SOURCE: Mazzolani, Lidia Storoni. “Sallust—On Harmony.” In Empire without End, translated by Joan McConnell and Mario Pei, pp. 39-83. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

[In the following excerpt, Mazzolani surveys Sallust's political history and his views on government and human nature, noting the author's concern with Rome's moral and social decline and his longing for social harmony in the midst of discord.]

… other enemies are within her walls, inside the very heart of Rome.

—Sallust, Bellum Catilinae 52. 35¹

Sallust chose recent events: the war against Jugurtha, the Numidian king who, after having murdered his two cousins, usurped the throne. The war lasted from 111 to 105 b.c. and was fought at the insistence of the left and against the judgment of the aristocrats in the Senate. After various failures by patrician commanders—except Metellus, who opened the way to victory for his successor—the conflict was finally decided in Rome's favor by Marius, the “popular” consul, the simple citizen from Arpinum who had risen from the ranks to become a top commander. Sallust's second monograph deals with an internal war: the coup d'état Catiline had prepared in 66 b.c., which ended in the execution of his accomplices in the Mamertine prison and his own death in battle, in 63. Catiline, an impoverished noble and former follower of Sulla, put himself at the head of a group of desperadoes in an attempt to overthrow the patrician oligarchy and establish a dictatorship by the extreme left.

In the two episodes that Sallust chose to examine in his monographs, some experts see the historian's desire to vent his hatred for a political class that had left him out in the cold, and to accuse it of ineptitude and venality. In my opinion, however, his criticism has a much broader base. Perhaps the Senate would have done well to take a firmer stand against the Numidian usurper and to keep watch over Catiline's subversive intrigues from the outset. But Sallust does more than criticize the Senate's behavior in these particular instances; he challenges the entire system, and in particular the party politics which forced opponents to lose sight of the ultimate goal that history had imposed upon Rome—namely, governing the empire. It was not a matter of wrangling over who would govern, but how it should best be done. The factiousness and growing bitterness of the political struggle produced a waste of vital energies and an erosion of trust among the Romans.

The Jugurthine War and the Catilinian conspiracy were, far more than patrician misgovernment, symbolic of the social malaise, the economic discomfort, and the moral decline that, in Sallust's opinion, had started with the fall of Carthage in 146 b.c. As soon as the enemy threat had disappeared, ambition and greed became rife, and created rifts. When the Gracchi made their first requests for more equitable land distribution, the Senate refused to allow even token concessions and instead toughened its already myopic conservatism. Convictions, exile, and every kind of iniquity followed (Bellum Jugurthae [The War with Jugurthae] 42.4; Bellum Catilinae [The War with Catilinae] 6-13). The incontrovertible duty of properly exercising power was forgotten, and men competed simply to secure power. In this light, civil war was the prelude of discontent in the provinces and other future uprisings, like the one led by Mithridates in Asia Minor.

Sallust linked the beginning of moral decline and lack of military discipline to the civil wars: he traced the first as far back at 146 b.c., and the second to Sulla's Asian campaigns, which ended in 62 b.c. (Other writers see the seeds of decline a full century earlier.) Sallust's purpose was undoubtedly to emphasize the ominous effects of wealth on the national conscience. In other eras, the Romans had “defeated huge armies with their tiny legions,” whereas, after their recent victories, “greed generated pride, cruelty, neglect of the gods and total materialism” (B.C. 7.7; 10.4).

Sallust pronounced these judgments in a severe, melancholy tone, reminiscent of Cato. The nervous spareness of his prose contrasts sharply with Cicero's long, flowing sentences and metric cadences. In order to interpret the spirit of the majores (ancestors), Sallust adopted their vocabulary and their style. The formal side of his work reveals his inner conflicts: Sallust was a man of the people, a follower of Caesar, a “new man” (homo novus) who had come to Rome from a small Italic municipality and had no ancestors of consular rank to boast about. He belonged to that rising provincial bourgeoisie which, under Augustus, would oust the patricians. Marius, and Cicero before him, men from this same class, reveal the same inferiority complex and the same frustrations.

And yet, deep down, Sallust was a conservative who respected the ethical code of the aristocratic milieu, but, like the others, he was unable to formulate a new substitute. He was Italic, yet, at the same time, passionately devoted to Rome. He was a divided man, anxious and ambivalent in his reactions, tormented by his failure to disengage himself from a moral and political tradition, his inability to define the state in new terms. Except for the two Epistulae ad Caesarem senem (Letters to Caesar)² in which he proposed a few reforms, he never pointed to people or classes that could undertake the task of re-establishing the state on a new basis. He always wrote against, never for. Though relentless in his harangues against groups wielding aristocratic power, he also criticized the social climbing and demagogy of his own social peers, and refused to back the proposals of the extremists in their attempts to oust groups with patrician economic power. He repeated Catiline's theses and arguments, which often coincided with his own views, or those formulated by the tribunes of his party, with the same words and the same indignation. Yet, Catiline was an enemy of the state and, for that reason, should be suppressed. Not for one moment did Sallust fail to respect private property, an attitude typical of a man coming from the country. He had a love of the law that was second nature to anyone who had attended the Roman schools, and a profound lack of respect for the masses—people, he wrote, of loose morals and who were violent and incapable of solidarity or cohesion (Ep. ad Caes. [Epistulae ad Casearem] 2.5).

The hope for a supreme ruler who would bring about harmony among the social classes and resolve the contrasts is tacit, never explicit, in the two letters to Caesar—provided Sallust actually wrote them. The author, whoever he may be, made the typical requests of his day and proposed the very measures that Caesar later adopted. The latter fact seems to support the suspicion that these two letters may be patchwork jobs, compiled at a later date, or propaganda circulars, authorized by the dictator.

Their author, however, quite obviously reflected the views of the democratic left. He is in favor of strict moral standards, civil order, and the elimination of any form of power monopoly. Wealth should not be a prerequisite for political power; the magistracy should be open to all citizens; the Senate should be rejuvenated with new men; the secret ballot should be abolished. He proposed that the urban proletariat, a serious threat to order and property, be scattered throughout new colonies and thereby integrated with peoples of different origins. Any subversive, once removed from Rome and set up in a comfortable little farm of his own, was bound to turn conservative.

By and large, Caesar enacted these reforms. In 49 b.c., Roman citizenship was extended to freedmen living beyond the Po, and to many Spaniards, Gauls, and Greek professional men living in Rome. The privilege of wearing the laticlavium (i.e., a tunic with purple borders, worn by senators and members of their families) was extended to the non-Roman élite. At the same time, an Italian proletarian beachhead was created in Spain, Egypt, and Gaul: those colonies, made up of veterans and former slaves, were then granted the ius italicum (Italic law). To reduce the hordes of parasites that thronged the City, Caesar drastically cut the welfare program and imposed a limit on the number of slaves who worked the large farms. All these measures had previously been proposed by the Gracchi.

One of the pillars of society and of the City is that private property remain both free and safe.³

—Cicero, De Officiis 2. 22. 78

Caesar carried out these reforms with the utmost prudence, and kept a careful watch over both the masses and the property owners. After his victory over Pompey, he was distrusted in conservative circles. He was not expected to repeat the excesses of Sulla's regime but many feared he might enact the radical measures previously proposed by Catiline since in their view he had supported that conspiracy. The most serious measure would have been the abolition of debts. The reasons why many hoped for this abolition were sadly yet firmly expounded by Manlius, one of Catiline's followers, in a letter that Sallust might have underwritten (B.C. 33.1). In violation of ancient laws, the urban praetor, who was a reactionary, had imposed expropriation and even prison sentences on insolvent debtors. Caesar decreed that any interest already paid could be subtracted from the amount owed. This decision eased the debtors' position, and yet it did not completely cancel the public indebtedness,⁴ which would have been tantamount to total expropriation, so far as the creditors were concerned. In Cicero's opinion, this had been part of Caesar's plans ever since he had plotted in Catiline's shadow. Worse still, the insecurity of one's private wealth would have weakened one of the fundamental principles of the state.⁵

In concluding, the author of the two letters appeals to Caesar for clemency, the virtue that most distinguished Caesar, especially during the civil war. In a letter dated 49 b.c., Caesar declared that he intended to exercise clemency and had no intention of following Sulla's punitive example.⁶ Cicero praised Caesar's mercy, and Vergil hinted that it was perhaps a supernatural gift, that Anchises inspired him to adopt this attitude, so rare in the political battles of the day. When the old Trojan recognized Caesar's spirit in the Elysian Fields, centuries before his birth, he said, “You, blood of my blood, who are descended from the Olympian race, must forgive, and be the first to lay down your arms.”⁷

Full of contempt, bitterness, and denial, Sallust's works lack a coherent line of thought. This explains why historians still subject him to a third-degree interrogation; they demand that he account for his work; they investigate his intentions. While some critics define him as a partisan author or a mouthpiece for the proletariat, others maintain that he had been so corrupted by Caesar that he was forced to write a history of the conspiracy in order to exculpate Caesar from the recurring accusation of having been Catiline's accomplice. On the basis of a vulgar Invective against Cicero, attributed to Sallust, as well as his faint praise of Cicero's merits, other critics believe that the historian recalled the conspiracy, which had occurred during Cicero's consulship, to demonstrate the flimsiness of Cicero's alleged action in defense of the existing institutions.

As far as the history of the Jugurthine War is concerned, many scholars feel that Sallust's sole purpose was to glorify Marius, who was Caesar's uncle and his ideal precursor. Like Sallust, Marius was a homo novus, coming from the Italic provinces, and had risen to the consulship in spite of patrician opposition. Other historians label Sallust a cryptoconservative and are convinced that his real idol was Cato. Few indeed judge him on the plane of pure thought, or view him as a detached historian and patriot, rather than a libelist. Finally, some critics see him as a man of letters, intent upon writing for writing's sake.

The variety of arguments supporting these different theses demonstrates not only the ingenious skills of the philologists, but also the impenetrability of this great author, who may best be defined as obscure—and therefore unclear even to himself.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn.

—Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well, IV, iii, 83

I should like to offer a different hypothesis—namely, that all these theses are partly true, and that we find in Sallust various contradictory tendencies. One can favor proletarian economic claims without subverting the state. One can hope for the renewal of society and the abolition of privileges without denying a tradition that has taken on perennial ethical values. One can, without abdicating one's supremacy, condemn colonial exploitation, which, aside from economic profit and national prestige, was viewed as Rome's historical duty, her civilizing mission. In Sallust, the theme of the Empire prevails over all the others. Social reforms, economic claims, power struggles, class wars could all be considered positive examples of the mode of life of a free people, provided they did not interfere with the fulfillment of Rome's primary duties—that is, the defense and administration of the provinces. On Sallust's scale of priorities, internal politics came second to world government. The realization of a new social stability, based on the overthrow of existing hierarchies, was a hypothesis viewed only as a utopian dream.

It is important to judge Sallust in this light. In the first place, he must be rehabilitated from the biased judgments that distort his character and falsify its dimensions. Then he must be judged independently of what happened after his death: specifically, the victory at Actium, Augustus's life term as prince, the Pax Romana through the ancient world. These are events that certainly would have altered Sallust's judgments, had he only been able to foresee them.

To imprison a man in a single stance, or to apply the criteria of our times to his is antihistorical. The traits of character and class attributed to Sallust are undoubtedly his, but they did not compel him to assume a position of intellectual coherence. Beyond their role in his life, they formed part of his spiritual make-up; they were present, but not determining. He was Italic, bourgeois, pro-Caesar, democratic, but in the face of the imminent Italic triumph over the social and doctrinary forces from the East, perhaps he felt that these traits were outmoded.

Maybe he acted for personal gain, or out of doctrinal conviction, or merely to serve the purposes of rhetoric, when he labeled the agitators' humanitarianism as simple lust for power. The Roman Senate had always looked askance at such men. Take the example of Manlius Capitolinus, who had supported the poor and therefore was pushed off the Tarpeian Rock six years after he had defeated the Gauls on that very spot, or of Tiberius Gracchus. The low standards of the mob, the overt ambition and arrogance of its exponents, did not encourage the Senate to risk the stability of the Empire for the sake of a proletarian revolution. Such a revolution seems hypothetically plausible to those modern historians who judge the ancients with their current ideological yardsticks, but in Sallust's day, the situation was different.

It is only fair to believe Sallust, to recognize that his devotion to the Republic was not an alibi or a mask to cover up his fear of imminent social collapse. If he joined in the condemnation of those extremists—many of whose demands, however, he thought valid—this does not imply that he wanted to hide his own revolutionary inadequacies under a cloak of patriotism. It must be remembered that the loathing he felt for that dominatio (dictatorship) which is inevitably born of proletarian revolution had a long tradition in Greek and Roman thought.

For a spirit like Sallust, who craved the absolute, revolution was only sterile, murky confusion, a profane reality as against the sacred cosmos resting on lasting values, the most basic of these being veneration of the Republic. The modern historian with a sense of professional and moral honesty cannot judge Sallust's scale of values in the light of current criteria. Sallust had different values, which made him prefer certain transformations over others in the res publica. But this should not be considered as an example of bad faith.

Any motives that might have induced him to write tendentious works had already disappeared. They had been supplanted by deeper worries and by preoccupations of wider significance.

Sallust started writing in 44 b.c. and died nine years later, in 35. These years witnessed the conflict between Octavian and Antony—a world conflict that involved mighty ethnic forces and major ideological trends. The political struggle had swollen to such dimensions that being a follower of Caesar rather than of Pompey no longer mattered. Cicero had already died, and the nobility of his death had redeemed the vanities and compromises that had sullied his life. Why stain his memory?

In the two episodes that Sallust chose for his two monographs, he pointed to the symptoms that sparked the two great conflicts of his era. The Jugurthine War had brought to light the conflicting interests between the middle classes and the patricians—the former, the expansionists who favored increasing investments in the provinces; the latter, the abstentionists who, like all conservatives, were opposed to risks of every kind. Marius was the leader and the mouthpiece of the former, while the patricians, a little later, supported Sulla's rightwing dictatorship. The civil war that followed “upset every divine and human law, and reached such a point of frenzy that civic discord ended in war and the devastation of Italy” (B.J. [Bellum Jurguthinum] 5.2.)

Catiline's conspiracy, on the other hand, had demonstrated the presence of other dangerous forces in Roman society—forces, though still scattered, that were more numerous and frightening than the Italic bourgeoisie. Unprincipled rabble rousers could count on this support as they struggled to gain power. It was imperative to nip these forces in the bud and to try to satisfy, within limits, their demands if that single yet sovereign mission which weighed on Rome's leaders was to be accomplished: to govern the world with justice. This is the peremptory injunction that echoes through Sallust's writings—all political competition may be considered legitimate provided it does not deflect from this goal.

It is therefore true: fate has been unkind to the Romans who have been guilty of fratricide ever since Remus's innocent blood, a curse to his descendants, was spilled on the ground.⁸

—Horace Epodes 7. 18-21

If we want to take psychological factors into consideration, then who can prove that Sallust did not project his own situation on the vicissitudes of the Roman state? He condensed, in his brief life span, the various phases that Rome had experienced over the centuries. He could measure the corrupting force of money, power, and pleasure in terms of his own experience of vice in the metropolis.

The years he dedicated to his historical meditations were years of inactivity, perhaps even isolation. In his splendid residence on the Pincian Hill, he had no future, except that of an old age without friends or glory. It was, therefore, the right moment for him to arrange his personal experiences in a systematic design so as to give meaning both to his past and to history. He had tasted the fleeting pleasures of success and power, and now grasped at literature as his last chance to gain eternal fame.

He undoubtedly thought about the place where he had been born: a harsh, desolate land where patches of snow still cling to the arid slopes even when the spring air is heavy with the scent of broom, thyme, and wild sage. The work in the fields is hard, and the harvests meager. He may have imagined life in the simple village that was to become Rome to have been similar to that of his birthplace, with its rustic setting and frugal habits. The cruel, opulent city that swarmed at his feet had, once upon a time, been a mixed community of Latins and Trojans: however, men different in race, unlike in speech, and of alien customs “were merged with incredible facility from that roving, heterogeneous band into a commonwealth through harmony” (B.C. [Bellum Catilinae] 6.2).

Harmony—the word rings throughout Sallust's pages; it evokes painful responses, the longing, the frustrated hopes of the author who was born and lived during the civil wars. In one of the surviving passages from the Histories, he quotes the Consul Lepidus as saying to the Quirites (ancient Romans in their quality as citizens): “You have beheld even human sacrifices and tombs stained with the blood of citizens” (Oratio Lepidi 1.15).

As a child, Cato had seen the outlaws' heads displayed in Sulla's house. Cicero recalled five civil wars in fifty years⁹ and as many outbursts of savage ferocity, all linked by a continuous chain of vendettas and reprisals. Each time political leaders competed for power, the excesses committed during the previous struggle were remembered. Sulla, who suffered from character assassination immediately after his death, became the bloody monster whose ruthless shadow still loomed over the City. According to Cicero, Catiline summoned him up from the nether regions. When the hostilities broke out between Caesar and Pompey, it was expected that one or the other would behave like Sulla. “Sullaturit,” says Cicero of Caesar—he will behave like Sulla—a word that evoked atrocious memories and revealed a disheartened pessimism about human nature.¹⁰

To a man of Sallust's era, discord did not appear as a fleeting episode, but, rather, as a congenital vice in the human race, a curse that was transmitted from father to son—Cain and Abel, Eteocles and Polynices, Romulus and Remus. Fratricide, like an evil omen, weighs heavily on the origins of the human community. This ancient misfortune, which chained men of all eras to the same unhappy destiny, continued to blight life within the city. Fraternal blood might clot, yet all the rivers in the world could never wash away its stains.¹¹ For Sallust, discord assumed cosmic proportions. “Civil wars,” he wrote, “flared up like telluric cataclysms …” (B.J. 41.10). In the words of Lepidus, the consul under Sulla (78 b.c.): “In these days, citizens, one either serves or commands, one either feels fear or inspires it; what human laws survive, what divine ones have not been violated?” (Oratio Lepidi 1.11).

Discord hung heavy over all men and pushed states toward ruin. “Since everything that is born must perish, when the hour tolls for Rome's death, her citizens will take up arms against one another until, exhausted and bled white, they fall prey to a tyrant or to a foreigner …” (Ep. ad Caes. 1.5). Then he sorrowfully added, echoing a passage from Plato,¹² that had they remained in harmony, “no coalition of forces, not even the entire world, would succeed in defeating and demolishing this empire. …”

The civil war had become a classical theme for the literati: Caesar had written his De Bello Civili, Lucan was to use it as a subject for an epic poem, Appianus was to write an account of it in Greek. The names of the great battles fought during the civil war—Pharsalus, Philippi, Actium—had acquired symbolic value. For Sallust, harmony was the only condition under which the state could survive. This word echoes throughout his pages as the word “peace” vibrates mournfully above the infernal winds in Francesca da Rimini's lament (see Dante's Inferno, 5).

Kingdoms are clay …

—Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 1, i, 30

At the end of the reigns of Rome's seven kings, the citizens of the Republic were stirred by a noble spirit of emulation. Their virtus overcame every obstacle. They were frugal, hard-working for the good of the fatherland, loyal in their relations with foreigners: they lived “in the greatest harmony, almost without a trace of greed” (B.C. 9.1). This is the way the past looked to a man who lived in an era when, in the words of Cicero, “one was ashamed even of existing.” “How many wars,” wrote Vergil shortly afterward, “and how many countenances can evil assume?” The gloomy expectation that there would be a change “in things, in the times” weighed heavily on the Romans.¹³ Sometimes their authors seemed to re-echo unwittingly the oracular literature of Jewish-Iranian origin, which Persia and Israel had always used as propaganda against the West. When Mithridates and, later, Cleopatra waged war against Rome, this literature flourished again and added an apocalyptic dimension to economic demands and requests for ethnic equality alike.

These ideas originated among the lower classes and through them filtered into the Roman world. Though the cultured classes pretended to ignore these warnings, they understood their message, which came to them by way of obscure channels: a foreshadowing of the end. Cicero considered the Catilinian conspiracy an eschatological disaster. That particular year had been forecast as fatal for the City and the Empire. The warning about an imminent civil war had been officially communicated to the Consul: “Haruspices from Etruria flocked [to Rome] to warn the populace of impending massacres, conflagrations, and the end of all legality; a civil war would break out in the city, and the hour of death for Rome and the Empire was drawing near. …” In apocalyptic tones recalling that prophetic literature, Cicero requested that the wicked be segregated.¹⁴ He called on Jupiter Optimus Maximus to punish them, “both alive and dead, with eternal torments.” Extermination of the unholy had been predicted in the Bible and in the prophecy of Hystaspes, which spread insidiously in Latin literature and was later quoted extensively by the Christian writers.¹⁵

The author of this prophecy is a mysterious figure often identified with some vague but venerable personage from the past to give greater credibility to these utterances. It was claimed that he was a king of the Medes, the father of Darius, or Zarathustra's precursor. By the time Mithridates headed the insurrection against Rome in the Asian provinces, his predictions had been widely spread. These prophecies always seemed to resurface in times of trouble. The fact that at a later date Christian writers were disseminating them shows that social classes that in the era of classical literature were not writing now joined the literary ranks.

This prophecy, as we have seen, was unearthed by Cicero at the time of the Catilinian conspiracy, and by other authors when Caesar's assassination seemed to signal the end of the world. They all speak of wonders that accompanied this event: “Such a thick mist rose,” said Vergil, “that the people feared eternal night. …”¹⁶ A comet was spotted—this, too, was confirmed by the oracle—and it was taken as the sign of war, famine, and death.¹⁷ The news of the appearance of the sidus Julium (Julius Caesar's star) spread as far as the Jews in Alexandria.

Once again Rome feared an uprising by the plebeians and the slaves. In Cicero's view, those who had built an altar and erected a column on the spot where the dictator's body had been cremated were a despicable lot (perditi homines). These wretches and “bold, wicked, degenerate” slaves were a threat to Roman homes and temples alike. Among these outlaws appeared an individual who claimed to be Marius's son. In those tense, tragic moments, he instigated the rabble to ask the government for radical measures at the expense of the wealthy. He shared the fate of the other rebels, death.¹⁸

The fear of chaos, subversion, and conflagrations paralyzed the Romans during those years. They feared invasion by the barbarians, who were watching Rome from afar, waiting for a propitious moment. “This is the second time,” wrote Horace during the hostilities between Octavian and Mark Antony, “that Rome is torn by fratricidal strife. This City, which neither the Marsi nor the Etruscans nor Capua nor the blue-eyed Germans nor Hannibal nor Spartacus nor the treacherous Allobrogians could defeat, is pushed to the brink of destruction by an immoral war. Wild beasts will roam freely over Rome's lands; the victorious barbarians will trample her ruins under the clanking hooves of their horses and insolently scatter Quirinus' bones to the sun and the winds.”¹⁹

They will take up arms, one against the other: greed for gold will be the City's wicked shepherd.

—Oracula Sibyllina 3. 464

He will hear that the citizens sharpened their swords, which they could have put to better use against the menacing Parthians.²⁰

—Horace Odes 1. 2. 21-22

Sallust wrote during those troubled years. The war that was splitting the City reminded him of previous struggles and their dire consequences for the state. When Roman armies were fighting among themselves, he had the Consul Lepidus say, “Our arms are turned away from the enemy and against ourselves” (Oratio Lepidi 1.19).

Even in the letter that Sallust has Mithridates, King of Pontus and leader of the Asian insurrections, write to Arsaces, he depicts the king as well aware of Rome's internal strife. Mithridates allied himself with the rebel Sertorius, who had barricaded himself in Spain; he financed the pirates who infested the Mediterranean; he even planned to surround the Italian peninsula. This famous letter is certainly fictitious. Some scholars have read into it Sallust's approval of its anti-imperalist message and therefore his support of its contents. Others see in it his alarm in the face of the rising Parthian threat, or even his bitter admission that Roman misgovernment justified these yearnings for autonomy and the sudden outbursts of popular fury. Mithridates's accusations echoed those that Jugurtha had formulated in almost the same words (B.J. 81.1), and that elsewhere Sallust uttered in the first person.

The Parthian threat was a reality during the years that Sallust devoted himself to history. In 53 b.c., twenty years after Mithridates's death, Crassus suffered a tremendous defeat in the East. In 40, Labienus, a Roman official, had defected to the Parthians and, by subverting the Roman garrisons, threatened the security of the provinces of Asia Minor. Only the Italic Ventidius succeeded in wresting a victory from the Oriental forces in 38 b.c. His friend Sallust, another Italic, composed the speech that Ventidius delivered on the day of his triumph. In 36, Antony moved against the Parthians and lost 25,000 men in a disastrous retreat. The ghosts of Crassus's fallen soldiers were reawakened on the Syrian deserts. According to the oracle of Hystaspes, “The East will again rule, and the West will serve. Dominion will be transferred to Asia. The name of Rome will be erased.” And Cicero, while recalling that war and the bold propositions of the king of Pontus, repeated this prophecy word for word: “The name of Rome was about to be erased from the face of the earth.”²¹

Mithridates, clothed in the majesty of his ancestral royalty, appeared as the true antagonist of the Roman Empire. According to Sallust, the King had said, “We are suspected of being rivals of the Romans, and eventually avengers” (Epistula Mithridatis [Letter of Mithridates], 18). He based this claim on the conditions of social inferiority and economic exploitation that Rome had imposed on her provinces. “Asia is waiting for us,” says the King of Pontus, “and cries out for help: the Romans have succeeded in making themselves hated because of the greed of their Proconsuls, the extortions of their tax collectors, the injustices of their magistrates. …”

The rising discontent in the provinces admitted by other authors, on a larger scale, the class hatred that was swelling up inside Rome. Sallust, and after him Lucan, Juvenal, and Tacitus, joined the chorus of protest: “From a just and excellent beginning, Rome's government has become cruel and intolerable” (B.C. 10.6). This is not a disillusioned abstentionist speaking, this is not a simple question of human solidarity with the oppressed. It is, instead, a gnawing fear that one day these peoples will unite and will take the upper hand: “Rome's enemies,” as Sallust had the Consul Philippus say, “lack only a leader.”

In the provinces, Mithridates spread demagogic promises as Catiline had done in Rome: citizenship to the freedmen and the cancellation of all debts. As with everything that came from the East, this insurrection had metaphysical overtones. Cicero said that “they called him [Mithridates] father, the saviour of Asia, God.”²² Mithridates had taken the title of Dionysos Eupator. On the coins, his disheveled head, crowned with ivy, recalled Bacchus or Alexander the Great, the young king who had carried the message of brotherhood to the world's peoples.

Even after Augustus, through diplomacy, achieved the formal reconquest of the East, the ideological conflict between Asia and the West continued to concern the Romans. They regarded the civil wars as all the more criminal inasmuch as forces that would have been better employed to crush the enemies in the East were dissipated. Horace, Propertius, and, above all, Lucan²³ reiterated this thesis, which is deeply imbedded in Sallust's Epistula Mithridatis. The frontier along the Rhine and the uncertain boundaries in Asia were the two great trouble areas in Roman foreign policy, and all of Rome's authors were aware of this.

With that same spirit that wins every fight Unless its heavy body weighs it down.²⁴

—Dante, Inferno, 24, 53-54

History is to Sallust what family tradition is to the individual. How many times has he heard the patricians recall their ancestors' deeds or point to their portraits and wax masks in the atria of their homes. These mute presences spurred the grandchildren to valor: “It is the memory of great deeds that kindles in the breasts of noble men this flame that cannot be quelled” (B. J. 4.6). What this heritage of affection and examples meant to the gens (the Roman patrician family), the historical past meant to the entire people.

In Sallust's opinion the “great deeds” were actions performed for the good of the nation. His ideal pivoted around action and aimed at glory, the only form of immortality granted to men. Marius and Metellus, Cicero and Catiline, Jugurtha and Mithridates all thirsted for glory. Censure, however, was the lot of the unworthy.

But the fierce desire for power and wealth corroded the praiseworthy qualities of these potentially excellent men. It made them lose sight of the real goals worthy of their endeavor. Since man is composed of both matter and spirit, everything that is material or aims at this world is perishable. Sallust's vision of mankind, seen as prostrate and forgetful of the astral origins of its spirit, foreshadows the gloomy grandeur of Saint Augustine's: humanity contaminated by original sin, a massa lutei, a heap of mud.

For Sallust, this dualism had deep spiritual roots, possibly of Pythagorean origin. It has been conjectured that among the strange, unsettling experiences of his disorganized youth, there figured initiation into some secret sect. Perhaps he had been influenced by the mystical undercurrent that in the dark days prior to Actium had colored even the skeptic Horace's poetry. Drowsy from the excesses of the previous evening, Horace wrote that “the body laden with external vices can weigh down the soul, that particle of divine breath, and nail it to the earth.”²⁵

Man, in Sallust's opinion, is composed of two parts, one that partakes of the divine and the other of animal nature (B.C. 1.2). Mortals, too, can be placed in two categories: those who are greedy and lustful, and the others, who are capable of dominating the whims of the senses. The material part of man is corruptible and finally dies: “The renown of beauty and wealth is fleeting; excellence of the mind is a shining and lasting possession” (B.C. 1.3). These ideas were perhaps drawn from Plato, directly, or indirectly through Posidonius's mediation, and would recur in Christian dualism. The world that Sallust saw before him had become so entangled in material interests, so lacking in any semblance of spirituality, that it convinced him of the approaching end.

Decay and death are inherent in all things that belong to this world. For the body, just as for the gifts of fortune, “there is an end as well as a beginning; everything that is born must perish, and everything that grows must get old: only the mind is incorruptible and eternal …” (B.C. 2.3).

Sallust defined immortality in a rationalist's terms. He did not speak of life after death, nor did he accept the Stoics' broad vision of a providence that governs the cosmos. He did not share the belief of Vergil and Livy that Rome's greatness had been preordained by the gods, and consequently he did not bother with prodigies or prophecies. In the debate in the Senate between Caesar and Cato, he had the former express a disdain of death that is typical of an Epicurean: “Death is a relief … not a punishment. After it there is no place for either sorrow or joy” (B.C. 51.20). While Cato, seizing upon the skepticism of his adversary as an example of the decline of the Roman conscience, replies: “Just a moment ago, Caesar spoke persuasively before this assembly, regarding as false, I presume, the beliefs about the nether world—where they say that the wicked take a different path from the good, and will end up in gloomy, desolate and frightening places” (B.C. 52.13).

Men like Cato and Sallust, who were open to philosophic thought, did not profess faith in immortality, except possibly in token homage to popular tradition or out of a belief in man's spiritual essence. “I am firmly convinced,” we can read in Sallust's letters, “that a divine agency watches over the life of each mortal and that his every action, be it good or wicked, is recorded; therefore, by the law of nature, both the good and the wicked will receive their different rewards. And even if retribution and reward are slow in coming, each one knows by his own conscience what to expect …” (Ep. ad Caes. 12. 7, 8).

The author of the Letters to Caesar considers those actions as good which conform to religious precepts that as such are inviolable. This axiom held true for individuals and nations alike. “From what I have read and heard, I have learned how kingdoms, cities and nations have enjoyed prosperity and power so long as wise counsel has reigned among them; but whenever privilege, fear or pleasure take the upper hand, their strength rapidly wanes, their supremacy is wrested from them, and finally they are reduced to slavery … (Ep. ad Caes. 10). If one abandons the right path—namely, temperance and love for the fatherland—then the inevitable follows: “Whenever sloth takes the place of industry, lawlessness the place of self-restraint, arrogance the place of justice, then fortune keeps even pace with man's conduct, and power is transferred from the less to the more worthy …” (B.C. 2.6).

For harmony makes small states great, while discord destroys the greatest empires.²⁶

—Sallust Bellum Jugurthae 10. 6

The war against Jugurtha started slowly, and since the Numidian usurper had corrupted the senators, it was conducted at a deliberately sluggish pace; it was finally won because of the tenacious will of Marius, a country plebeian. That, according to many critics, is Sallust's thesis. Undoubtedly, many facts seem to support this interpretation, but there were enough connections between the Roman nobility and the Numidian dynasty so that Jugurtha certainly did not have to buy their favor.²⁷ Sallust's accusation was based on the premise that ousting Jugurtha and placing his cousins, the legitimate heirs, on the Numidian throne was both a moral and a juridical obligation of the Roman government (an assertion that De Sanctis has since demonstrated to be unfounded). No treaty provided for such interference in the internal affairs of an ally. Intervention, however, became unavoidable after Jugurtha had killed the surviving cousin (the other had been murdered earlier) and the Italic residents at Cirta (modern Constantine) in 112 b.c.

Despite these events, the Senate still disapproved of engaging its military forces in an African war of attrition precisely when Rome was watching apprehensively the nations beyond the Alps and wanted to extend her power in those areas. In 118 b.c., the first Roman colony was established in Gaul, at Narbonne; in 115, a treaty of alliance was signed with Noricum (present-day eastern Austria). The first serious Roman defeat was in 113 b.c., in battle against the Cimbri and the Teutones, the second in 109, the third in 105. In order to stop the barbarian advance at Acquae Sextiae (today, Aix-en-Provence) and Vercellae (modern Vercelli), Marius was forced to transfer to Gaul the Roman troops he had commanded in Numidia.

The reluctance on the part of the government to engage in a colonial adventure in Africa hardly seems unfounded. By sustaining a priori that intervention was necessary, Sallust revealed his attachment to the paternalistic policy, which relegated allies to the position of vassals. This is a typically aristocratic definition of power, and one of his inconsistencies.

Sallust did not minimize economic motives, and recognized that commercial expansion appealed to the Italic bourgeoisie. The Romans, who had been massacred by Numidian warriors at Cirta, by Jugurtha's orders, belonged to this class, and Marius counted on its support when he was running for the consulship. He joined them in disparaging the current consul, Metellus, the patrician he then succeeded, by promising that under his leadership the war would be over within a few days (“reasons that seemed all the more plausible since the prolongation of the war was damaging their [the traders'] interests: for greedy spirits nothing moves fast enough” (B.J. 64.6).

Had Sallust not selected the Jugurthine War as the subject of his monograph, it certainly would have received little mention on its own merits in Rome's history. It represented no threat to Italic security, nor did it reveal the existence of a future African threat. Sallust used the war as an occasion to discuss the class struggle within the Roman Republic, the competition for leadership, and the clash of interests. He watched as these dangerous forces threatened to undermine the soundness of Rome's century-old foundations. He even went so far as to declare that he had selected that particular episode because of its dramatic features and to bring out the fact that for the first time the arrogance of the Roman nobles had been humiliated.

According to Sallust's version, it was the Roman nobles who instigated Jugurtha to usurp the throne. He had been serving in Numantia as an ally of the Roman army when the nobles suggested that he become king. They even assured him of the tacit consent of the Senate by reminding him that “at Rome anything could be bought” (B.J. 8.1). Jugurtha returned to his country, and, though an illegitimate nephew, was adopted by the old king. Jugurtha immediately had the first of his two cousins killed. The survivor took his case to the Senate, but Jugurtha showered the senators with gold, and thereby won their favor.

This moment marks the beginning of a long series of procrastinations by the Romans: first they sent commissions, and then insufficient troops with inept commanders. Only Metellus, the third leader, had those traditionally Roman qualities virtus (excellence) and gloria (renown)—attributes that Sallust never applied to Marius. Metellus, however, had that fatal psychological flaw of superbia (arrogance), which characterized his class. He aroused Marius's rancor and rivalry to the point of goading him to throw himself wholeheartedly into the political fray. Marius then ran for consul, and despite his humble origins—he was a “new man” from the provinces—succeeded in snatching the consulship from his predecessor. His emotional make-up and behavior were marked by the plebeian vices of cupido et ira (greed and anger). He allowed discipline to slacken among his troops. He connived to turn the loyalties of the Romans in the colonies against Metellus, inducing them to write and tell their friends in Rome to call for Marius as a commander. He corrupted the Numidians with promises. These were the actions of an intemperate troublemaker. In contrast to Marius, Sulla, the young, highly cultured, perfectly mannered official recently arrived from Rome, behaved like a true nobleman: “Unlike a man spurred by base ambition, he never tried to undermine the reputation of the Consul or of any good man” (B.J. 96.3).

Once consul and commander of Numidia, Marius engaged in dangerous and unnecessary sorties. In order to augment the number of soldiers under his command, and to circumvent the Senate, which was cautious in sending him additional troops, he found a new method that was to have serious consequences. He enlisted plebeian volunteers, and thereby created an army of his own. Out of loyalty, these men were ready to follow him into any action, even into civil war. The speech he delivered on this occasion was a model of rudimentary demagogy: he scoffed at the patrician sons who learned the art of war through manuals, not on the battlefield, as he had. He expounded a principle that was to become the cornerstone of Roman ethics: nobility depended on one's valor, not on one's birth. The titles of those vainglorious nobles derived from their ancestors' bravery. “No matter how grandiose your genealogy may be, your origins are still humble. The founder of your family, whoever he may be, was a goatherd or something else that I won't bother mentioning.”²⁸ These are Juvenal's words, two hundred years later; this is the argument of Cicero and of all the other Italics who were conscious of their contribution to national security.

Marius knew that though he lacked an illustrious name, he was the legitimate heir of all those men who had played an important part in creating the Republic's greatness: “If the fathers of [the patricians] Albinus and Bestia could now be asked whether they would choose their own offspring or me as their sons, what do you think they would answer if not that they wanted to have the best possible progeny” (B.J. 85.19). Here speaks the proud yet illegitimate son of Roman society. He reasoned like Jugurtha, who knew that, despite his superior valor, he was excluded from the succession to the throne by reason of his birth. When Metellus learned that Marius was planning to run for the consulship, he echoed Scipio's counsel of moderation as he dismissed Jugurtha from Numantia. Though no legal obstacle could block Marius's election (the plebeians had gained the right to accede to the supreme magistracy as early as 367 b.c.), the patricians opposed this with a kind of scornful ostracism. All men, Metellus warned Marius, should not covet all things; Marius should be content with his own lot.

The revolt of the provinces would further extend the power of the new classes during the imperial era. The plebeian from Arpinum who became consul in Sallust's day was the counterpart of later emperors of foreign stock: Trajan, the Spaniard, and Septimius Severus, the African. The new classes and the foreign races had access to key government and religious posts, both previously reserved for the élite. They could also subscribe to the patrician moral principles and rules of conduct that distinguished this class from the plebeians. Though at a far remove from the principal stage of power, Jugurtha had nevertheless learned the patrician code based on the traditional values virtus, animus (courage), gloria. Marius had already made this code his own.

In Jugurtha, courage and ambition assumed the intensity of his fiery African temperament. He lacked Marius's rough good nature. A courageous warrior and fearless hunter, he was ruthless and arrogant when dealing with the first two consuls sent by the Roman Senate—two inept or corrupt patricians, Lucius Calpurnius Bestia and Spurius Postumius Albinus—and he became as suspicious and wary as a beast at bay when he sensed an implacable enemy in Metellus. He withdrew before Marius's pressing attacks, and fell into his hands only because the new quaestor, Sulla—subtle, correct, and astute—had succeeded in persuading the King of Mauritania to betray Jugurtha.

Sallust surveyed this war with an eye that scanned time. He judged the events that followed it as logical consequences of this struggle. Bitter feuds and conflicts were linked together in a twisted pattern of destruction. At times he spoke of Fortune as an occult, arbitrary power that preordained men's future, but more often than not he found the causes of the impending catastrophes in the protagonists themselves. It was useless to ferret out hidden reasons for decadence or to attribute the decline to the still-distant barbarian threat. This decline, when it came about, would be the consequence of the internal premises that Sallust had recorded in his works.

Notes

1. These letters were found without any author's name in a Vatican codex, and the debate on their authenticity has not yet been resolved.

2. … alii intra moenia atque in sinu urbis sunt hostes.

3. Id est enim proprium et civitatis et urbis, ut sit libera et non sollicita suae rei cuiusque custodia.

4. Suetonius J. Caesar 42; Dio Cassius 41.37.

5. Cicero De Officiis 2.22.78.

6. In the Epistulae Ciceronis ad Atticum 9.7. C.

7. Vergil Aeneid 6.835-836: Tuque prior, tu parce, genus qui ducis Olympo, / Proiice tela manu, sanguis meus.

8. Sic est: acerba fata Romanos agunt / scelusque fraternae necis / ut inmerentis fluxit in terra Remi / sacer nepotibus cruor.

9. Plutarch Cato Minor 3; Cicero Catilinariae Orationes 3.10.24.

10. The references to Sulla are numerous, both by his contemporaries and by later authors. See Cicero Ad Atticum 8.11.2 and 16.2; 9.10.6 and 7.3; 10.1; De Officiis 1.14.43, 109; 2.8.27 and 14.51; 3.22.87. One hundred years later, Lucan reconstructed the spirit of those days in his poem De Bello Civili (or Pharsalia), passim. See also Caesar De Bello Civili. 1.14.

11. Aeschylus Agamemnon 520.

12. Plato Republic 8.545c-d.

13. Cicero Epistulae ad Familiares 5.15.3 and 4.13.2; Vergil Georgics 1.505-506: … tot bella per orbem / Tam multae scelerum facies. …

14. Cicero Catilinariae 1.13.32; De Divinatione 1.47.105; De Haruspicum Responsis 10.20 and 37.62.

15. See Zoroaster's myth in Dion Chrysostomus Oratio 36.39. In the second century, the oracle is cited by Justin (Apologia 20.44) and by Clemens Alexandrinus (Stromata 6.6.42); in the fourth century, by Lactantius (Institutiones divinae 7.15.19 and 18.2).

16. Vergil Georgics 1.466-468: Ille etiam exstincto miseratus Caesare Romam / Quum caput obscura nitidum ferrugine texit / Impiaque aeternam timuerunt saecula noctem. See Ovid Metamorphoses 15.782 ff.; Tibullus, 2.71 ff.; Suetonius J. Caesar 88.

17. Oracula Sibyllina 3.334-336.

18. Cicero Philippicae 1.2.5.

19. Horace Epodon 16.1-14.

20. Audiet cives acuisse ferrum / quo graves Persae melius perirent.

21. For Antony's campaigns, see Velleius Paterculus 1.82; Appianus De Bello Civili 5.7.75; Plutarch Life of Antony 34-36. For the prophecies, see Oracula Sibyllina 8.190-342; Daniel 7:24; Isaiah 34:4; Cicero Catilinariae 3.8.18-20; 3.4.9 ff.

22. Cicero Pro Flacco 25.60; Appianus Mithridatica 10; Plutarch Quaestiones Conviviales 1.624.

23. Horace Epodes 7.9-10: Sed ut secundum vota Parthorum sua / Urbs haec periret dextera? Lucan Pharsalia 1.10-12: Cumque superba foret Babylon spolianda trophaeis / Ausoniis umbraque erraret Crassus inulta, / Bella geri placuit nullos habitura triumphos? See also 2.45-56 and 8.307-308.

24. Con l'animo che vince ogni battaglia / se col suo grave corpo non s'accascia.

25. Horace Satyra 2.2.77-79: … corpus onustum / Externis vitiis animum quoque pergravat una / Atque adfigit humo divinae particulam aurae.

26. Concordia parvae res crescunt, discordia maxumae dilabuntur.

27. Scipio's friendship for Jugurtha: Valerius Maximus 5.2.

28. Juvenal Satyra 8.272-275: Et tamen, ut longe repetas longeque revolvas / Nomen, ab infami gente deducis asylum / Majorum primus, quisquis fuit ille, tuorum / Aut pastor fuit aut illud quod dicere nolo. See Cicero De Lege agraria 2.1-2.1-5. Catilinariae 1.11.28.