After the Past. Andrew Feldherr

After the Past - Andrew Feldherr


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to end with a view of the spectators coming out to see and take spoils from these bodies, and with an effort to evoke the emotions that “were being enacted” among the survivors as before he had done with Catiline. There is a big difference between looking at the image of an image of a 2000-year-old corpse in a museum on another continent and finding the real thing on a battlefield. But by making the last event in his narrative also the first event in its reception, Sallust highlights the layers of temporal and narrative distance between his reader and the actual scene. These layers can suggest separation, the 20 years from what we call 63 BCE to 43 and the distinction between a book and a body, or they can point to the stages that connect times and audiences. And to imagine an original audience for Sommer’s photograph brings a more immediate connection for us as well. As the nineteenth-century viewer was likely more aware than we, photography was a physical process only possible in the direct presence of what it depicts. The man and woman in the image left a material trace of remarkable intimacy on the volcanic matter that killed them. The gesso mold can only be made by putting the plaster into contact with that substance. The photograph can only be made by a long exposure to the mold. And one important use of these images was as souvenirs, which travelers could take back with them from their visit to the site. From this perspective, these inescapably modern images seem less depictions of antiquity than direct traces of antiquity. So too in the case of the Sallustian narrative, the distance that makes historiographic representation possible competes with an impression that the narrative itself is produced by the events it describes. His history becomes a fragment of the past, not so much removed from time as embedded in a process of transformation that can be traced within time.

      I begin with a couple of preliminary observations to confirm that the audience’s sense of where they stand in time is an issue that matters in Sallust. First, that partial viewpoint of an immediate audience in the final sentence of the Catiline gains yet further power by contrast with the work’s opening. Sallust begins the monograph with a description of omnis homines—all humans, not particular humans, nor even Romans—and treats them as objects of description more than as subjects: what men ought to do turns out to be very different from what they actually do. The verb of that sentence is also in the present tense, implying not so much that the claim he makes is true “now,” but that it is always true:

      Omnis homines qui sese student praestare ceteris animalibus summa ope niti decet, ne vitam silentio transeant, veluti pecora quae natura prona atque ventri oboedientia finxit. sed nostra omnis vis in animo et corpore sita est: animi imperio, corporis servitio magis utimur; alterum nobis cum dis, alterum cum beluis commune est. quo mihi rectius videtur ingeni quam virium opibus gloriam quaerere, et, quoniam vita ipsa qua fruimur brevis est, memoriam nostri quam maxume longam efficere. nam divitiarum et formae gloria fluxa atque fragilis est, virtus clara aeternaque habetur. (Cat. 1.1–4)

      All human beings who desire that they stand ahead of other living creatures ought to strive with the greatest effort not to pass through life in silence as the herds, which nature has formed as downward looking and subservient to their stomachs. All our power is placed in mind and body; we employ the ruling power of the mind, the slavery of the body. The one we share with the gods; the other with beasts. Therefore, it seems more upright to me to seek glory with the resources of talent than strength, and, since the life we enjoy is short, to make the remembrance of us as long lasting as possible. For the glory of wealth and beauty flows away and breaks; virtue is held (as) bright and eternal.

      My second point moves from narratology’s concern with point of view to the schemata the text creates simply for measuring and understanding time. In a narrative like Livy’s, structured around changing years marked by naming consuls, you always know where you stand.5 Even if consular dating provides a notoriously awkward system for relating events to one another, for visualizing the hundred years between the defeat of Hannibal and the defeat of Jugurtha, it creates a powerful sense of a shared experience of the past measured through Roman political institutions. Sallust too seems to mark this tradition by beginning the first action of the story of the conspiracy proper with a specific consular date, the Kalends of June when Caesar and Figulus were consuls (17.1). But as the notice that this is June 1, not January, may suggest, we are already in medias res. For Sallust has provided his own account of the first beginnings of the conspiracy and located them in two contrasting frames of reference for understanding time. First, these events which we could measure from the middle of the consulate of Caesar and Figulus become manifestations of causes better traced through the life story of Catiline, and Sallust similarly imposes a biographical structure to his narrative, by beginning the story of Catiline at his birth and ending with his death. These causes must also be explained by a longer digression on the development of the republic, one that does not emphasize its extent through the proliferation


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