyses of the genre over the past thirty years, but here I argue for the importance of maintaining the distinction between rhetoric and historiography in Sallust’s narrative. A crucial catalyst for the reader’s engagement with the experiences depicted in any historical narrative is the historian’s representation of and attitude towards emotions such as pity, and, especially important to Sallust, envy, and this will be the topic of the third chapter. Ancient treatments of the role of the emotions in historical writing often include a comparison to tragedy, and Chapter 4 studies the allusions to tragedy in the Jugurtha in this light, arguing that tragedy provides an important framework not only for understanding the course of events in the narrative but for dissecting the potential impact of Sallust’s own work on its audience. The depiction of space in the same monograph will be the topic of the next chapter, which connects Sallust’s techniques of representing both the landscapes of the battlefield and the imagined geography of Africa as a whole with the differing conceptions of historiography set forth in the first chapter. The final chapter considers the status of Sallust’s works as textual artifacts by analyzing the representation of writing in both monographs.
As this summary shows, the book as a whole is unified by a way of understanding the political dimensions of how Sallust has constructed his narrative, how an impression of distance from and proximity to the events described prompts reflection on both author and audience’s engagement with public life. It also presumes an openness about the interpretability of historiography as a genre that may be surprising, especially in light of the way a modern historian
