Batstone William Wendell - Sallust - Catilines conspiracy, the Jugurthine War, Histories

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

SALLUST

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

WILLIAM W. BATSTONE

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

CATILINES CONSPIRACY, THE JUGURTHINE WAR, HISTORIES

GAIUS SALLUSTIUS CRISPUS, known as SALLUST, is thought to have been born in Amiternum, a town in the Sabine country north-east of Rome, in 86 BC and to have died in 35 BC. We know nothing of his early life. He must have been a quaestor before 52 BC, but when we first hear of him he is one of the unruly tribunes who attacked Cicero in 52. He was expelled from the Senate in 50. He sided with Caesar during the civil war. In the summer of 49 he was sent to aid C. Antonius, who was barricaded on Curicta in the Adriatic; he failed and Antonius was forced to surrender. In 47, as praetor, Sallust was sent to deal with a mutiny in Campania; he barely escaped with his own life. In 46 Caesar made him governor of New Africa. He returned to Rome in 45 with vast wealth which he used to purchase a villa at Tivoli, a mansion in Rome, and the famous Gardens of Sallust that became the property of later Roman emperors. He was tried for extortion, but was acquitted. After Caesars assassination in 44, Sallust retired from public life and turned to the writing of history. His monographs on Catilines conspiracy and the Jugurthine War survive complete, and he also began an annalistic history of the late Republic, starting in the year 78, the year Sulla died; he got as far as 67 before he himself died. In antiquity he was considered the greatest of Romes historians. His style, difficult to read, broken and deceptive, and his perspective, satirical and sarcastic, had a profound influence on Tacitus, and was praised by Nietzsche.

WILLIAM W. BATSTONE is Professor of Greek and Latin at The Ohio State University. He has written many articles about the poetry and prose of the Roman Republic, focusing primarily on the relationship between our modern theoretical understanding of ourselves and our historical understanding of the ancient world. He wrote the commentary to Latin Lyric and Elegiac Poetry, which he co-edited with Diane Rayor. He co-authored Caesars Civil Wars with Cynthia Damon and co-edited Genre and Gender in Latin Literature with Garth Tissol.

C Catilines Conspiracy

J The Jugurthine War

H The Histories

References to other classical works are abbreviated according to The Oxford Classical Dictionary 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1996).

Sallust wrote near the end of a century of civil discord and civil war. His first monograph tells the story of Catilines conspiracy (63 BC), an event that he considered especially memorable because of the unprecedented nature of the crime and the danger it caused (C 4.3). In his second monograph, he takes up the history of the Jugurthine War, a period from 118 to 104 BC, first because it was great and brutal, with victories on both sides, and second because that was the first time there was any opposition to the aristocracys abuse of power. This struggle confused all things, human and divine, and proceeded to such a pitch of madness that political partisanship had its end in civil war and the devastation of Italy (J 5.12). His final work, the Histories, is unfinished and exists for us only in about 500 fragments, four orations, and two letters. In this he undertook to deal with the events between the Jugurthine War and Catilines conspiracy. He did not, however, write about the Social Wars and Sullas dictatorship (after the first instances of the madness that resulted in civil war) but began with the year of Sullas death (78 BC). He got as far as the year 67 before he died.

In all these works, Sallust is concerned explicitly and implicitly with the political and moral decline of the Roman Republic, which he dates to the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC. Others saw different turning points. Livy ascribed the beginnings of luxury to 187, when Manlius Vulsos army returned from Asia. Polybius saw moral standards changing as early as 200, but placed the crisis of the late Republic after the battle of Pydna in 168, when Rome began to achieve world domination. But in Sallusts view the destruction of Carthage began a period of factionalism and luxury. As a result the Roman state gradually changed from the most lovely and best and became the worst and most depraved (