After the Past. Andrew Feldherr
condemned him.35 The kind of decisions we make in reading about the power the author has over our interpretation take on, in his case, a political charge that draws them back to the history his work describes. Note that Kraus’ assertion implies already that Sallust had a purpose, and that his purpose matters to us: he believes history has “power.” While Latte depicts an author fundamentally condemned to failure by the time in which he lived (a generation later and he could have taken genuine satisfaction from an intellectual career),36 crucial to Syme’s vindication of Sallust thirty years later is his assertion of the historian’s mastery over his material and literary techniques.37 Such language, as we will see, connects these readers’ conception of the author to Sallust’s own moral vocabulary. He grounds his description of the virtue that defines worthwhile human activity on the opposition between power and slavery (Cat. 1) and opens the Jugurtha by resisting the claim that our lives are “ruled” by chance rather than virtue. Thus as our own choices about how to read Sallust condemn or exalt us by revealing an interest in pleasure or virtue so our simultaneous struggle perhaps to evade his judgment, perhaps to identify his own place inside or outside the moral universe he has constructed, link with special urgency our act of reading to the subject of our reading and become a simultaneous ethical evaluation of ourselves and the author. And at a moment when representations of public events provoke such disbelief and suspicion, this reminder of the moral stakes of reading history, whatever the claims made by its authors, seems especially important.
Notes
1 1 For the dates of Sallust’s birth and death, see Syme (1964, 13–14).
2 2 See, for a fuller introduction and overview, Grethlein (2013, 1–6), and the collection of Powell (2013).
3 3 Helpful orientations in Batstone (2009) and Grethlein (2013, 4–9).
4 4 Pp. 268–308. Grethlein’s emphasis on the teleological aspects of Sallust’s Catiline contrasts with Batstone’s (1990) descriptions of the work’s narrative as aiming at mimesis of contemporary uncertainties about the conspiracy, see esp. p. 119.
5 5 An important precedent for understanding this internal dynamic will be found in Scanlon (1987), esp. pp. 67–8, who demonstrates how the theme of hope within both monographs creates a tension between the often revolutionary expectations of the characters and the knowledge of the impartial historian. His interest in using this tension to construct Sallust’s view of the present, and especially the alternatives of non-participation he poses for the historian and his audience, also anticipate my own emphases.
6 6 For impartiality as a prerequisite for historiographic authority in antiquity, see Marincola (1997, 158–74). For various approaches to the epistemological inadequacy of historical narrative, I refer the reader to Grethlein’s introduction (2013, 9–14).
7 7 A full and useful history of the debate, with further bibliography, will be found in La Penna (1968, 68–83). For its earliest stages, see Schindler (1939). Influential portrayals of Sallust as a pro-Caesarean polemicist include Mommsen (1854–6, v.3, 177n.) and Schwartz (1897); the shift in momentum away from this approach owed much to Klingner (1928).
8 8 Syme (1964, 2): “Sallust is at the same time an artist, a politician, and a moralist—the elements so fused and combined that he seems all of one piece.”
9 9 See esp. Wiseman (1979) and Woodman (1988), both discussed in Chapter 2.
10 10 Batstone (1988, 1990, 2010a, 2010b); Gunderson (2000); Kraus (1999); Kraus and Woodman (1997); Levene (1992, 2000); Sklenář (1998). My reference to the commonalities of these scholars’ attention to the formal aspects of Sallust’s work of course overshadows many differences. Especially crucial is the question of where Sallust as an author stands in relation to the hermeneutic challenges of his texts. How much does he as author critique and describe disorder and dissimulation in history, and how much does his text become part of the confusion it describes and subject itself, intentionally or not, to contradictory and hostile interpretation by its readers? In addition to the rhetorical turn in anglophone scholarship, it is also important to signal how the work of Rambaud (1953) on Caesar has especially fostered a distinct continental tradition of studying the effects of historiographic texts as literary representations, see Devilliers (2012, 258–9).
11 11 Another important precedent for the approach to Sallust’s text deployed here comes from O’Gorman’s (2000) monograph on Tacitus, both in her efforts to make the historiographic representation “embody a political judgment” (p. 2) and in her discussion (based on White 1978, 128) of the ironic mode of historiography as implying a contrast between representation and reality (pp. 10–14). This despite the differences between the Tacitean examples of irony, which target, predominantly, an imperial representation of the past, and Sallust’s highlighting of the competition faced by any such representation, including his own.
12 12 See esp. Gurd’s 2007 analysis of Cicero’s late treatises as multiply authored, discussed in Chapter 6.
13 13 On Cicero’s need to defend his philosophical activities from the general devaluation of otium, see Baraz (2012), esp. pp. 13–43. See also Stroup (2010, 37–65).
14 14 For a recent comprehensive treatment of the issue of fictionality in the Eclogues, see Kania (2016); for the concept of autonomy in the poems and its social impact, Roman (2014, 113–21).
15 15 The best guide to Sallust’s political career is Syme (1964, 29–42).
16 16 See esp. Vretska (1976, 96); Egermann (1932, 27); Renehan (1976, 2000).
17 17 Syme (1964, 42–3).
18 18 See Tiffou (1973, 260–2).
19 19 So Tiffou (1973, 283), who argues that Sallust emphatically rejects the equation of historiography with a leisure activity, equivalent to other modes of literary composition. A few sentences before, he had said that “memory of the past” was the most useful of negotia (Jug. 4.1).
20 20 Baraz (2012, 22–36) is a striking exception to the bracketing of Sallust in the debates about literary activity in the period. Her argument, based on detailed readings of the prefaces, makes Sallust a foil to Cicero in his active rebuttal of the prevailing devaluation of his “leisure” activities. She also accepts that the writing of history per se was more easily accepted as an occupation for a man of the political class but argues that pursuing historiography to the exclusion of a public career would nevertheless have required defense (22 n. 26). Faced then with an easier case for the public good to be derived from his work, Sallust can adopt a more forthright strategy than Cicero in his philosophica. As will be seen in the chapters to follow, my understanding of Sallust’s positioning of his work differs from hers in two respects. First, I see the claims about leisure as more ambiguous: Sallust makes available readings of his work that link it to public action and also stress its distance from it; indeed, he draws authority from both positions. Second, as we will see, Sallust’s strategy will also prove crucial to defining the generic identity of his work, especially against oratory, where its impartiality is an advantage. Cf. also the similar comparison by La Penna (1968, 25–32), and the important article by Leeman (1954–5, pt. 2).
21 21 Leg. 1.5, on which see esp. Woodman (2012, 1–16) and Krebs (2009).
22 22 Wiseman’s (2014) arguments for situating historiographical performances at public occasions will be discussed in Chapter 6.
23 23 See the important discussion of Heldmann (1993, 3–8), more fully treated in Chapter 6.
24 24 Damon’s (2010) study of intertextuality in ancient historiography similarly reveals the uncertain status of historical works as both textual entities and pointers to real events. Strikingly, her first example of the difficulty of distinguishing textual allusion from historical reference involves one of the most traumatic moments of the civil wars, the beheading of Pompey the Great. As Moles (1983b) demonstrates, the many later texts