After the Past. Andrew Feldherr

After the Past - Andrew Feldherr


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always and everywhere.

      In the sequence that follows, historiography itself becomes quite literally the field of combat for continuing this contest. When Sallust refers to a great “certamen,” he seems to gesture towards the traditional form of historiographic opening, which from Thucydides often centered on a war greater than any other war. But Sallust describes a competition to determine not the course of events but rather their interpretation. Its participants struggle not for virtue nor with virtue, but rather about its value:

      Sed diu magnum inter mortalis certamen fuit vine corporis an virtute animi res militaris magis procederet. nam et prius quam incipias consulto et, ubi consulueris, mature facto opus est. ita utrumque per se indigens alterum alterius auxilio eget. igitur initio regesnam in terris nomen imperi id primum fuitdivorsi pars ingenium, alii corpus exercebant. etiam tum vita hominum sine cupiditate agitabatur; sua quoique satis placebant. postea vero quam in Asia Cyrus, in Graecia Lacedaemonii et Athenienses coepere urbis atque nationes subigere, lubidinem dominandi causam belli habere, maxumam gloriam in maxumo imperio putare, tum demum periculo atque negotiis conpertum est in bello plurumum ingenium posse. quod si regum atque imperatorum animi virtus in pace ita ut in bello valeret, aequabilius atque constantius sese res humanae haberent, neque aliud alio ferri neque mutari ac misceri omnia cerneres. nam imperium facile iis artibus retinetur quibus initio partum est; verum ubi pro labore desidia, pro continentia et aequitate lubido atque superbia invasere, fortuna simul cum moribus inmutatur. Ita imperium semper ad optumum quemque a minus bono transfertur. (Cat. 1.5–2.6)

      Sallust’s metahistorical perspective on the past itself suggests quite an optimistic trajectory, at least for the progress of human understanding. This trajectory inscribes the emergence of virtus in the first paragraph within all of human history. Sallust here not only views history teleologically, with a knowledge of how things will end. He steps further away from the perspective of the actors in his narrative in that the knowledge he gains from hindsight affirms a universal truth about human nature. From this vantage point, men win knowledge from the outcome of events, and they can apply that knowledge to shape the future. But this requires a curious approach to both events and their representation. Obviously, the contestants whose battles Sallust learns from were not fighting for knowledge but out of a desire for power. So too, Sallust’s knowledge demands a view of human development that seems breathtakingly schematized and abridged especially in comparison to the historiographic texts to which he makes reference. All of Herodotus and Thucydides run together to become a single turning point: “after Cyrus in Asia and the Athenians and Lacedaemonians in Greece began to subjugate cities and nations, etc.”28

      The philosophical reading of the past may offer a way out of this pattern, if Sallust’s readers can position themselves at a further distance from a narrative (Sallust’s) that already signals its own place after other narratives of events. But if everyone is a part of history, and history really implies the transience of power, the confusion of everything through a consistent human desire, if the historian must always contest the conclusions he draws, and the readers be unable or unwilling to translate learning to action because of who they really are, then history and philosophy will always offer fundamentally different maps of how the past becomes the future. Indeed, as Batstone points out, from a historical perspective closure is impossible, for to decide finally that virtue should be used to describe a Caesar or a Cato would be to take sides in a struggle to which we are condemned by the very nature of language.30 An alternative is to posit a world of words outside of history, that virtus means something that applies to both Caesar and Cato, even if it is impossible to say what it is. Historical reality struggles to impose its limits on how the text is read, even as the text struggles to change that reality. At stake will be the position of virtus simultaneously on the page and in the world. Can Sallust’s narrative, as history, reveal virtus in action, or only its passing away? And can Sallust’s text, as philosophy, even name virtus, or do his own words inevitably enter a great historical certamen that obscures it?


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